A recent sour experience with a car rental company
A recent sour experience with a car rental company put my reptile brain into over-drive.
The dispute is over a small amount – about $220.
The reptile brain doesn’t have complex emotions. It thinks in simple terms: fight or flight.
My reptile brain wants to fight. Maybe post a video of their shoddy customer service practices to YouTube, register a yourcompanysucks.com domain, and generally bitch and moan so loudly that their senior management gets headaches. I guarantee I can create a headache that costs far more than $220 with just a few hours of reptile effort.
But I won’t. At least not yet.
Why not yet? We’ll, maybe I can turn them into a customer for BrandProtect (one of my clients) and it wouldn’t be good if I slammed them publicly. And also because it just too easy to make myself a nuisance. With the power of the Internet, it is possible for one person to tell his story to thousands of people.
This power illustrates just how effective a single “guerrilla” can be in the face of a corporate superpower.
In the past, given a superpower brand’s supremacy in marketing, customer service, public relations and legal support, few rational opponents would deliberately seek a face-to-face confrontation. It was almost always a loosing battle.
But today, any idiot, including myself, can resort to asymmetric, or David-and-Goliath, strategies. I may not win the battle but I can make myself a nuisance or even bloody the nose of a superbrand by using some extremely affordable weapons such as GoDaddy.com (less than $10 to register a yourcompanysucks.com domain), Twitter, a blog, and the Flip (a hi-def video camera that costs less than $100).
Although it would only take one letter from a superbrand to make me cease and desist, the cost of just the attorney writing that letter is already way more than the $200 in dispute. Now matter how simple the cease and desist, escalation from the superbrand would be costly.
Superbrands are also seeing public relations backlash from stepping on bloggers and vocal complainers. In effect, a legal victory can still equal a PR defeat
So what should the superbrands do to protect against the asymmetric customer with a chip on his shoulder? Should I find someone to help me make a video about this company’s poor customer service? What would you do?
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Four years ago, I had a bad experience returning something at Best Buy and vowed to never shop there again (I have not). I’m not sure if it happened today if I would tweet about it; I don’t know if people would care. I might be stubborn in how I take things personally but that’s my business (friends can hear my story and agree or disagree – no big loss to the offender). That said, I had the worse business experience of my life with a home builder last year and I did Yelp about it; more to warn others than to claim some glory as I felt that the issues were at the core of how they did business. I do believe there is a right place for social media in providing a forum for incidents. Ultimately, members of the community will decide to alter their buying habits or brush off the ravings of an upset consumer. That’s what makes it so great…