Strive Notes

So people expect Virgin to provide quality, innovative products and services and when Ryan Air hinted that they’d consider charging for the use of the toilet on their aircraft, people might have laughed at the suggestion, but no one was surprised.

Branding problems start when the companies behind successful brands do something that goes against the grain.  So when British Airways’ launch of Heathrow Terminal Five was such a fiasco, people were surprised and lost confidence in a brand they’d previously trusted.

And when social network Facebook issued news terms and conditions there was an immediate outcry among users, a flood of negative media coverage and a somewhat embarrassing climbdown by the company which quickly reinstated the original terms of use. The problem for Facebook was that they’d greatly misjudged their community and indeed, this is surprising.

That Facebook’s fundamental mission is to empower individuals to communicate and build relationships, makes it difficult to understand why company executives tried to impose new rules of engagement without consultation of their key stakeholders, their millions of users.  Click here to read the rest of this Tech Talk column.

Filed under: public relations, Tech Talk