Managing the Vocal Minority: When the Heat's on and the Customer's Wrong.

By Shawn Gold, CMO TechStyle Fashion Group

When Chrysler released their “Built to Serve” commercial during the SuperBowl, featuring the words of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. reaction was swift, sure, and unforgiving. The company was accused of exploiting a cultural movement of protest and a fight for freedom to sell Trucks. Chrysler defended itself by saying that they worked closely with King estate representatives on creative and received the necessary approvals, but both The King foundation and Dr Kings’ daughter Bernice king distanced themselves from the ad referencing a sermon that warns about “being taken by advertising”.

Ouch.

Whether you believe the Chrysler ad was appropriate or not is beside the point. This is the modern world for marketers. Your brand takes any kind of action, intentional or not — promotion, change in a product or service, controversial statement by some employee — and the Internet outrage machine kicks in with gibes, satirical memes, and calls for boycotts.

You can't, and shouldn't, ignore complaints when every consumer has a social media megaphone at hand ready to go unexpectedly viral. Every marketer knows that you need to answer in the right degree. Respond inadequately to a big issue, and you may face consequences for months to come. Overreact to a teapot-sized tempest and you squander focus, resources and time.

But what if the vocal minority is wrong? You've taken an unpopular step that nevertheless is critical to the future of the company. To thrive, manage the incorrect noisy few with the following steps: understand the criticism in context, be empathetic, be responsive.

Most importantly when doing so, demonstrate conviction in describing why you did what you did. What was your company trying to accomplish when this controversial action occurred? How is that part of your company’s values and goals?

Be Customer First

All of this is about being “Customer First.” But that doesn’t mean the customer is always right, or even that you have to say they are.

Customer First does mean you’re trying to solve your customers’ problems quickly and thoughtfully. It does mean you’ve created online resources so customers can solve many of their own problems, resources such as FAQs, a Help Center, or an informed moderator on a Reddit page. And it does mean you rapidly identify and focus on bigger issues as soon as they surface.

You have to be able to figure out just how big that online roar is. Is this a relatively small but noisy group whose objections mean little to your brand’s core products, initiatives or plans? Or is this something bigger and more worrisome?

Gap Inc., for instance, mistook a social-media squall for a typhoon after it unveiled a new logo. Hit with online complaints about the design, the company junked its new logo, and ate the development costs. The company had panicked when critics pounced, even though the logo’s design is anything but central to its ability to sell clothes.

Even worse, it turned out the complaints came from fewer than 10,000 people, not a small number but not a big one either for a company with $15 billion in annual revenues. How many of those critics were Gap customers? How many would stop buying Gap clothes because of the new logo? Probably not many. And yet Gap let itself be distracted with an expensive response. 

Noting criticism that is broadly applicable to your image is one thing. Changing major strategic decisions based on social media chatter is another. Without the research to understand how its real customers interact with social media, a company could let itself be whipsawed by people who, in strict financial terms, don't matter.

Any company faces difficult decisions at times. An old line of business may be headed for commoditization or obsolescence. A new direction is will embrace new technology and the future. Unfortunately, people don't like change and such decisions are often unpopular for that reason.

Some years back, Netflix saw that the future of DVD rentals was limited. Management thought streaming was the future, so it made some critical decisions. One was raising prices, which angered people. A million real customers left the service. The stock price dropped by almost 19%. But the decision was absolutely the right one to make. Old pricing couldn't generate enough revenue to sustain payment demands of Hollywood studios let alone underwrite the custom content that has become the company's calling card. Today, Netflix is one of the most well thought of and dominant video streaming services in the world.

It's All About Empathy

Being empathetic means trying to see a situation from the customer’s point of view. Don’t automatically tell the customer they’re wrong or their concerns are unwarranted (there are exceptions in extreme cases). But walk them through a desired course of action that will solve the problem. And don’t forget that just listening can be the most powerful form of empathy.

Contrition means admitting when you’re wrong. Many times, people just want an apology. And many times, the apology defuses the situation, makes people feel they’ve been heard, and actually improves your relationship for the future.

Responsiveness, empathy and contrition would have helped United Airlines, whose passenger removal missteps cost it untold customer goodwill. Competitor Delta Airlines, by contrast, was much more responsive in a similar situation. It expressed contrition and suspended the attendant while conducting a review, moves that kept the issue from spinning out of control.

To say the customer is always right is incomplete and mistaken. That said, companies must respond quickly, and have in place the resources to identify and resolve routine issues.

When something big does hit, managing the vocal minority can be done, if you understand they’re not always right, but neither are you.