Brand Vandals: Reputation wreckers and how to build better defences

December 11, 2013 3:16 pm

‘Brand Vandals’, by Steve Earl and Stephen Waddington

Review by Maija Palmer

Brand Vandals: Reputation wreckers and how to build better defences, by Steve Earl and Stephen Waddington, Bloomsbury, £12.99

This book has the cover of a cheap thriller, and it is written much like one. The blunt language is clearly designed to shock. “Media has become a two-way weapon. Nobody can control it. It’s anarchy,” begins the first chapter, and the book goes on to describe a world where brand reputations are shredded by baying, internet-based mobs impervious to reason and from whom it is impossible to hide.The previous book from this pair of ex-journalist public relations consultants, Brand Anarchy, was criticised for its hyperbolic tone by, among others, Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former public relations man, who knows about grabbing a headline.

But are Earl and Waddington exaggerating? Anyone who observed the recent savaging of JPMorgan on Twitterwill have to admit that social media can be brutal. When the bank prop­osed an open Q&A session with one of its top bankers the #AskJPM hashtag was hijacked by some 25,000 highly negative tweets, along the lines of: “Can I have my house back? #AskJPM” and “I have Mortgage Fraud, Market Manipulation, Credit Card Abuse, Libor Rigging and Predatory Lending AM I DIVERSIFIED? #AskJPM”.

Under the weight of the at­tack, the bank was for­ced to cancel the Twitter session. Earl and Waddington cite several other examples, from sustained criticism of Fortnum & Mason’s foie gras sales from Peta, the animal rights group, to Martha Payne, a nine-year-old girl who shamed a Scottish council through a blog – entitled Neverseconds – showing pictures of her unappetising school meals.

On the one hand this is a victory for consumers. Who is not heartened that companies – which previously fobbed off complaining customers with automated messages and meaningless, pre-written apology letters – are jumping to attention when criticism is aired over social media?

But there is a darker side that companies do need to guard against, a strain of unreasonable, lynch-mob be­haviour that can arise quickly and be hard to contain.

One of the best sections of the book describes what a small café in Asia goes through in dealing with customers who use the online ratings site Trip­Advisor to trash the business – sometimes unfairly. One customer, for example, came in demanding to be paid £1,000 or he would write to TripAdvisor with a false claim about contracting gastroenteritis at the café. Under the system, there is little the restaurant can do about fraudulent reviews.

“All businesses are guilty of poor service occasionally and yet sometimes the punishment for this can far outweigh the crime. Trying to engage or reason can put you in the line of fire,” says the café’s co-owner, who spoke to the authors on condition of remaining anonymous.

So how can a brand protect itself? It can try to build up a cohort of allies – people it has engaged with and who like the brand and who may defend the company when it is attacked. If there is a dirty secret in danger of getting out, the company could try to announce it itself, bringing the information out on its own terms.

Most of all – and this is not surprising given their professions – Earl and Waddington call for brands to hire strong PR managers who can intervene at the highest levels to stop the company doing stupid, brand-damaging things in the first place. These communications professionals – like the strong-jawed fictional heroes of action thrillers – need to be creative geniuses with the diplomacy of Henry Kissinger and courage to face the full force of a social media broadside, armed with nothing but a little charm and humour.

Whether any such superheroes really exist is debatable.

The writer is a social media journalist at the FT