No matter how strong or powerful the brand is, it is unavoidable to face with both people who love and hate the brand.
The Atlantic Monthly published a list of the 15 Most Hated Companies in America with some explanation of reasons. This should be a useful source of information for brand manager to learn and identify the problem occurring with their brands.
Check it out, whether your favorite brands are on the list.
This is very interesting article. Because of it is well-known company, they are always facing with people who dislike them. The companies should spend their budget convincing people who don't care about the company (neutral position) rather than people who dislike.
ReplyDeleteIf you can manage people who against the company, they may turn into be more loyal customers. Although it is true, focusing on hated people are more risky, I think. What do you think?
As Mark Twain famously said one day: “There are lies, damn lies and statistics”.
ReplyDeleteThen reading the articles like that, the first question I always ask myself is where the authors get the data. According to the end note, it was delivered from:
“Employee opinions, using research firm Glassdoor and other services, were reviewed. We considered total return to shareholders in comparison to the broader market and other companies within the same sector. We analyzed data from a broad array of sources, including Consumer Reports, JD Power, the MSN/Zogby Poll, and the University of Michigan American Customer Satisfaction Index. We reviewed brand valuation changes based on data from Corebrand, Interbrand, and BrandZ. We considered negative press coverage based on 24/7 Wall St.'s analysis of media coverage and the Flame Index, which uses a proprietary algorithm to review more than 12,000 websites and ranks companies based on the frequency of certain negative words. Finally, the views of these firms by taxpayers, Congress, and the administration were considered where applicable.”
In other words, reading behind the lines, - the authors combined massive amount of data and tried to get a correlation based on certain pre-determined attributes of dissatisfaction. They could as well just pick the companies form the hat based on the recent headlines. “Hate” is a strong word, many people define it differently.
The article was written by 24/7 Wall St., LLC, which is fast growing content provider, mostly for on-line financial services such as yahoo.finance, wsj and thestreet.com. Not surprisingly it feels like many of the firms got on the list because of the sluggish shareholders returns, which do not necessarily reflect the overall perception of the consumers.
Best Buy, for example, increased the revenues last year and still is the biggest electronics retailer in the USA. Here is another blogger from Forbes, who has extremely positive review of the company: http://blogs.forbes.com/allenadamson/2010/12/27/eleven-brands-to-watch-in-2011/
Personally, I think” Consumer reports” probably provides the most unbiased data. But we probably will learn a great deal of sources and methodologies in the class.