For those of us who have been following the recent ‘LA Fitness meets Twitter saga'* some thoughts…
*For those unaware of what happened…Young couple from Billericay – he recently made redundant, she very pregnant - move flat to save their precious remaining pounds and try to cancel their expensive, now unnecessary and geographically challenging gym membership. LA Fitness want to hold them to the £700 cancellation period. Couple write to Guardian Consumer Champions who plea on their behalf. LA Fitness stick to guns and do their level best to look like an unpleasant bunch of uncompassionate money grabbers. Caitlin Moran (Times journalist with big Twitter following) retweets an early heads up to the plight of the couple. Within a couple of hours the story is ‘trending’ – people offering to pay the money for the couple to shame LA Fitness, members proposing that everyone cancels their membership and asks LA Fitness to sue them. The company wake up – probably from the smell of abuse slowly rising up their track suited thighs...
From the outset we’d have thought any business that receives a consumer complaint via a national media consumer champion would have a standing instruction to escalate to the CEOs desk and sort within 36 hours. As painful as ‘giving in’ may be it has got to be the default response… along with, in this case, a mea culpe grovelling backdown, a bunch of flowers to mum-to-be and an offer for the mother to attend a course of ‘get your tummy back’ classes.
Instead, after weeks of ‘la la can’t hear you’ and other to-ing and fro-ing, LA Fitness issue a mealy mouthed ‘things have changed… we weren’t really wrong… just misunderstood the facts…’ statement. At that point the Tweets got more vindictive ‘Cancel you membership, pass it on. Let’s make them lose thousands!’
Having a standing set of instructions in the ‘Crisis Management’ booklet is obviously critical.
However from a brand reputation perspective those instructions/protocol have to be driven by the brand – its values, behaviours and guidelines for customer facing employees.
Having a Twitter account and social media campaign/comms team is not enough – you have to have clear brand values and policies that drive content and approach
Brand is not something that only the marketing types do – it’s a whole business responsibility. Brand informs and drives the human ‘voice’ of the business. It is aligned to a wider set of principles, led by an understanding of what the organisation stands for, expressed through brand (behaviours, values, promise).
Maybe this is just a storm in a teacup for LA Fitness – I’d only hope that if it does blow through that they use the time to pull out their ‘brand stuff’ and make sure everyone knows how to use it as part of the way ‘we do things round here’.And it’s here that it gets interesting for those of us in the ’brand is your most valuable asset’ world.
