A paradigm shift in marketing communication
It’s not news that social media has a huge impact on brand perception, but the series of much-discussed communication crises recently suffered by major brands like United Airlines, Pepsi, Cosmopolitan and Adidas have left communications professionals confused nonetheless.
One thing that surprised many experts was the breadth and intensity of the negative social media reaction to these communication blunders — or rather, the companies’ inability to foresee that this would happen. Some, like Michael Fertik, an experienced online reputation consultant, claimed that the velocity and ferocity of the social media response to the infamous incident on board the United flight was not predictable.
The backlash against United was of course significantly bolstered by the communication (and initial lack thereof) on the part of the company following the incident, which raises another question regarding all the other cases of failed communication: how did it even happen that the brands in question, which have impressive marketing communication budgets and have attracted experienced professionals, could issue such inauthentic, tone-deaf and insensitive statements? While United CEO Oscar Munoz’ belated and much-mocked apology for “having to re-accommodate the passengers” will no doubt become a textbook example of inappropriate communication in a crisis, it differs from the other cases in that it was a response to a failure that was not essentially one of marketing communication.
The situation was very different for Pepsi with its Kendall Jenner ad, for Cosmopolitan publicising the story of a cancer survivor as an example of successful weight loss and for Adidas with its congratulations to the runners of this year’s Boston marathon on having “survived” it. These messages did not respond to any existing crisis and were not issued under obvious pressure. They were the crises themselves. Furthermore, while Cosmo’s tweet and Adidas’ email were examples of routine everyday communications, and thus most likely the result of individual decisions, the multi-million dollar Pepsi ad clearly was not. Considering the amount of audience research that is usually involved in productions of this kind of scale, the question remains: how could a team of experienced professionals miss the mark so badly? How could people expert in finding the right words for the right ears fail to address their audience in a satisfactory way?
The overwhelming insensitivity of the messages in question suggests a major problem of values in the marketing communications universe. It looks like the values of sincerity, authenticity, empathy and responsibility, etc. that dominate the social-network-permeated world of today have not yet been fully embraced by the professional community. Extensive audience research is prerequisite for successful large-scale communication, but the conclusions drawn from that research are predominantly determined by the way the data is interpreted. Due to various big data solutions, collecting detailed information about the customers is no longer problematic, and yet making sense of it remains a challenge.
The abilities and skills necessary for successful interpretation are not limited to ordinary data literacy — a much broader humanistic perspective is needed to master the cultural codes that define the reactions of a given audience. Intelligent data mining is clearly a thing of the future, but so is emotional intelligence which enables empathy with those that you are addressing and so always hitting the mark in communication, whether everyday or one-of-a-kind case. The damage suffered by major companies due to their tone-deaf statements and narratives is a signal of an imminent paradigm shift in the world of communications, likely to bring to the fore a more mindful, responsible and empathetic approach.
At Copywriter, these values have always mattered, and the precision of the solutions we offer our clients has never been based on rational analysis alone. When we say we put our heart into what we do, we mean it.
