Back in 2014, global supermarket giant, Tesco, found itself in the midst of a crisis which led to a £2billion market price loss. This substantial loss came in the aftermath of the discovery that Tesco had artificially inflated profits by £250m, leading to a serious loss of trust from all sides.
With an increasing number of people taking to social media to publicly complain to a company, it’s important that brands and companies are dealing with them in the correct way to avoid a social media crisis.
A successful hashtag can generate a huge amount of positive publicity and brand awareness if executed correctly. But if it goes wrong – it can generate even more publicity for all of the wrong reasons and alienate potential customers. Is it just the luck of the draw whether it succeeds or fails or is there a clear strategy that works?
Regardless of the business, chances are its online presence contributes to the company’s success in some way. In the last few years, constant algorithm changes have kept companies on their toes – trying to keep up with the shift in focus of what Google is looking for when it decides where to rank you.
Reputation continued to move higher on the marketing agenda for companies last year, but for a number of big brands, it wasn’t a high enough priority and they suffered disastrous consequences. I take a look at the top 10 reputation crises of 2015 and where these brands went wrong.
Fortune 500 company General Electric (GE) recently admitted that a failed partnership with another business has damaged their reputation. This suggests that you need to conduct proper due diligence of a business before you agree to work with them, in order to protect your corporate reputation.