Let their facilities deteriorate, force their technological equipment to the maximum, allow the uniform to be used indiscriminately, lower the salary of employees, which results in general dissatisfaction and terrible customer service. These and other actions of self-deterioration are usually found in companies and cooperatives as adjustment measures resulting from financial crises, unconsolidated mergers, among others.
Such is the case of a photographic services company in Guatemala and of great renown in the last decade of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st. They provided excellent service: fast, efficient, with optimal quality in paper and prints, generating emotion that resulted in effective marketing and positioning in the market.
These types of companies, as well as many others in other countries, were hit with the rise of new technologies, in this case not the famous ICT but with the increase of new and better technological devices that reduced the need for paper photography, products for development, etc., thus transforming the concept of digitization of technology.
They were not prepared for this scenario and they still are. They did not expect their product / service to stop “needing” and instead of adapting and reinventing themselves, what they did was to contract and let go of the social and corporate capital they had earned with a good corporate image.
This contraction took the form of reducing the number of stores, employees, raw materials and product diversification. This is what the administrative theory indicated to them and they fully complied.
But no, the SELF-DETERIORATION didn't stop there. If you visit their facilities 15 years after this debacle, you may find:
1. Dissatisfied employees with the worst customer service
2. Facilities with obvious deterioration
3. Poor quality products and poor delivery time
4. Photographic services minimums that are not adapted to the technological context
5. Inefficient sales capacity of the few products and services
What to do in terms of Public Image with a company that decided to contract but at the same time ultimately attack its Corporate Image? Can it be recovered? Are you interested in repositioning your image you have ever achieved? Or is it doomed to extinction?
Definitely, the institutional essence of said company never existed or deteriorated to the point of its agony. Without this first point, which is the basis of the Public Image, it will have to proceed to a basic redefinition of its strategic planning that once again lays down the institutional bases on which the new image idea will be generated, of course, after an image audit that determine to what extent the initial image deteriorated as a basis for the projection of its Corporate Image contextualized to these times that we live in.
But ultimately, having gone through a crisis, a corporate contraction, a labor conflict, a media crisis, the only thing that a company should not allow to lose is its public image; Everything can be lost, except its name, its brand, its prestige as this will constitute the starting point for the resuscitation of the company in the future (when other conditions exist) in the imaginary of the market where it operates.
