The industrial and financial accident Samsung is going through with its Galaxy Note 7 is a crisis of the kind many companies face. Beyond the immediate impact on the share price and, tomorrow, on the brand’s “reputation”, this event can also help assess the quality of a company’s relationship with its “territories”.
When it comes to customer relations, companies too often neglect the emotional side. Or rather, they reduce this relationship to the emotional side of the act of consumption. They call on sociological studies, and now neuromarketing; they design packaging and communication campaigns to stimulate perceptions, the senses, even “emotions”, ultimately to prompt a purchase.
With digital technologies, this “relationship” is projected into the virtual world: “communities” are animated, the appearance of interaction is maintained – already entrusted to artificial intelligence programs that imitate, and try to influence, online behaviour.
But consumers are, by nature, fickle and unfaithful. Because no market is truly monopolistic, and the competition – particularly the competition that does not yet exist – will always find a way to win market share. As for virtual “communities”, their quality is only what one cares to imagine… until a competitor stimulates them, that is. Because, despite the fantasies projected onto big data and a hypothetical permanent relationship through connected objects, no brand owns its customers.
And above all, when a crisis strikes – due, depending on one’s style and leanings, to “fate”, “bad luck”, or simply to accident or the unforeseen – this relationship is put to the test of emotions, real ones. The kind that cause ruptures.
Today, with Samsung, there are no deaths. Any more than there were in the crises faced by Deutsche Bank or Volkswagen (at least not directly). Unfortunately, this is not the case with air or land transport accidents. And the consequences are less visible than those of disasters in the oil industry (Total, BP…).
Accidents reveal the quality of a relationship
Yet, beyond the victims of accidents – whose treatment is often a matter of financial compensation only, and too rarely of genuine compassion – all these events reveal the quality of a company’s relationship with its “territories”: physical as well as digital.
Any serious event, and therefore one that generates real emotions, will indeed be perceived in the light of an existing relationship. The first reaction of the onlooker – let alone of the “stakeholder” – is rarely objective: it is built on credit or on suspicion. One “understands”, one may even “excuse” the tragic event suffered by a company one likes, perhaps even sympathise – no one can foresee the unforeseeable. But because of “confirmation bias”, one is merciless with a company to which one attributes “guilty” intentions or practices (each giving these words the meaning they wish).
Many companies, in anticipating crises, therefore take their “reputation” into account. And they often court “opinion leaders” so that, when the time comes, they can count on them. But would you support a company in difficulty because it offered you a cocktail party, or even samples of its products? In relationships, there is no gratitude of the stomach.
A second step in building a relationship consists in getting to know each other better. In the digital age, companies pride themselves on knowing their customers better and, with big data algorithms, claim that tomorrow they will know them better than they know themselves… But making oneself known is left to “communication”.
Yet when an accident occurs, unforeseen by nature, perceptions realign with reality. And any gap turns into disappointment and mistrust. Because customers never blame themselves for misplaced trust; they lay the blame on the other.
A relationship is not built only on the information each party provides to the other, deliberately or not. It feeds on what each brings to it, and on what the two parties share, beyond the commercial and contractual customer–supplier relationship.
Building better than a relationship: a connection
A relationship can be one-way. A connection links both parties.
Every company has its territories, even digital players: a place where contact is made. And these territories are, potentially, places where joint action can take shape, to build a shared present and future. Because the strongest connection is that of shared construction: co-construction, to use the fashionable term.
In a crisis, these actors are then not just onlookers; they are stakeholders, and engage as such. Relays of information, educators, defenders and promoters.
But building this connection requires real strategic and operational choices. Because building with others means opening one’s doors sincerely and including the other. Not seeing them only as a consumer. Nor even as a “prosumer”, where customers generate part of the service they pay for. It means seeing them as a partner.
In the digital age, when proximity can break free of physical constraints, companies connected to their “territories” have the opportunity to renew the dynamics of “extended enterprises”: networks of reliable, loyal partners, with their skills and their capacity to multiply efforts, mobilised according to needs and projects.
And foremost among these partners are customers. These partner-customer-suppliers form the company’s closest ecosystem. Its first line of action and, if need be, of defence. And its first recruitment pool, in the age of the “war for talent”.
This of course requires agility – not the “method”, but the quality – to adapt to actors from other organisational cultures and fully integrate them, and humility – to recognise and benefit from their skills. These may well be the real strategic changes the connected company must make.
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