Brand Management in the Age of Twitter

In days gone by, a brand interacted with consumers either through retailers or tightly controlled feedback channels.

Brands were separated from their customers and marketing was a “Mad Men” sort of process of smoked filled rooms and catchy slogans and jingles like “Intel Inside”.

The rate of change in the past few years in the way that brands interact with their customers has been exponential with the rise of review sites like Yelp, Trip Advisor, Angie’s List and Twitter with the powerful elegance and beauty of the hashtag.

The hashtag has been the most powerful shift in the loss of B2B anonymity. In the past, if you wanted to complain about bad customer service or a tainted burrito, you were relegated to the black holes of customer service or the complaint department.

Now with a few clicks on your phone, you can bring once powerful brands to their knees as witnessed by Chipotle with a record loss of over $1B in market cap after a sick staffer spread the norovirus around a suburban Washington DC, store, sickening more than 130 customers.

Now powerful tools from Salesforce, Adobe, Lithium and others enable brands to monitor and respond with immediate damage control to prevent billions in loss or increased distribution to capitalize on market inefficiencies.

But the power of the hashtag is not just about angry consumers.  While monitoring its twitter feed shortly after the release of a new LeBron James shoe, Nike noticed that these shoes were being bought up in droves in the Midwest and sold at a 500% mark-up on eBay.  They quickly responded and stepped up production.   When Nintendo was trying to figure out what to do with old outdated games like Donkey Kong, they bundled them onto an old console and listed them for $99. These caught on like wildfire amongst 40 year old gamers looking for childhood nostalgia. Nintendo cranked up production and the price to meet this overwhelming market demand.

Twitter and the power of the hashtag has further accelerated the swing of power from the brand to the consumer.  

Next blog: The power of AI and ML in the new age of brand management.