Brandjack: how your Reputation is at Risk from Brand Pirates

The digital world provides great opportunities for enhancing brands’ connectivity with audiences but there’s a double edge to this. Brands are also more vulnerable in this “always on” environment and can be wilfully or accidently misrepresented. They can be “brandjacked”. It’s a horrible term but seems to fit the thesis of the book quite well.

The ease with which a business can be brandjacked is one of the problems in this area and Quentin Langley has a rich seam of case studies to mine and lessons to impart from them.

Langley is a PR practitioner and academic who teaches at the University of Bedfordshire Business School and one suspects is a keen curator of case studies on behalf of his students. Some have been well vented in this sphere already.

There's blogger Jeff Jarvis who bought a "lemon" of a laptop from Dell and whose "Dell Hell" blog became the aggregator of dissatisfied customers who had previously felt unloved by the corporation.

In similar vein we have Dave Carroll whose Taylor guitar was smashed by baggage handlers on a United Airlines flight.

When customer service gave him the cold shoulder because his complaint had not been filed within the required 24 hours, Carroll took to YouTube to broadcast a song about the experience that went viral. US Airlines subsequently lost 10 per cent of its value on the New York Stock Exchange in four days.

As Leroy Stick, the expert brandjacker behind the satirical Twitter feed @bpglobalpr, puts it: "Forget your brand. You don't own it because it is literally nothing. You can spend all sorts of time and money trying to manufacture public opinion but ultimately that's up to the public now isn't it?"

One of the ways to avoid brandjacking is to scenario plan but Langley advises to look beyond the obvious.

Langley used to be an executive at Shell in the 1990s and crisis management strategies there centred around an oil tanker going down. Obvious but insufficient, as it happens.

Other issues the company had to confront included reformulated petroleum damaging car engines, the disposal of a North Sea oil platform and the company’s relationship with a brutal dictatorship in Nigeria.

It’s also important to think outside the confines of the core business. An employee of a major multinational, loathed by environmental groups, confided that its biggest worry was not green protesters but bribery.

But it is the rapid rise of social media that has caused the biggest challenge in this area. Social media has put gossip on steroids and geographic boundaries provide no limitations. Trying to maintain one reputation in one market and another elsewhere is increasingly a losing strategy.

Legal actions against social media outlets tend to produce a backlash amongst consumers who equate this with censorship. The only way to counteract negative social media comment is by honest and transparent engagement. Getting heavy-handed generally makes things worse.

The book identifies nine categories of brandjacking, ranging from self-brandjacking, where the organisation scores an own goal through accidents or poor advertising choices for example, to staff brandjacking, where a rogue employee misbehaves, to impersonation brandjacking where a hoaxer purports to speak for an organisation.

Aggregation brandjacking, is where people who would otherwise be isolated use social media to combine their voices, often to complain about the poor service they have received at the hands of company. Unanticipated response bandjacking meanwhile, is where an organisation seeks responses from its public, generally customers, but gets answers that it doesn’t like, which can range from mockery to reasoned critique.

As more and more firms find themselves the subject of a social media debate, from the local sole trader to the biggest conglomerate, the book is a worthwhile read for those in the public eye.

Even individuals who find themselves in the social media spotlight might find some useful advice in its pages.