Watch out! Customers are not stupid anymore!

About 13 years before, I found a piece of glass in “Axiangpo” hot sauce, and at that time, I did think about whether to call media and gain some compensation from Taiyang Co. However, concerned about that there would be huge numbers of calls I needed to make and I was really a little girl and maybe nobody would listen to me, I gave up. What would I do if I was in this modern society, I asked myself. The answer is: I would never get them off easily! How if I ate that glass? I did not even dare to think about the result! I would use as many as sources--Facebook, Renen, Weibo, twitter, or whatever--to stop the same thing happening on other customers. The changing behavior is fortunate to customers, and to companies, I can only say: I’m sorry, watch out before you do anything!

For P&G, let’s get rid of the possibility that competitors’ adding fuel to the fire, although there is a high possibility, the crisis they faced is pretty common in our society. We should never doubt the power of gossip, not to mention something really happened. The company I worked for had faced with the same problem, and the only difference is that my company is pure innocence. One of the products in US General Mills had some “quality problem” since a kind of heavy metal excess Chines eligible heavy metal level. (China and USA has different heavy metal standard level, and that product was only sold in USA, which is eligible) And that news translated by Chinese media was: Haggen-Daze, which is the main product of China General Mills had problem of high level heavy metal. Ridiculous! I laughed out when I first heard about this news, I thought nobody would believe that since they cannot prove anything. However, when I saw my director’s face, I realized that things would not as simple as I thought. Customers would like to believe whatever news harmful to them. And the result is my boss had to call media she knew one by one and explained the truth to them, she almost had no food and sleep during that two days. (I have to say that every time this kind of things happened I always felicitated myself secretly that I was only a small intern.)

Things became more seriously when it came to babies. I feel painful and angry when I read what Moms write about the pain their babies going through. Babies are so innocence. And I can’t image what patents feel when they hear babies crying. When we think about this incident as a real person, everything happened on social media made sense. I think that also is counted into P&G’s response strategy, they tried to stand at the Moms’ side and thought like them. This should be the only thing they could do to calm customers down. I can’t say what P&G did was right, but it was what most companies did when they faced with crisis, and it worked. P&G didn’t response to this crisis directly and they decided to transport customers’ concentration. The Facebook page was still there but there were more news about how P&G care about babies would occupy layout of news webs. Time will wash away everything, and what companies need to do is decrease crisis concentration from customers. After all, we can see Pampers is still top selling among diapers products.

Reference:

 Paul Gillin, Attack of the Customers: The Pampers Dry Max Crisis

http://gillin.com/blog/2012/08/attack-of-the-customers-the-pampers-dry-max-crisis/

Matt Harrison, P&G responds to Pampers Dry Max concerns

http://wave.wavemetrix.com/content/pg-responds-pampers-dry-max-concerns-00091