Laying across a foundation of effortless interaction, social media has enabled us to simply decipher a consumer-brand relationship. Such interactions are not a rare sight anymore, but, how many times have you witnessed the CEO himself stepping up and taking consumer concerns in hand?
Voices rising towards brands on social media
Facebook shelters millions of groups within, Pune Eat Outs being one of them, a member of this group posted a couple of images of Chitale brand’s milk packets with missing date of expiry terming it do be an adulteration.
Within an hour, Facebook noticed members of the same group pouring their thoughts and opinions on the post, while the conversation was blazing, someone had already tagged the CEO of Indraneel Chitale.
Talking about such a negative connotation on the brand, Indraneel Chitale the budding entrepreneur from the second generation of Chitale Bandhu business group shared, “First reaction after reading the post was of concern. As food directly affects our health and incase some wrong/adulterated product is to be consumed by the customer, the consequences are always risky. And concern followed by our naturally programmed disaster management protocol kicks in as well. The idea is always to ensure that in such cases, minimum negative impact occurs on the customer after getting updated about their complaint.”
Personal involvement in return
The Brandowner himself took up the responsibility to meet the apprehension of the consumer by posting a decent comment to the concerned through his personal account. After being asked about his active social media presence he replied, “Being the youngest partner in the organisation currently, this responsibility has been entrusted on me as the seniors find social media too fast to manage!”
This was followed by instant admiration by the followers for his prompt yet not superficial response on the post.
This example exactly explains how a regular post got turned into an extraordinary effort by the high profiled personnel, to back his brand by showing personal interest in their loyal consumers. It almost never happens that a person of such a big stature personally attends to such social media issues, thus reflecting the brands’ reverence towards their audience.
Giving his opinion about the importance of brand CEO’s being active on social media Chitale told Social Samosa, “Sometimes I have seen agencies managing CEO's pages on social media. They are not always aware of the CEO's schedule and end up updating wrong post at the wrong time. That can be very harmful to the authenticity factor that is expected of a CEO on social media.”
Chitale further explained that while the brand has an agency managing its social media pages, however, when queries arise it is usually forwarded to him for further management.
Personal interactions have their own significance, the custodians of Big brands must comprehend from this case so as to humanize the brand’s persona and take real ownership of the issues in virtual space.
The instance contributed in strengthening the brand’s resolve towards quality compliance and customer experience management. The leaders of these brands are always under a constant watch, how to extract the better out of this scrutiny and rise to the top depends on the brand owners and their approach towards social media.
The Article stems from Ashish Dasharathi’s post on Linkedin Pulse –How Chitale Bandhu is winning hearts with Social Media.
Ashish Dasharathi is the Head Digital Marketing at Superise.com