With social networks abound, consumer created content that is brand-damaging can spread at an amazing pace and make it onto mainstream media to cause additional damage. This week, Domino's was hit with such a brand disaster.
Two employees at a Domino's in the U.S. had nothing better to do during their work time than to record a video of themselves putting all sorts of bodily fluids into the meals they prepared. They uploaded it to YouTube a few days ago and started a nightmare for themselves and for the brand that they are ridiculing. Their video is here , if you are willing to stand it.
The video obviously created an enormous brand damage and had a pretty bad effect on the fast food market in general with people proposing that such actions happened every day across a lot of the fast food chains of the world. Domino's executive first decided to not react aggressively to the posting, but hoped the controversy would die down, but that is not how viral sensations work.
Only when many posts on Twitter asked for Domino's reactions did they decide to work against the brand-damaging ongoing discussions: the workers were fired, charged with food tampering , the restaurant in question was closed and completely sanitised, and Domino's start a Twitter channel to directly respond to customer's concerns. Domino's president Patrick Doyle even posted a message to YouTube in which he apologises and clarifies the company's commitment to food safety.
The brand's reputation was indeed damaged. According to research firm YouGov, who undertook an online suvey, the perception of its quality among consumers went from positive to negative within the first 3 days after the video was posted.
Accordingly, the call for tools to help deal with such situations is growing louder. Social media monitoring tools provide a means to make sure brand-damaging postings are captured early, their impact is measured exactly, and adequate reactions can be prepared. Tools like Google Alerts , and Sydney-based companies S7 , Brandtology , and also Vquence provide tools to address the challenges.
The whole affair engaged people so much that there are now almost 100 copies and replies to the video available on YouTube. Some of these are copies of the original video, some of Mr Doyle's apology - one even with captions .
Interestingly, the Domino's Incident has stayed mostly a YouTube phenomenon. There is no copy on MySpace.TV, there are only two copies on Dailymotion, one on Break.com, one on Metacafe, one on Yahoo video, and a few more random singles on other sites. It is a big public discussion held on YouTube. The videos are reaching 500K-1M views and 5.5K comments here. But given the reactions of Domino's, we expect the buzz to die down rather quickly before creating more brand damage.
In comparison to that, the recent "Susan Doyle" videos with the star from "Britain's Got Talent" have spread across many more sites. There are 87 copies on Dailymotion, 23 on MySpace.TV, 7 on Break.com, 13 on Vimeo, 14 on Yahoo video, and 42 on Metacafe. The original video on the BritiansSoTalented YouTube channel reached almost 30M views and 150K comments. This video single-handedly achieved 700 video responses and many many more copies.
It is a good sign that a positive message where a person lives up to her dreams and out-performs all expectations receives a much higher spread than a brand-damaging, stupid prank.