The Strength to Be ... Where?
There’s been a fair amount of comedic hay made lately out of AIG’s series of “The Strength To Be There” TV commercials. Still running last week as the insurance giant was imploding, the ads feature precocious kids worrying aloud about such topics as “risk management,” with their parents invoking AIG as a “nuff said” riposte. Each commercial ends with AIG’s tagline: “The strength to be there.”
Of course, AIG as we (and its shareholders) knew it is no longer there. Which got me to wondering: When should a company stop whistling past its own graveyard when problems arise, and address its customers’ concerns?
Last month I blogged about how Netflix rose to the occasion when a “technology issue” caused an interruption of DVD shipments to its 8.4 million subscribers. Rather than duck the problem, the service readily admitted the snafu and offered several make-goods to its customers.
In a somewhat similar case, the J Crew clothing group recently announced that a website system upgrade at the end of June resulted in glitches that negatively affected its site, call center, and order fulfillment. The company pulled back on marketing the site while working on the problems, and offered annoyed online shoppers free shipping. Not as impressive as the Netflix approach, but still good enough to earn a tip of the cap in most quarters.
As far as I can tell, these examples differ from AIG in that Netflix and J Crew had no advance warning of their service disruptions. AIG, not to mention other major financial institutions, had ample opportunity to see what was coming. I’m not suggesting they should have taken out full-page ads in the Wall Street Journal saying “Bail Out NOW!” but surely the situation called for something beyond running the same commercials and pretending that everything was fine.
It seems to me that a crisis is exactly when an intelligible brand management strategy is most called for. It’s been a long time since we were all assured, “When E. F. Hutton talks, people listen.” (In no small part due to the fact that Hutton hasn’t really existed since 1988 after a series of its own missteps.)
With these latest financial foul-ups, the general public can be forgiven for turning a skeptical eye on any future oversized monolith’s claims about “The strength to be there.” But maybe "The strength to talk straight" might find some cachet.
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