How to protect and repair your brand from damage

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For a brand, its reputation is everything. Companies around the world, spend hundreds of millions of dollars to build the right brand image to entice customers. It is because, it is this reputation that makes all the difference between consumers picking one brand over the others. It is what creates a loyal customer too. But sometimes, like everyone else, brand custodians make mistakes that could tarnish the hard-earned brand reputation, which could lead to loss of customers' trust, employee morale and the market cap of the company. Moreover, in today’s era of social media, negative news about a brand can go viral and send it into a downward spiral quickly.

There have been multiple incidences in which iconic brands were damaged and faced public relations (PR) crises. In 1982, Johnson & Johnson came under fire after one of its then best-selling brands, pain relief tablets Tylenol, led to the loss of life of a few people. In another instance, in 1994, a mathematics professor discovered and publicised the flaw in Intel’s Pentium microprocessor that produced errors for certain calculations. Later, in 2003, customers discovered worms in some samples of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolate. Then in 2015, Nestle India's popular Maggi noodles faced a ban in India on allegations that it contained Monosodium Glutamate (MSG) and lead in excess of the prescribed limits.

There is a bottomless list of brands that have faced reputation crises around the world. It can happen to any organisation at any point due to a human error or oversight, faulty product, or wrong advertising campaign.

Here are a few ways that organisations can repair the damage done to their brand because of the aforementioned reasons:

Keeping an eye on brand reputation crises happening globally and understanding the reasons behind them, provides for good learning.

The brand team should inculcate the practice of imagining these faux pas and come up with probable solutions to handle the potential crisis that could befall them. This would help in plugging the loopholes while creating a campaign the next time.

In April 2017, in the US, United Airlines (UA) violently removed a passenger from its flight. This incident led a lot of outrage on social media and negative publicity for the airline. Later in November 2017, a video back home showed popular airline IndiGo's staff manhandling a passenger. It soon went viral on social media platforms, leading to a reputation crisis for the airline. By being proactive, IndiGo could have learned from the UA crisis and could have entirely avoided the incident or managed the crisis better.

For example, back in 2009, two Domino's employees at one of the franchises contaminated some ingredients and used them to make a pizza and sent it out for delivery, and uploaded a video on YouTube. It took some time for the Domino’s team catch up to the unfortunate incident and by then the video had already been viewed widely.

When Cadbury faced reputation damage due to the worm crisis, it invested on imported machinery and revamped the packaging of Dairy Milk. The metallic poly-flow was costlier, but the company did not hike the price. A team of quality control managers, along with sales persons did a thorough check of thousands of retail outlets that stocked and sold its products and created awareness amongst retailers about storage requirements.

Andy Grove, former Chairman and CEO of Intel said, “Bad companies are destroyed by crisis, good companies survive them, great companies are improved by them.” If a company regularly audits itself for its crisis preparation and comes out stronger from a crisis, then it could move from the orbit of good to the orbit of great.

(Views expressed are his personal and don't necessarily represent any company's opinions)