It’s turkey time, and this year we are extra thankful as our year-long 30th anniversary celebration draws to a close. During the celebration we wrote a series of blogs, cleaned up our neighborhood with Brightside St. Louis, helped provide 18,275 meals for those in need with the St. Louis Area Foodbank, and gave some walks (and lots of love) to the dogs and cats at CARE STL.
Our efforts on behalf of Brightside STL in May.
We followed all of that with an amazing open house…which is a professional way of saying a killer party with past employees, partners, friends of GL, and clients.
At our open house, GL Content Studios unveiled a video documentary of our past 30 years that would even make Ken Burns proud. If you haven’t seen it yet or have been itching to watch it again, here it is:
In honor the 30th anniversary of when we first hung our shingle, we have been revisiting some fond memories over the past few months. However, since our founding in 1989, there have been plenty of stories of brands who have bottomed out. We explore some of our favorite stories from the past 30 years of brands dusting off the dirt and getting back on their feet in this series, the Dirty 30, a three-decade retrospective of redemption.
So far we’ve seen Exxon in the aftermath of an oil spill, watched the origin story of Jack Box, reunited Carl Hardee Sr and Carl Hardee Jr, and discussed the Firestone blowout. With so many of us grumbling about their busy flights during the Thanksgiving week, we’re going to fly the not-so-friendly skies with JetBlue.
In 2017, a number of JetBlue flights waiting to take off were delayed due to an ice storm. Many for up to 11 hours. Surely anyone who has suffered through a tedious delay is already feeling that despair of being stuck in the airport, but this was even worse.
The passengers weren’t even allowed to leave the plane even though the terminal was just a short walk away.
As the snacks dwindled and the sanitary conditions in the restrooms degraded, a contingent of passengers demanded to leave, only to be denied. Finally, many, many hours later, official airport vehicles arrived to free them from their captivity and escape to the terminal.
In response to the ensuing conversation regarding what rights a passenger had during a flight delay, JetBlue proactively issued what was known as the Passenger’s Bill of Rights. It included a system of reimbursement for delays and a limit to how long a passenger would be forced to stay on the tarmac during a delay. The passengers on the plane received reimbursement for their troubles and apologies from the airline. Even though there are some things those passengers who were stuck for 11 hours will never unsee, at least they were pioneers for the rights of future flyers.
And if need something to read while waiting to board your flight, check out past installments of Dirty 30:
Despite the insistence of conspiracy theorists decked out in the latest tin foil hat fashion, marketing isn’t just a way to trick people into buying something. Very often, it might not be trying to sell a thing. That’s especially true when it comes to community outreach.
For some of our clients, the objective of our efforts has nothing to do with selling a single product or service. Instead, they have different objectives, like providing education, generating goodwill and creating valuable and meaningful content for their communities.
Does this help build brand awareness, engender brand loyalty and ingratiate a brand into that community? Sure. However, providing value is the name of the game when it comes to the new, emerging world of social media and online marketing. It has to feel right.
Imagine you’re at a party. You wouldn’t just walk into the room and start talking about yourself to each person there. You’d be a pariah. You have to listen, ask questions and have a two-way conversation.
Think of community marketing like a trade. You must give as much as you take, leaving the scales balanced. People can sniff out a thinly veiled marketing ploy, but if you provide engaging and valuable content while building bonds throughout the community, that is more valuable and more effective than a typical social media ad spend.
We have a great deal of experience with these types of effort with our longtime client, Union Pacific. Instead of selling their services, our campaigns focus on Union Pacific’s commitment to track safety and to the regions that they serve, while also raising awareness and providing education on track safety to demographics who are most susceptible to putting themselves in danger.
In other campaigns, the goal can be more closely associated with the brand’s product or service, although the brand awareness would take a back seat to the philanthropic focus of the campaign.
Working with United Access, we discovered how much of a personal and life-changing purchase process they experience with wheelchair-accessible vehicles. Not only do they work closely with each person to meet their unique needs, they learn about the freedom and world of possibilities that they open to them.
We created a video library of content. We focused on the personal testimonies illustrating their real-life challenges and what it meant to them to overcome them, as well as PSA-style videos on the dangers of texting and driving.
The stories that we experienced were not only compelling and deeply emotional, but they were also authentic and not tarnished by a hard sales pitch. We received overwhelmingly positive feedback from these community outreach efforts, while United Access reinforced their brand values and company mission to be mobility specialists. They don’t want to simply sell vehicles, but rather to provide solutions designed for each individual’s unique goals. The vehicles are only a means to an end, which made this type of strategy particularly well suited to our client.
Community marketing can be a valuable tool for building long-term brand loyalty and thought leadership, but it takes an entirely new approach to marketing. If you think this approach is well suited for your brand, let’s talk.
In honor the 30th anniversary of when we first hung our shingle, we have been revisiting some fond memories over the past few months. However, since our founding in 1989, there have been plenty of stories of brands who have bottomed out. We explore some of our favorite stories from the past 30 years of brands dusting off the dirt and getting back on their feet in this series, the Dirty 30, a three-decade retrospective of redemption.
So far we’ve traveled to Valdez to witness the Exxon oil spill, discussed the troubled origins of Jack Box, and reviewed the family squabbles of Carl Hardee Sr and Carl Hardee Jr. This week, buckle up because we’re going on a ride with Firestone.
At the height of the SUV boom at the turn of the new millennium, Firestone and Ford found themselves at odds over a series of disastrous events. Ford’s flagship SUV, the Explorer, came equipped with Firestone tires off the lot. However, both brands made headlines as the top-heavy SUV found had a tendency to roll over when it would get a flat tire.
That’s when the blame game began. One side said that the Firestone tires had a tendency to separate at the tread. The other side said that Ford ignored important data and the Explorer’s design added danger to what should be a routine problem that many drivers have experienced: a tire blowing out.
Firestone even insinuated that the problem in part laid with the consumers performing insufficient maintenance by not checking tire pressure and maintaining proper inflation. That led Ford and consumers to push back, saying that it was unreasonable for them to perform such fastidious monitoring.
All this culminated in Firestone accepting some fault, but only to a limited extent. As reported by the New York Times during the height of the crisis, “Wall Street analysts…say the Firestone tack of trying to shift the responsibility onto Ford increases consumer skepticism about Ford management and the Explorer, but it will probably do little to restore confidence in its tire brand.”
Eventually, Firestone reached a $41.5 million dollar settlement that required them to cooperate with an investigation to discover what Ford knew about the problems. In 2001, Firestone launched a campaign called “Making it Right,” in which the CEO addressed consumers and their concerns in a television spot.
Another spot followed in which Mario and Michael Andretti, racecar drivers and spokesmen for the tire brand, expressed confidence in the brand (if they trust it on the track then it must be safe on the road!) and stressed the importance of proper tire maintenance. As a tie-in, Firestone dealerships gave away free tire gauges to customers.
Passive aggressive? Perhaps, but in the ensuing months after the recall the brand serviced 2,000 customers per month and original equipment sales begin to pick back up in the next quarter following the campaign.
Firestone refrained from advertising until 2004, when they launched a lifestyle advertising campaign with the soundtrack of their classic song, “Where the Rubber Meets the Road,” that harkens back to the 1970s…back when the FTC found that the company’s ads had falsely implied that its tires were “safe under all conditions of use.”
But like any quality rubber, Firestone keeps bouncing back. After a $510 million loss in 200 and a $1.7 billion loss in 2001, the tire company posted a $83 million profit in 2003. Despite some of the unsightly squabbling, the company made things right with their customers and set more rigid oversight and quality control standards, leading them to get back in the fast lane.
Each brand is unique and every brand is bound to run into some turbulence. How they handle it is what separates the greats from the also-rans. As we said last week, being proactive, responsive and forthright is easier said than done, but you can get a lot of miles out of it.
Stay tuned for the next installment of the Dirty 30, and check out our previous Dirty 30s:
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https://geileon.com/dirty-30-firestones-consumer-trust-goes-flat/
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