Not Everyone who Talks about your Brand is a Customer; Some of them are just Assholes

In our modern era, it is not only possible, but actually quite simple to be constantly aware of everything that is being said about our companies, our products or services, and our brands. We can listen to, analyze, and dissect every blog post, tweet, or comment coming from every corner of the world. As professionals involved in marketing, we have access to more of this information than ever before.

And this is a great thing. If someone has an issue or is unsatisfied, we have the chance to rectify that and show that we care about and appreciate them as a customer.

The problem, though, comes about when trying to determine which people talking about your brand are customers with an actual gripe and which are just outsiders indulging their inner critic. The most obvious recent example of this was the new not-long-for-this-world Gap logo. As soon as the internet found this gem, every designer, marketer, and Twitterer who hasn’t stepped into a Gap since college jumped on the bandwagon of critiquing it to death. All of this was with good reason. The logo was bad and Gap needed to hear that from this specific community.

But is this the audience they should have looked to for approval to keep the logo?

When Gap reverted back to their old logo, they stated that they made this decision after listening to their customers and following their wishes. But did they really? Or did they merely listen to their peers? Did Gap talk to actual customers and find out what they truly thought about the new logo? Or did they just look at tweets and reports and decide that they couldn’t live with the bashing they were receiving from their marketing peers?

And let’s be honest, while most people hated the logo, did they really care? Is this something people would have still been talking about weeks later? Was a bad logo going to cause ardent Gap fans to boycott the company? As the saying goes, nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd. We all saw what was happening and we wanted to be part of it too, at least for the moment it was happening.

Last night, I was watching the TBS post-season pre-game show and the host asked panelist Cal Ripken, Jr. whether he and other athletes pay attention to the things being said about them in the papers and on TV. I don’t remember the exact quote, but it was something to the effect of, ‘If we paid attention to everything being said about us, we would never be able to perform and do our jobs on the field.’

That statement is relevant to all of us. It is critical to pay attention to what your customers care and talk about, but you can’t rely on what the rest of the world has to say. If we are too focused on these outside critics, we will never have the guts to make tough decisions and stick with them.

While most of us will never be the recipients of a Twitter Riot on the scale of the Gap fiasco, we have to be careful to place the proper value on outside critiques and not allow them to determine how we react.