Charter Communications: Your brand is what your customers say it is !!!

Every semester, no exception, almost every professor will ask us at the beginning of the first class: "Have you ever used Charter? They have a really bad internet service in this community!!!" Then the class begins to warm up with the accusation of the bad service of Charter Communications.

At first I really have no idea what is Charter Communications and why my peaceful classmates and respectful professors become so angry when they talked about it. Right now I completely understand what happened to them, because I become one of Charter Communications' customers!!!

Your brand is what your customers say it is!!!

When I started to read the second part of the Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff about listening to the groundswell, the first thought came in to my mind was Charter Communications. How could a foreigner like me knew this brand so much at the time when I knew nothing about the community I lived in.


After I read the book, in my perspective: listening to the groundswell is not just have a phone call or have a survey to your customers but more about a way to learn your past , your present and your future. It is more about a way of learning and self reflection.

It really helps the company or the brand to find the voices of different attitudes, from insiders and outsiders. Just like ancient China, thrive dynasty always comes from public's mouth to mouth stories, only declining dynasty uses paperwork to advertise itself.

I think the quote from Ricardo Guimaraes, founder of Thymus Branding, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, really give me a very clear explanation of the power of listening to the groundswell:

The value of a brand belongs to the market, and not to the company. The company in this sense is a tool to create value for the brand...Brand in this sense-it lives outside the company, not the company. When I say that the management is not prepared for dealing with the brand, it is because in their mind-set they are managing a closed structure that is the company. The brand is an open structure-they don't know how to manage an open structure. 

In the book, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff also provided two listening strategies for companies which willing to listen:

1. Set up your own private community.

2. Begin brand monitoring.

The reason a company really need to listen to the groundswell can be summarised like:

1. Find out what your brands for.

2. Understand how buzz is shifting.

3. Save research money; increase responsiveness.

4. Find the sources of influence in your market.

5. Manage PR crises.

6.Generat new product and marketing ideas.

To Charter, I think manage PR crises is really their fist thing need to solve.

Your PR crises really need to be solved!!!

While I used a lot of "bad" words to express my dissatisfaction to the Charter Communication in Worcester communities, it doesn't have represent everybody's attitude. So I did an investigation online.

From google's rating page, you will find the rating number is 1.4 stars. People really feel angry about that.

On yelp.com, which is a really popular website on rating business,  people seemed more angry. Their reviews cannot be summarised in lines of words. They made their reviews like a story long. Among the 25 reviews, only one five star rating, the other 24 are all one star rating.

Look at this one start rating, even I zoom the page in the minimum size it still cannot show all!

 Let's see what youtube users did. They even took a lot of time to make a video. Why? Because they cannot express their feelings within such a little page.

Listen and talk to the groundswell probably not that easy but it is really necessary for companies to do that. Here I got some suggestion on Charter Communications:

1. Collect and review the most heated groundswell on your company.

2. Start to response and solve the problem on the major review and rating websites.

3. Start establish a good customer service which can really solve the problem.

4. Make a community which can help your company listen to your customers immediately.

5. Have more interact with your customers on your problems.

I do hope companies like Charter Communications which provide cable and internet services can start to pay attention on the groundswell. Both companies and cyber citizen will benefit from groundswell, I think.