Joachim Scholz
Assistant Professor of Marketing, International Business and Strategy
Goodman School of Business

The conventional wisdom is that criticism is bad: as a company, you don’t want to be in the headlines, you don’t want to have people talking bad things about you. My research shows that this is not necessarily the case. There’s a certain form of controversy online which companies can actually use to build their brand and to really create brand value for themselves and their customers.

There are two main forms of criticism you can think of: your product is faulty to some extent. And, on the other hand, they are more like morally infused crises where the issue is not so much something wrong with your product, it’s just that customers take issues with a certain position you’re taking. And that’s actually a very large category of social media firestorms out there. Estimates range like, about, 60 per cent of all online crises are about these morally infused events.

Our research shows that that is an opportunity for the brand to build their brand, by not appeasing their brand critics but by actually fanning the flames of the firestorm, fighting back online.

Companies should definitely not fan the flames if something is wrong with your product. That’s pretty clear: you messed up as a company, you have to rectify this. If this is about a moral issue, if this is about a value system you’re endorsing or not, and if you want to stand up for social justice, for example, or you want to stand up for other social values around you, and some people don’t like it, there’s a good opportunity for you to actually stand by your values. You want to create a certain moral framing around the issue which means you frame your own perspective and potentially the perspective of your opponent. Whether or not this is a more progressive value or more conservative value, that really depends on your own brand and on your customers. The important thing is that you see a certain level of support. You can identify certain issues which your adversaries are complaining about and turning those things around.

Companies want to demonstrate that they’re relevant in today’s time, right, so they want to resonate with their customers. Differentiate yourself in terms of the meaning system that you embrace with your brand and you also propagate through your brand.

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