Both Facebook and Wells Fargo are spending (yes spending, not investing) millions of dollars on advertising campaigns that basically say, “We screwed up. We are correcting our course. And we are back.”
Are consumers buying it? Nope. Why? Because both of these left-footed behemoths didn’t climb down from their ivory towers and walk into the crowded streets below to listen to the marketplace.
Dealing with the Fallout
These two organizations are dealing with fallout from what are basically public relations nightmares. Both organizations abandoned their ethics and mission in favor of profits, with the consumer at stake.
Facebook was caught sleeping at the switch and allowed its users to be pawns in the political game. And after a bad performance in front of Congress, Facebook tasked its ad agency to build a message to would bring consumers on board.
Well Fargo set goals for its branches while disregarding the needs of its customers.
In both counts, they didn’t listen to the marketplace. Worse, they didn’t measure the impact. Their mistakes?
- They knew what was best for the bottomline and to hell with the consumer.
- Senior management was out of touch with their customers down below on the street, yet way tuned into their board of directors who were interested in the numbers.
- These companies and their marketing departments didn’t recognize or understand the huge sea-change that is happening in the marketplace.
Taking it to the Streets
Channel Signal measures consumer sentiment in the marketplace through the user experience. These users write product reviews and those review have tremendous leverage with prospects. Measure the reviews and you measure the marketplace.
Had Wells Fargo been measuring their customer experiences through reviews they would have known that their star rating average was between 2 and 3, poor to say the least. And Facebook’s customer star average was about the same, hovering around 2.
Channel Signal’s average star ratings from a sampling of 2.5 million product reviews is 4.3. When one of our customers’s star average goes down by .1 or .2 they want to know “why”. Our platform can tell them “why”. This is measuring the user experience, listening to the marketplace and taking corrective action.
Facebook and Wells Fargo need to walk down the long spiral staircase of the Ivory Tower, loosen their ties, go to a taco stand and have lunch with their customers.
The “user experience” is what counts and what those users report back to the marketplace. It is not your board of directors or your Madison Avenue ad agency, or your consultants in $500 open collar shirts.
Contact us if you want to measure your performance in the real marketplace. It will change your corporate life.
