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Unless you were not on planet Earth during the last two years, you will have heard about the “Fyre Festival” fiasco in one of the Bahamas islands.
What started as one of the most promising marketing promotions of all times, a “luxury music festival” for the Millennial’s elite, turned out to be a monumental music disaster.
On January, 2019, Netflix unleashed its documentary: FYRE: The greatest party that never happened. The world overwhelmingly watched how the organizer, Billy McFarland fooled thousands of Millenials to pay an average of $4K each to participate in a “luxury immersive music experience” that went bad. 10 super models were paid huge amounts to advertise it; it sold-out in just 48 hours. Still, the successful influential marketing was not able to prevent the festival’s epic failure, brought about by McFarland’s tragic tactical mistakes.
The festival’s fiasco, though, provides several valuable PR lessons:
Despite the initial skillful use of social media that made the festival one of the can’t-miss events of the year, they finally became the festival’s worst enemy when truth came out; social media make everything transparent and this comes at high cost in our hyperconnected world. Never underestimate the social media power and understand the risk: influencers can empower your business, but they can just as easily destroy it.
Reputation management is extremely difficult to handle if you have over-promised to your publics what you cannot actually perform; therefore, always under-promise and over-deliver. Make a solid plan, based on deep research, and address both a comprehensive strategic approach of your targeted audiences and a crisis management plan, like a relevant dedicated landing page, for example. When bad luck strikes, you have to be ready.
Admit your mistakes and apologize – do it fast and do it in all honesty. Make it timely and to the point. Refusing responsibility for your obvious mistakes will only harm your audience’s trust and loyalty to your brand, most of the times irreversibly. Remember, honesty is the best policy.
Finally, always keep the communication channel with your audiences open, especially if your promises have failed. Allow for substantial feedback on the matter and do not attempt to redirect attention or blur your audiences’ judgement. Your communicative approach should be ethical and responsible, based on truth and transparency, aiming at gaining your audience’s trust and loyalty. Only then your brand will be established as ethical in your publics’ conscience.
Had Billy McFarland made all the above choices, the Fyre Festival would have gone down in history as the “ultra-chic, Coachella in the Caribbean” that it was supposed to be in the first place – no doubt.
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