HMV: A Company Defeated by Social Media  

  COMPANY BASIC INFO

  Type                  Public limited company

  Industry             Retail

  Founded             London, United Kingdom (20 July 1921)

  Headquarters     Maidenhead, Berkshire, United Kingdom

  locations            273 stores across 8 countries 

  Area served       United Kingdom, Singapore and Hong Kong

“Oh My Goodness “was the first sentence that popped up into my mind on the time I finished reading the articles about the case of HMV. Frankly speaking, I have Never Ever thought the words on social media can actually turn a prestigious company into a notorious firm, even destroy it.  Based on the information offered by the readings this week, we can roughly outline the ups and downs of HMV Company.

First of all, all the negative contents posted by laid off employees on twitter absolutely ruined the reputation of HMV. Even though HMV has deleted all the negative posts and apologized within hours, the company has inevitably left the audiences a really bad brand image. Finally, the causes of the company’s failure can be listed in three main points, including the entry of the downloadable market, reluctance of changing HMV’s core strategy and strong wrong belief in customer’s existing behaviors.  Among those three reasons, I personally take “reluctance of changing HMV’s core strategy” as the main cause that incurred the end of HMV.

Unable to change the core Strategies

For a long time, HMV has positioned the company as a physical store that sold CDs instead of a pure music seller. Because of this reason, the company insistently followed their old pattern of tried and tested marketing. HMV neglected the changes of customer behavior and was too slow-paced in developing their on-line shopping tunnels for their consumers. Since the market customers was getting more used to doing everything through the Internet, the company was unable to compete with iTune and other digital on-line music shoppers, which ultimately made HMV become a loser in this market.  

Salvageable?

   

No, I don’t think that HMV will be able to revive because of some reasons. The first reason that the digital music market in modern world has become far more competitive than it was. E music is everywhere on the Internet.  (Not to mention the illegal download tunnels). To reposition the company would be a time-consuming and highly cost job, which is also extremely risky for HMV based on its current condition. Second, it has never been an easy task to twist the conceptions of the customer for a bad brand name. Again, this is totally related with time and money. Without a proper brand strategy, the brand name can even become worse.

GoDaddy CEO Shoots Elephant

Here is another case about the power of social media that I would like to share here.

In 2011, GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons has been criticized for posting a picture about his killing an elephant on twitter. Afterward, he even claimed that shooting the elephant was not a crime but a way to keep the balance for the animals. After this incident, Bob Parsons was forced to leave the company he created and was replaced by new CEO Warren Adelman. 

Below is the video about the news that can bring you further information.