Growing Your Own Crisis: How a Bank and an Auto Giant Grew the Seed of Trouble
Altered Wachovia Logo as it appears on Facebook anti-fan page.
It should have been the simplest kind of call into Wachovia Bank’s customer service center. But it wasn’t. Heather Lynn, a 21-year-old art student in Virginia, contributed $10 to an ongoing relief effort in earthquake-ravaged Haiti. And she used her Wachovia debit card to do it. Yet when her transaction posted, a 3% “international service fee” had been deducted from her contribution. The quake victims would see less money. What?
"I called customer service to ask if they were waiving fees like Visa and MasterCard did for Haiti relief funds, but the unsympathetic customer service representative said 'No,'" Lynn told The Huffington Post. "I just don't understand how a bank can make a profit from a tragedy, let alone get away with it."
And from there the seed for a looming public relations disaster was planted. And Wachovia’s parent company, Wells Fargo, would soon appear to possess a misguided surplus of water and highly-enriched fertilizer.
Furious at the abrupt decision Lynn took her plight to the internet, setting up a quite unsavory page on Facebook. Entitled “Wachovia = Fail,” the page not only details Lynn’s profound disappointment but also serves as a call to action. “Wachovia needs to be held accountable! They need to either refund the money or donate whatever profits they accrued to Haiti relief funds!” the site says while Lynn encourages fans (totaling 3,008 as of the time of this blog posting) to contact their elected representatives and reconsider banking with Wachovia. “The internet is our last hope to equal the playing field,” writes fan Fawzi Momani.
Enter the bank’s garden hose and that fertilizer.
"We have given $100,000 to the American Red Cross, and on January 19 we pledged an additional $250,000 to support the non-profits in Florida that are mobilizing the relief efforts," Wells Fargo spokesman Micheal Klosterman told The Huffington Post. "We decided that donating a sum of money would be quicker and more beneficial than waiving transaction fees because the funds would get to the people quicker. It would take the equivalent of $35 million in transactions to raise the amount of money we actually donated."
Wachovia and parent company Wells Fargo missed the proverbial boat. At real issue was not whether the bank was somehow profiting from donations to Haiti. It wasn’t whether transaction fees are simply the real cost of getting the donations to where they belong. And it certainly did not center on what Wachovia is doing to aid the quake’s victims. Yet those are the issues Wachovia endeavored to answer. And in doing so they ignored reality.
The principal, guiding issue for Lynn and her growing list of irritated Facebook supporters centers on their money – not Wachovia’s. It’s all about anger and disappointment. From a public relations perspective, these issues of emotion cannot be solved with facts. They’re solved with action that seeks to quell. And if the corporate response is on target, the public’s image of the corporation could also actually be improved in the process. With the ever profitable Wells Fargo $25 billion taxpayer bailout still fresh on the minds of most, the bank might have taken a lesson from Toyota’s innumerable mistakes of late.
Like Wells Fargo, Toyota’s public relations machine failed to answer the real dilemma facing consumers – fear amid increasing reports of runaway gas pedals. Toyota answered by initially denying the problem existed. The PR machine then retooled into an evolving process including studies, repair programs, recalls – and ultimately PR disaster – all because the auto giant failed to address the real concern, fear.
Paramount to successful communication with any audience is mere understanding. Before speaking, communicators must understand what they’re saying, what it will mean, and most importantly – how it will be understood. Quite simply – what’s the real concern here?
Whether you’re attached to a mega-bank, an auto manufacturer or a small business, you might learn from Wachovia/Wells Fargo and Toyota. One theme here is constant:
Rather than cultivate their own firmly planted trees, these corporations opted to turn their garden hoses and fertilizer elsewhere. And if you’ve ever used fertilizer, you already know a little goes a long way.
