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Does anyone have experience with customer stories that feature polarizing brands? Interested to hear your creative solutions! I'm currently working through the mental gymnastics of a brand that sells weapons but is very interested in telling their story _and_ has a particularly interesting use case. I'm hesitant to suggest that we anonymize the story, as I know the customer is excited about their use case.
Maybe focus more on the use case specifics and less on the weaponry, making the fact that they sell weapons incidental to the story? I'm not sure if that's possible but worth a shot.
This is a sticky one, and I'm obviously not sure who the client is. But if it's a recognizable name like Ruger or Smith & Wesson, it'll be impossible to skate around it. My thoughts:
As much as I'd have the exact same moral quandary as you, I would ultimately try to remove my personal emotion from the decision on how to tell the story. In my opinion, a company shouldn't really be in the business of accepting money from a customer while also policing how they share their successes. It's a weird moral grey area. Unless it's like the literal NRA or something, which would be a much bigger moral issue for me than a manufacturer, I would probably publish the story like any other and have a contingency plan in place if the market has a negative reaction to it. Otherwise you run the risk of pissing off the customer
Thank you for your thoughtful responses! @Jake Sotir I definitely appreciate the perspective and agree—it feels icky to appreciate this customer but not want to celebrate their story. So many things to consider!!
For customers like that, we end up having to defer to our company policy, and we don't do anything public. Just thinking it would be good to check with your corporate comms team or some such organization. And in those cases, we ask customers to do P2P, etc.
@Alexie Glover This may sound like an oversimplification- but if it's ultimately your choice and there isn't currently a guiding policy- sleep on it, then listen to your gut.
One leadership lesson I learned in a tough moment is that if there's a situation where you're forced to make a decision between 2 risks, ask yourself- is one of these risks a certainty and the other a fear of risk? Avoid the certain risk in those situations.
Not the exact same situation, but we have a policy not to do business with people who disrespect our team or make people on our team uncomfortable. We discuss as a team to see if there's a better fit within our org, but in extreme situations, that's not always possible. Sometimes it means walking away from business or partnerships, but at the end of the day, we all sleep better prioritizing the mental health of our people.
Agree with Laurie, you really need to make sure it´s not hitting your own reputation in the market. Would never recommend to do something with "toxic brands" as it can hit you even harder. Imagine media, journalists are getting aware of it and reaching out to your company and start asking questions. I would anonymize it and focus on the use-case only.
@Rebecca Grossman I completely agree. With everything going on in the world right now, I had the exact same feeling.
An update for all: we've decided to go ahead and interview the customer. After confirming with the corporate comms and legal folks we know for certain we can't publish anything about the brand, which helps with the decision making about a story. What we might try to do, depending on the quality of the interview, is highlight the speaker and not their company association (thought leadership, customer quotes, etc.). Unfortunately, the spokesperson is really excited about the opportunity ... but I think that probably has to do with the fact that they're not often asked to participate in this kind of activity 😅