I feel compelled to comment on the unfolding PR firestorm facing clothing retailer H&M because it intersects with the three core elements of what our Company is all about. If you don’t want to read the full article, here are the salient points of this blog post:
1) This “scandal” shows how a one-off mistake (i.e. not sanctioned by corporate policy and a local human error) is quickly amplified in social media and this very type of “scandal” is the most likely to first visit major and established brands;
2) Scary and stressful as it must be to internal staff, I argue that the spread of this scandal was instantaneously good for H&M and that the Company will only grow stronger and more relevant in social media environments as a result;
3) I articulate the value of being engaged in Twitter before the scandal breaks and how Facebook’s Fan Pages’ functionality works to give brands an opportunity to gain new customers even when their first interaction is reacting to negative news;
4) I defend H&M as one of the best corporate citizens in its field.
I have no affiliation or connection to H&M. I’ve never spoken to anyone at the Company other than their retail clerks. In defense of the Company, this is a brand that, up until yesterday’s NYT article, has done an incredible job of delivering on its brand promise. It’s sales, store growth and connection with its customers is one of the strongest of any apparel brands targeting its demographic.
As part of its brand promise, recognizing that corporate social responsibility is a necessary brand attribute to many of its customers, and especially important in the garment industry, they have invested heavily (relative to their peers) in corporate philanthropy and cause marketing.
To name a few initiatives H&M has been involved in recently:
- A $4.5m donation from H&M to Unicef to fund a five-year program to protect the rights of children in cotton producing areas in the state of Tamil Nadu in southern India.
- A collaboration with WaterAid that since 2002 has raised the equivalent of more than USD $1.6m for water and sanitation projects in Bangladesh (where some of H&M’s clothing is produced) by selling a particular garment each year with 10% of proceeds funding WaterAid.
- And perhaps most important to the current fall-out from yesterday’s NY Times article, the statement that H&M’s US Sales operation donates “thousands of garments from its corporate facilities through Gifts In Kind International” that distributes products to community services groups that are improving the lives of people in need.
H&M became top-trending today on Twitter with most of the comments negative in tone and retweeting either the link to the NY Times article or blogs discussing the article.
As far as I can tell, H&M does not yet have an official Twitter presence or any social media representative engaging through Twitter. Had they been on Twitter, their official tweets would allow anyone who believed the negative reaction was overzealous to retweet official messaging from H&M. It would take only a few hundred people retweeting H&M’s official tweets to take the search results generated from H&M be a better mix of positive and negative messaging.
Unfortunately, it appears that H&M’s CSR Manager, Ingrid Schullstrom, is currently on an extended leave, making it even more difficult to respond with full force.
What I find interesting is that H&M has more Facebook Fans than any of its peers. A quick scan showed me the following Facebook fan numbers of some comparative apparel brands:
American Apparel: 171,293
Gap: 503,152
Abercrombie & Fitch 612,103
H&M 1,473,529
I’m guessing that H&M’s Facebook Fan following grew significantly from yesterday’s article and would be grateful if anyone who had these numbers could comment on this post with a “before and after. ”
Anyone who wants to comment on a Facebook fan page (negative or positive), first has to become a fan.
This functionality represents a huge opportunity to H&M and underscores a key incentive for brands to engage in social media. They have an opportunity to convert every one of the “fans” who have joined to express outrage/dissatisfaction into actual fans of the brand.
H&M’s biggest miss today with its Facebook Fan Page response to the “scandal” is that it’s messaging was in its brand voice, as opposed to finding the right person within the organization to engage on behalf of the brand. Nevertheless, in looking at the comment stream on the status updates posted on H&M’s page addressing the controversy, there is a good mix of Fans defending H&M from this controversy mixed with negative comments.
The take away here is that for established brands, trust that some percentage of your customers will come to your defense. Figure ways to empower those “fans” to act as brand ambassadors or at the very least thank them for coming to your defense.
I’m going to go on a limb here and say that I don’t believe that it’s common practice across the H&M store to destroy its products and leave it in its alleys. To be clear, it probably does destroy some portion of unsold product but it’s not company policy to callously leave destroyed product in its store alleys for all to see. This comes from a break-down at the store level, not unlike the Domino’s franchise in North Carolina that ignited a similar firestorm of controversy.
The last thing I’ll say is that type of “scandal” is that it’s becoming a common one. The mistake of one store or a couple of employees impacts the entire company. That’s the reality of the new power consumers have over brands through social media.
But my bet is that the net effect of this “scandal” for H&M will be a positive one. It will spotlight that it leads its peers in corporate social responsibility, it will grow its online audience, and hopefully inspire H&M senior management to develop the capacity to engage real people as representatives within the online spaces where people now talk about its brand.
And just as I finish writing this article, I see that this “scandal” is already on its way to being over. The NY Times is reporting that H&M has pledged to donate any unsold items from the store where this behavior was reported to charity as opposed to throwing them out.
