Exclamation blog: Stories, Ideas and loud noises
Will Comcast’s Unhappy Customers Show Them How To Die?
I was watching John Batelle’s opening remarks at the Conversational Marketing Summit at San Francisco’s Presidio last Tuesday afternoon; the entire event surrounds trends in marketing that involve the consumer, presumably as a co-creator of marketing content.
I was introduced to the people sitting on both sides of me, and, two people to my right was a guy from Comcast. I turned to the guy to my right and said, “Man, has that guy been on the blogs this week? They’ve been getting slaughtered.” The guy shrugged his shoulders and said, “Uh, I don’t know,” which made me wonder what the hell he was doing at a conversational marketing event if he wasn’t aware of the Comcast situation, but I digress..
Ad Age’s Bob Garfield, among others, has been going ballistic about Comcast, and Jeff Jarvis (Dell Hell) took his tragicomic account of waiting for the cable guy and kicked it to the next level: stating that “every company — every industry — that makes its money by screwing its customers is doomed.” Well, he’s got a point here.
The kids today aren’t really just into being spoon-fed professionally made content. In fact, according to a Deloitte study referenced on David Weinberger’s blog last week, stated that Millenials (yes, I’m officially old because I called people aged 13-24 the kids) are adopting new forms of content consumption faster than ever, but all generations are demanding UGC faster than ever. Essentially, 51% of the Internet is watching user-generated content. That is, one half is watching what the other half if saying.
When Garfield challenges Comcast’s unhappy customers to start an anti-advertising campaign, customercials, to make a video explaining why the cable behemoth sucks so bad, he’s already a week or two late. Jeremy told me about the infamous sleeping Comcast technician video posted on YouTube a year ago.
This video is so popular (over 1 million views) that it actually comes up on the first page of Google and Yahoo for search-rankings, so it goes without saying that customercials can have enormous effect, especially when they’re highly viewed on video portals like YouTube. Will videos like this have a long-term pervasive effect on conversations about brands? Absolutely.
But until the other day it wasn’t empirically clear that a majority of the customer marketplace was listening to the content-creators among them. To quote one of my favorite consumer advocates, Garth Algar: “Game On.”
Comcast Customercial Link Love:
What’s Your Brand Mantra: I Hate Comcast
How Starbucks Should Have Burned Mr. Smith
San Francisco Weekly writer Matt Smith’s dad got burned at Starbucks in July. The Red Bluff, California retired Methodist pastor ordered a cup of coffee, and the barista accidentally knocked it off the counter. Coffee spilled down the front of Mr. Smith’s pants, burning his crotch. Some of the hot coffee ran into his shoes. That sounds painful, and embarrassing. I can only imagine how Mr. Smith felt when the barista ran to get a questionnaire, instead of summoning medical attention.
According to the elder Mr. Smith:
“There was a man in the shop who was a male nurse. He came from where he was sitting and said, ‘I’ve been watching this, and I’m a nurse, and I must say to you, you must not fill out this form. You must take yourself to the bathroom and make sure you get some water on your foot.’”
After not hearing from the location for two days, Mr. Smith returned and was given a case number and a 1-800 number to call. Two weeks later, Starbucks mailed Mr. Smith a $50 gift card for the scalding.
As a point of comparison, Matt Smith cites the infamous 1992 Liebeck V. McDonalds case, in which a 79-year-old woman who accidentally scalded herself with hot coffee (also in her groin area), eventually settled for $160,000 in compensatory damages and $2.7 million in punitive damages. There are two key differences between the cases: (1) Smith didn’t undergo skin grafts like Ms. Liebeck did and (2) an employee was involved in Mr. Smith’s scalding. While the depth of his dad’s injury doesn’t compare with Liebeck’s, one incident took place in the customer’s car, and the other took place in coffee shop, with employee involvement.
Starbucks spokesperson Tara Darrow closed ranks when Matt Smith interviewed her for his August 1 article, citing a secret corporate “program” they have in place to deal with scalding incidents. Darrow said:
“Do we have a policy in place for responding? Yes, we do. We have a policy in place. I can’t really give you details”.
From a PR or social media perspective, this definitely looks like a case of “death of a thousand cuts”. Starbucks committed several wrongs here, none of which are entirely unforgivable, but combined, are pretty atrocious:
1. They scalded a customer;
2. They made him fill out an incident report before giving him medical care for his burns, without knowing their severity;
3. They weren’t transparent about their reaction process to such incidents, after admitting they had a program in place to deal with such incidents;
but the most egregious wrong was Starbucks regional manager Chris Gage’s written response to the article, in which he wrote:
It is difficult to provide specific details on how we respond to incidents, as each situation is unique and our response is tailored accordingly. However, I can assure you that in any situation that involves injury, our partners are trained to first offer to call for outside medical assistance and, if a more immediate response is necessary, use on-site first-aid supplies to assist the customer.
Here’s the spot where Starbucks could have come clean and said:
1. We messed up by spilling coffee on you and not giving you medical attention, pronto
2. We’re really sorry and we train our employees to act differently in these situations
3. This employee was disciplined and we re-emailed all store manager to ensure they know how to deal with this kind of situation
4. We’re going to send you a $10 gift certificate every month, forever, so you can always take a friend to Starbucks for a cup of coffee. And so you don’t think we’re total jerks.
They should have done this within about 48 hours of the scalding
This would have done a few things:
1. Shown the customer that the company is not afraid to admit when they do something wrong
2. Shown the public that the company is quick to act on customer-safety related issues
3. Shown that the company makes good when it makes an error
To take more a few rules from my forthcoming eBook on social media, Do Not Print At Work, I’ve got to delineate a few crucial tenets that Starbucks is going to need to follow in all “crisis” communications from here on out:
1. Success in the blogosphere is generally proactive - go out there, Starbucks, and look proactively for people that have been burned by your baristas, who, like most humans, are prone to spilling 1 out of every 100,000 cups of coffee they pour. Address each and every one of these incidents, even retroactively. Become known as the company that lives up to the imagery of the shiny, happy coffee drinkers portrayed on its gift cards (like the one sent to Mr. Smith, sans apology).
2. Be super-freakin’ transparent communications matters relating to public safety.. Now, I know what you’re thinking. Metz, you’ve got it easy - none of LaunchSquad’s clients are capable of scalding someone with hot coffee, or, god forbid, killing someone. Well, that may be true, but if one of our clients’ tech products failed, critical business processes could go awry, costing companies untold fortunes and even, jobs. So, we know high-stakes. And, what misfortune could possibly befall Starbucks for revealing their burned-customer program, when this information is obviously accessible to any Starbucks associate with a rank higher than assistant-manager? This information will likely leak out, soon enough on the Starbucks Rumor website anyway. This brand has more citizen marketers than any food brand, ever. It would be so easy to make them say good things about the brand, if the brand did good things.
I tried to get comment from Darrow and Gage, but thorough searches on both Google and LinkedIn yielded no results, so I invited them to comment via email on the Starbucks website.
It should be noted that I dug through a utensil drawer thick with knives to find a coffee measure so that I could hand-measure a pot of Peet’s Major Dickason’s blend (instead of the 10 packets of pre-measured Starbucks) before typing this entry up. It seems that everyone has their own measure of good taste.According to his son, Mr. Smith mailed back the gift card, and Starbucks has chosen not to respond to this posting.
