This is a great example of how to turn a negative story about your business into a positive one. There are always going to be setbacks in business, but the ability to see positives can provide useful messaging and content for your marketing efforts.
Burger King’s Flame Grilled Burgers
This is from the classic show don’t tell school of marketing and works brilliantly. Instead of telling us their burgers are flame grilled, Burger King show us, demonstrating with real proof in the form of restaurants that have burnt down.
Using what could be deemed as ‘failures’ to promote a brand could be a risky strategy and there’s no doubt that Burger King will have considered this strategy long and hard; perhaps even drafting in some lawyers.
This print advertising campaign from North America is an example of how you can turn a negative into a positive. After all, what says authentic flame grilled burgers better than pictures of restaurants fully ablaze?
When Burger King were in posesson of statistics that their restaurants were more likely to burn down than other fast food chains, they decided to put a positive spin on it. With burgers that are always flame grilled, Burger King put out print adverts like the above with a stamp ‘flame grilled since 1954’.
The images speak for themselves.
Marketing Actions
We could consider using a negative story about our brand and turning it around to show that when things don’t go completely to plan, our customer service is spot on. A negative story doesn’t need to be hurtful and it doesn’t need to be made public. All stories related to your business can be utilised for content marketing material and even to improve internal procedures.
Clearly we need to make sure that the negative story isn’t something that would result in a damaged reputation if we were to use it as part of a public marketing campaign. A large organisation like Burger King would find it easier to create shocking adverts such as the one discussed here without loss of reputation. But for the every day business, this isn’t always the best course of action.
The important thing to take from this is that seemingly negative feedback or events don’t have to hold your business back. If a customer claims they didn’t get the product they wanted, the first thing you need to do is make sure you understand why they had a problem and resolve it as quickly as possible.
- Always look or ways to turn negatives into positives
- Use negatives as an opportunity to improve internally
How To Tell Your Story
Unlike Burger King, you may not be able to distribute pictures showing some of your biggest disasters. However, we’d like you to takeaway one simple thing you could do today.
How about making a case study to show how your business delivers great customer service. Start with a suboptimal customer experience. Write down what happened, how you investigated, the outcome for the customer and how that will help potential cuatomers. You could boost it into a full case study, or take snippets and create content in different forms. If you’re looking for help with creating great content out of negative situations, get in touch.
Have you been on the receiving end of poor customer service? If so, what happened and how was it resolved, if at all? Have you ever managed to turn a negative into a positive with your business? How did it go?
Let us know in the comments section below or on Twitter using the hashtag #HailnFail and our Twitter handle @MoreThanVenice <–click to tweet. Or join the conversation on the Hail & Fail Facebook page.