Annals of Rebranding: The Unintended Consequences of Customer Feedback

Getting close to one's customers, constituents, alliance partners and/or stakeholders is highly touted for getting them involved, committed, invested and otherwise actively interested in their relationship with your organization and maybe even you personally. It also means you have to listen to them. And not infrequently, you are not going to like what you hear.

The annals of customer feedback are filled with unintended consequences: Stanford University, in identifying a new mascot asked students to vote(in the 1970s, Native Americans objected to the use of "Indian" as the mascot on US university campuses, including Stanford's). Their choice: 'The Robber Barons,' in honor of founder Leland Stanford's role as a 19th century monopolist whose railroad charged usurious rates to its victimized shippers. University administrators and alumni were not amused.

In the following article from Ragan's Daily, Matt Wilson describes how the City of Austin, Texas, capital of the state and home to the University of Texas, asked citizens to suggest names for a re-branding of the municipal solid waste services department (in simpler times, known as the garbage, trash or sanitation department). The city has an artistic and countercultural reputation in an otherwise conservative state; "Keep Austin Weird" is the most popular t-shirt slogan one finds for sale. That prepared authorities for non-traditional suggestions, but even they were surprised by the choice of the over 30,000 voters. The implication for anyone running a customer feedback program, whether it be European bureaucrats, American soft-drink brands, or Egyptian coalition partners; keep your sense of humor and retain the right to review suggestions:


"Imagine this splayed across the trash truck coming by your house: “Fred Durst Society of Humanities and Arts.”

If nearly 30,000 voters in the city of Austin’s recent poll aiming to rename its Solid Waste Services Department had their way, residents of the Texas capital would see the Limp Bizkit frontman’s name going by their homes every week. News outlets including NPR picked up on the work of likely pranksters just before the close of online voting Thursday night.
But city communicators are taking it all in stride, and stressing that just because a joke suggestion got the most votes, it likely won’t be the new name.

“I wasn’t expecting it or not expecting it,” city Communication Consultant Jill Goodman says of the joke entries. “When you’re opening up a forum like that, you’re really opening up to any type of comment. To me, that’s half the fun.”
The online vote through Uservoice was one of several of methods the city used to pick up input, but the decision rests with the city manager, Goodman says.

“Solid Waste Services, the name, had never been a true reflection of what we really do here,” says Jennifer Herber, public information specialist for the department. “People get it confused with collecting human waste, which is another department.”

And, she says, the department isn’t just about garbage collection anymore. It’s shifted into waste reduction, recycling, debris collection and even street sweeping. Officials were looking for something all-encompassing.

The city asked for public input, Goodman says, because “this department is one of the few departments where people see their work, day in and day out.”

Officials conducted focus groups with city residents, asked people in other departments what they thought and asked employees within the department, “What name would you be proud of?”

That yielded three possible names: Austin Resource Collection & Recovery Utility, the Austin Recycling and Waste Reduction Department, and Austin Resource Recovery Utility. Many more were soon to come.

In late January, the city opened up online voting, specifically using a polling tool that allowed users to offer up their own suggestions rather than just vote on a set of pre-selected names.

“Austin is very creative, a little bit weird,” Goodman says. “We didn’t really want to limit the public discourse to just a few options.”

Soon genuine suggestions such as “Department of Neat and Clean” and “CleanAustin” started popping up, alongside jokes such as the Fred Durst entry and “Stephen Colbert Solid Waste Services Department.”

Other suggestions proved the point that the department needed a name change, Herber says. Many included the words “sewage” or “human waste,” which isn’t what the department’s job.

A few other suggestions took the form of comments, one prominent one complaining about how much a name change would cost taxpayers.

“We haven’t gone through all our lessons learned yet, but one thing we learned pretty early on is that we needed somebody to moderate the things that were coming in, because some of the entries were less than nice,” Herber says.

About halfway through the voting, Goodman said she began screening suggestions before they went up on the site. “Even with that, we didn’t want to delete any ideas, even if they were off the wall. The only things we were deleting were cuss words and hateful speech,” she says. For instance, the comment complaining about cost, which is still viewable, is “fair game,” she says.

As for whether the joke entries were a plus or a minus, Herber says at least they may have driven some people who wouldn’t have otherwise visit to the department’s site to read up on its Zero Waste program.

Now that voting has ended, officials will corral all the input and start “weeding through the silly,” Herber says. The staff will make their recommendation to the city manager, who will announce the new name in April.

The name announcement may be an attention grabber, too. “I’ve kind of joked to a few people that we might invite Fred Durst or have a Fred Durst impersonator,” she says.

The department may genuinely roll the announcement into the premiere of its new reality series about four local families trying to reduce their waste, Goodman says. The show will air on the local government access channel and will be up on the city’s YouTube channel.

“Instead of doing a plain old marketing campaign where we placed ads, we sort of came up with this idea,” Herber says.