Brand Fail Whale: Restaurant Owner Turns Negative Yelps Into T-Shirts

If you've shown up here, why don't you mosey on over to my new blog? Yeah, I just soft launched The BrandForward Blog. It's at http://michelletripp.com. You can find all the same posts you can find here. But it's a bit more pretty.

Yeah, go on! Scoot! Nothing to see here!

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Yelp's had some publicity lately, and not a lot of it good.

Let's forget the "holy crap" moment this week when a judge ruled that Yelpers can be sued for libel. And let's move on to something a little less disturbing. If only slightly.

I just finished reading an article from NPR's On the Media http://tr.im/otmy that was basically an interview with a San Francisco restauranteur who got upset about some bad Yelp reviews and "confronted" the issue by turning the offending Yelps into T-shirts. "This place sucks" and stuff like that.

Clever idea but it seems the opportunity to improve and connect with some very important customers was lost. By taking a complaint and essentially turning it into a joke, the restaurant owner made a statement. A big one. Basically that he doesn't take his customers seriously. And if you're particularly demanding (or just expect things to be right), instead of being respected as a paying customer you're going to get called out and put in your place.

Business-to-consumer companies are admittedly having it a little rough right now. In the past, a company that didn't make customer service a top priority or provided an inferior product or service had total impunity. The customer could walk away upset and the company didn't have to care. Now with Yelp, companies are all of the sudden being forced by the customer to do the right thing. And a lot of companies aren't exactly prepared for that.

To prevent bad reviews, companies now have to hire better people, have a more positive management style, and produce a better product. They also have to get serious about their total offering and be prepared to satisfy every customer. Like as in ALL of them.

So back to the whole Yelp factor. Yeah, I know there's always going to be "that" customer who thinks it's funny to give one star and say they saw a rat run across the table. But I went to the Yelp page for the restaurant in question http://tr.im/delfina and the bad reviews were pretty reasonable. They were completely believable, criticizing mostly product quality, atmosphere, and employee behavior. No vicious rats, no people lying in the streets convulsing from food poisoning, no swill dripping from the rafters. Everything was pretty straight-forward.

But instead of looking at these Yelps as an opportunity to see things from a different perspective, the owner of the restaurant looked at it as a way to show he's more clever than his customers and that he doesn't take negative reviews seriously. Even if he's privately using Yelp to improve in small ways here and there, the T-shirts (while a successful media grab) are a total brand fail whale.

News Flash: Demanding customers are the ones that can be evangelized.

You think people don't realize when they're being demanding? You think they don't know they expect a lot? They do. But that doesn't soften the blow when they realize you don't care to please them. They take it personally. They think you're doing a bad job because you don't care about them. They think you want to take the lazy way. Tip the scale in your favor at their expense. These customers don't suffer the mediocre, and they're not about to let you get away with giving them the bum's rush. They want justice. And with Yelp they're going to get it. Let's count the number of times Best Buy has recently found itself on page one of Digg. Companies that fail to meet "demanding" customer expectations are in a bad place to be.

But the flip side is that if a company does meet their needs, they're going to tell the world. Cue the fireworks. They appreciate when a company can meet their expectations because it doesn't happen very often. This means they're going to love you. A lot. These are the customers that will Yelp your establishment in rainbow colors, and confront other Yelpers if they criticize you unjustly.

Still annoyed by those demanding customers?

Yelp is a gift. For brands and companies that honestly want to do the right thing, and value customers as unique individuals who don't want to be herded like King Ranch cattle to the cash register, Yelp is an amazing social media tool that can be leveraged to cultivate and celebrate brand evangelists.

For the companies that don't want to bother, there's always the T-shirt business.