Ignoring online reputation is like making out a blank cheque

I remember dating a budding actress at university who at some point in our ultimately doomed relationship, pulled out a square, white chequebook with old fashioned writing on it – very different to the animal patterned Nat West ones most students were sporting in those days.  I remember being impressed and slightly intimidated by it, as I was by her if I’m honest. She explained it was a Coutts chequebook –the Queen’s bank – that her Stepdad had given to her.

At that time in the late eighties, Coutts had a rock solid, exclusive reputation which any self- respecting yuppie wanted a piece of. Legend had it that you needed half a million in cash minimum before they’d consider letting you in the door. As with many of the aspirant financial clubs of the eighties, the lack of information available about them just added to their mystique and cache.

Just as the red Porsches and matching braces have all but disappeared from the City, so the era of such corporate reputations, locked tight in a marble clad safety deposit boxes, have gone. It’s not just the high profile Madoff, Enron and Lehman scandals that have shaken public belief in financial institutions but on a micro level, through the internet, reputations now rise or fall on what customers are saying online.

If you put ‘Coutts bank account’ into Google today, the eleventh entry on the page is a site called www.couttssucks.com, a site essentially dedicated to destroying the brand reputation of the three hundred year old institution. I’ve got no personal axe to grind about Coutts (unless on an actress related subliminal level) but many ex-customers obviously do and are enthusiastically warning other individuals, dreaming of that Coutts chequebook, to think again.

In this new era of online brand transparency, negative customer comments are an inevitability and not always a bad thing for the brand or the customer. If it helps highlight a problem which can be put right, the brand becomes hero rather than villain and the customer walks away happy that they’ve been listened to by the corporate giant.

By contrast, not engaging with customers online, can make brands look as if they don’t care, or worse, arrogant and out of touch. Some organisations will only find this out when something goes wrong unfortunately and then it’s often too late. Look at what Toyota are suffering now (1) because of a reactive communications strategy, research by Brand Finance suggests they’ve lost $4bn off their brand value.

To use a banking analogy, ignoring online reputation is like making out a blank cheque from your brand equity account and allowing your enemies to decide when to cash it in and for how much. Not a good idea, no matter how fancy your chequebook is.

(1) This blog was first published in February 2010 by Stopgap