FreshNetworks Blog

As our posts on BA’s fiasco at Heathrow show (see here and here), it is how brands deal with things that go wrong and with criticism that really shows how willing they are to engage customers and how they use them to their advantage. The best firms are able to embrace and harness criticism and use these views and critics to the benefit of the brand itself. There is a great article in the current issue of Retail Week about how brands do exactly this (see here).

The article explores the approach at Carphone Warehouse, who’s Chief Executive, Charles Dunstone, is famously implementing a strategy of radical transparency. He thinks that brands should tell their customers everything that is happening in a business – his rule is “if we knowing, we tell our customers about it”. This is an attitude that we very much embrace at FreshNetworks, we encourage brands to be open and honest with their customers and to engage in a real and two-way conversation with them.

Dunstone’s approach has been implemented first at TalkTalk, the fixed-line telecoms part of the business first, and perhaps the most obvious manifestation is the online community Talktalkmembers.com. The site describes itself as The Official Unofficial Website and Forums a tag-line that describes neatly what sites like this achieve. We all know that our brands are being discussed in a multitude of places online right now and that we cannot be expected to know of all of these sites let alone monitor them. Conversations are going on between customers that we know nothing about. Purchase decisions are being influenced in a way we have no control over.

TalkTalk’s site is an example of how brands can harness all this activity and engagement and bring people together in a place that is managed by or for the brand, where you can respond and where you see what people are saying. The mere fact of running a site like this can be a great boost for any brand – providing valuable word of mouth and advocacy for your brand. But it is how you manage the community that will make it even more powerful, and in particular how you will answer one question: What will I do if somebody criticises my brand?

There are four broad answers that people can give to this question:

1. We don’t allow negative comments: I know of at least one site where negative comments are actively removed by the moderator so that only positive comments show
2. We will drown any negativity out with positive comments: according to the Retail Week article this is the approach taken by Hotel Chocolat, who seek to drown any negative comments with the weight of all the positive comments they have about their brand online
3. We allow all comments, positive and negative: this is the approach taken by TalkTalk. Their community is “managed but not edited” and even contains links to critical sites
4. We actively encourage negative comments: I was speaking to a brand marketing manager who described how they had encouraged negative comments on their site as they thought this lent credibility to the rest of the site

We believe that the approach taken by TalkTalk is the best of these. They allow all comments positive and negative and so their community begins to be a true reflection of the conversation that is going on about their brand online. But this conversation won’t emerge on its own – it needs prompting, encouraging and managing to make it work. In fact this is the biggest danger of focusing on issues such as what to do with negative comments, you miss the bigger question: how do we grow a community that both generates strong word of mouth and benefits our brand. To do this you need strong and dedicated community management – and the manager’s job isn’t to decide if a comment is too negative about your brand; it’s much bigger than that.

So whilst radical transparency is a great and laudable ambition, it won’t happen overnight. It needs to be managed and facilitated to make the most of it for customers and the brand alike.