In the age of viral videos, one of the worst things that can happen for a brand is that a negative video goes viral and tarnishes the brand’s name. Brands are defined by what consumers say and think about them, so when a video makes its rounds and brings down a company’s reputation after they have spent time and money carefully crafting their brand, the damage can be consequential. Sometimes a company’s small mistake, once caught on video, can quickly reach millions of people and spell doom for that particular brand.
Social media and YouTube reviews are great tools for consumers because they help weed out the companies that offer good products and services from those that don’t. A company can have plenty of great reviews, but sometimes all it takes it for that one negative review or one bad viral video to go around and send a company tumbling down if the situation is not handled correctly.
There are a few instances that I can currently think of where this has happened. The first example is happening within my own employer. I work at Univision Communications, within the television and entertainment industry. During the last week we had a video go viral where an executive producer for the show El Gordo y La Flaca was caught heavily sexually harassing a model. All of the audio was leaked and quickly went viral, being shared all over Latin news outlets and YouTube. Various viewers have threatened to not only boycott the program, but the entire network itself. This has been so devastating for the Univision brand that my company immediately fired the producer and has been working on damage control to try to keep this issue at bay and to reduce the harm this incident has caused to the company’s brand name.
Another example of this is the Walmart Black Friday shopping experience videos. Every year, Walmart tries to attract more shoppers during the holidays by slashing prices and offering Black Friday discounts. Walmart has even tweeked the way it handles these events by changing its hours of operation during the holidays and opening up later on Black Friday so that employees can enjoy Thanksgiving with their families instead of working throughout the holiday. However, the same kind of video makes its rounds every Black Friday. Media coverage always shows consumers attacking each other in line and going as far as stomping over each other like a stampede of animals to get a hold of the best deals and products. When these videos go viral, they are harmful for the Walmart brand name. People choose to either go to other stores that may not have the cheapest deals but where they don’t have to deal with this kind of behavior. This leaves Walmart having to look for ways to undo the damage that the viral videos cause.
Although viral video marketing can have a positive impact in many ways for a company, a brand can have less overall control once a video is spread because the company doesn’t have a way of controlling how a consumer interacts with the message. This can unfortunately be detrimental and cause irreparable damage for the brand.