By Quentin Langley
If you were to pick a company likely to be brandjacked, it would not have been Jet Blue. While low cost airlines in Europe often have a bad reputation for customer service - and Ryan Air seems to revel in this - Jet Blue is not only known for high calibre customer service, but also a light-hearted attitude and being fully engaged in social media.
Of course, one rogue member of staff can ruin things for anyone. But the bizarre behaviour of flight attendant, Steven Slater, doesn't seem to be what is damaging Jet Blue's brand. Rather, it is the company's stiff response to the mass of social media coverage. Slater has become something of a folk hero, with thousands joining a fan page on Facebook and the Twitterverse christening his decision to swear at a customer, pick up a bottle of beer, and leave the aircraft via the evacuation slide 'the best way to resign' ever.
The events are very current, and that's why Google turns up several matches for this story on a search for 'jet blue' and the first page on Twitter for the same search is almost exclusively on this story. It is not clear that this story is going to keep running, and it certainly doesn't have the ongoing potential of Deepwater Horizon. But Jet Blue's refusal to engage with a story which is a silly season classic, is still something of a worry for the company. It reflects one of the worst errors a company can make in a crisis. They are treating a reputation problem as a legal problem.
Obviously, there are legal implications to the story. They might find themselves in a legal dispute with the customer or the employee. But the liability in either case would be relatively small. But the story is so newsworthy that in reputation terms it is huge. This is clearly a case when Jet Blue should be listening to its PR people and not its lawyers.
Lawyers always like silence. Yet there is huge evidence that saying sorry and engaging in a friendly way dramatically reduces the chances that you will be sued. Jet Blue should be willing to laugh about this story, at least a bit. That is what everyone else is doing.
Comments