Boycott of Gillette: “I would rather grow a beard!”

-An illustration of customer empowerment and negative word-of-mouth through the use of Internet-

During the last lecture, we were talking about how customers’ complaints could make your business go bankrupt through the PayPal example (www.paypalsucks.com). Indeed, the eMarketing web might be extremely profitable for plenty of companies but customers or even competitors might also use the Internet medium to drag you down and let you know they are not satisfied with your products/services.

They can organize themselves into more or less influential communities able to kill your business. Consumers are indeed actively communicating between each other and ignoring what they say, from what we have seen, could turn out to be a disaster for the firm. Since we keep on thinking that Internet will in most of the cases bring cash in, it’s also interesting to take a look at companies suffering from the Internet tool.

That’s the case of Gillette, the razor and blade company, which experienced a dramatic moment with a website they wish they had never heard of: www.boycottgillette.com. The website (as well as many other online articles) is basically blaming Gillette for putting tracking devices into its products and to have hidden cameras in Gillette spy shelves taking mug shots of people who pick up their products! The same target customers who have made companies such as Gillette successful could become your biggest threat!

Believe the story or not, up to you, but be sure of one thing: companies take this kind of problem very seriously! For the story, I personally wrote a complaint to Gillette regarding the customer tracking associated with a made-up story regarding a previous CRM study about how companies could deal with the customers’ complaints online. And guess what… They of course denied the tracking accusations and last but not least, they offered me a free razor to retain my loyalty to the brand!

Loïc, 2A7507