This blog post caught my attention because it demonstrated the scale of impact that social media has on a brands image and marketing. Debenhams, a British multinational retailing giant which was doing very well in the market till now has suddenly been faced with a lot of negative views and loss of revenue due to a single facebook post. In today’s social media reliant market, businesses are largely affected by what goes on online. In this case, Mr. Aires Loutsaris, the head of SEO has evaluated Debenhams situation and predicted a loss of millions for the retail giant as a result of negative facebook marketing. The issue in question was the tragic death of a shopper in his 40s due to falling from the 3rd floor of the Oxford Street Debenhams store, the next day after the incident, Debenhams posted a picture of a celebrity visiting that same store as marketing, which was interpreted as “inappropriate” and represented disregard for the tragic event that occurred at the same location. Debenhams was then bombarded with negative reviews and customer feedback. “Both its reputation and bank account has taken a huge blow” in the words of Mr. Aires himself. Even financial analysts evaluated that at the rate this negative view is going, the business could be looking at millions in lost revenue. I am interested in this phenomenon and how it managed to affect a retail giant which was well established and had a large amount of brand loyalty at its disposal, so negatively. And I am even more interested in how it plans to counter this problem. Will it simply stop posting any advertisements for a while, or face the issue head on and apologize publicly. Mr. Aires is convinced that Debenhams needs to make a move fast unless it wants to face a large loss soon.
Source:
• https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20141108010152-83517803-how-debenhams-will-lose-millions-from-one-facebook-post?trk=tod-posts-post1-psum