There is a lot of discussion about failures coming from the Fyre Festival debacle. Most conversations whisper fraud, or shout customer anger, and yet the fact remains that Fyre’s marketing was successful. The social media strategy was extremely savvy and played on all the Millennial triggers necessary to amplify the message across the entire internet with a minimum cost of $20,000 for each influencer. If you want to learn more about how the entire affair unfolded, you can watch the recent Hulu or Netflix documentaries that take a good look at things from very different angles.
In the end, the challenge facing Fyre’s management team wasn’t anything new to the marketplace. Brands everywhere try to tackle the same problems every day. Where they went wrong was creating too much demand for a product where supply didn’t meet customer expectations. Not unlike swarms of holiday consumers piling on top of each other during Black Friday in an effort to score a single big-screen TV at a discount, Fyre failed to harmonize “supply” with “demand” and it cost them everything.
What can we learn from this? We must first come to grips with the idea that most customer experience strategies fail because they focus too heavily on the consumer. This is where Fyre failed. When companies lack the operational and logistical ability to deliver on customer expectations, failure is the only option. To win, companies need to balance investments in both supply and demand. When supply and demand are harmonized, the result is happy customers.
Today, the best way to balance supply and demand requires two key things. The first is stakeholder alignment. You want to be sure that marketing teams and the logistics teams are working together at every customer touchpoint. The second is business intelligence. Modern marketers know that beyond getting the message out, they must make sure to integrate marketing data with logistics data. Failure to maintain stakeholder alignment or lack of integrated data means that you’re at high risk of losing the balance between supply and demand.
Don’t become the next Fyre Festival. Keep your focus on operational decisions married to consumer marketing and you’ll deliver winning customer experiences.
Contributed by: Dennis Wakabayashi, Integer Dallas
Image Source: Pexels
