The brandgym blog

Taco Bell's rat hell

If you needed any more persuading about the power of "social media" (basically people with a common interest sharing stuff via the web; also called Web 2.0), then Ben's update on Taco Bell's rat-infested brand hell is for you.

This has been all over the media in the US, but our European readers may not have heard about it. A load of rats were caught on film partying on down at a Taco Bell restaurant. Now this got on CNN, which is bad enough. But what's different today is that this brand bomb doesn't just explode once. There is a chain reaction of mini explosions set off around the web. Ben reports "Now there are at least 27 videos on You Tube with approximately 660,000 cumulative views." (update: since Ben's post, this is now up to 52 videos). Yum brands CEO ordered a number of the restaurants to be closed down, and issued an apology on the company website.

A few lessons from this:
1. If you have a shitty product or service, then watch out. When you get found out, you'll pay the price big time
2. Web 2.0 is an incredibly powerful tool to amplify both the bad, like Taco Bell's rats, and good (Dove's Revolution viral video)
3. You  need a PR plan in place to harness the power of Web 2.0 in the case of brand disaster

Others?

The empowered consumer costs Banks billions

The growing consumer protest about exorbitant UK bank charges continues to pick up pace, and is a dramatic illustration of the power consumers now have to take on what they think is bad brand behaviour. I read about in last weekend's Sunday Times. From one student's complaint, the FT estimates the cost to UK banks could be as high as £10 billion!

The whole thing started with student Stephen Hone being pissed off, as many of us have been, at being charged £32 on 2 occasions for going only 5p overdrawn. He called his bank, Abbey, to protest and after a while was told they would drop one of the charges as a sign of "goodwill". Well, Stephen was studying law, and found out that the bank was breaking contract law with an effective interest rate of 64 000%; turns out companies can't make you pay "unreasonable" penalty charges, even if they are clearly written down. He took Abbey to court, and got £5000 in compensation. But he didn't stop there. He set up a site, PenaltyCharges.co.uk, to publicise his story and in doing so has helped a growing number of other ripped off consumers do the same thing, with over £1million won back through his site alone. A BBC investigation fanned the flames further.

This story is an example of what Jackie and Ben over at the Church of the Customer call "Citizen Marketers". Their book on the subject has loads of other great examples where customers have used the power of the internet, and in particular blogging and other "social networking tools", to fight back against crappy service and products. Such as the protest against poor iPod battery life that led to Apple setting up a battery replacement service.

And all this can only be good for the campaign to build brands on substance, not spin. Wouldn't less money spent on advertising campaigns and logo changes would free up money to fix problems like these punitive charges?