A disclaimer upfront: in no way do we at BrandHook advocate or endorse the principles and premise of the Ashley Madison website. So in light of the recent hack of the website, writing about it, in our professional opinion, doesn’t actually count as promotion for the ill fated website. The brand, the communications and advertising in our opinion are abhorrent. For those not in the know, Ashley Madison positions itself as a dating website for those already in a relationship, looking for ‘discrete’ encounters. The ‘discrete’ nature of the proposition has been severely compromised by the pseudonymous attacker, The Impact Team, who have stolen the Ashley Madison’s customer database.

So why is this important from a BrandHook blog perspective?

When you have a brand, despite the questionability of the values, you need to deliver on them. When anonymity is part of the proposition, you want to be 110% certain you adhere to it – and for the 37 million users, this has been bought into question. As a brand, you need to ensure that everything you do, communicate and deliver as part of the customer experience is based around your brand values. You need to be prepared for the fact that everything moves so quickly now and you need to be prepared for the unexpected.

We’ve spoken for many years about the fact that the Marketing Managers and teams no longer own the brand, instead it is now the consumer that owns the brand (although on this occasion, it’s literally the hackers). Part of BrandHook’s new #closingthegap podcast series talks about the control the consumer has – not only can consumers research, compare and buy your product/service at any time, they also define the expectations and experience they want. They can also turn on you very quickly…

The marketplace is changing – look at groceries, where the rise of the “top up shop” and the “savvy shopper” has quickly replaced the traditional and long standing fortnightly shop at Coles or Woolworths. Look at the alcohol sector where the era of large market share for the big brands is long gone. Check your LinkedIn feed where multiple business connections post the same image of AirBnB, Facebook and Uber – all brands that don’t actually physically own their respective ‘assets’. Technology is enabling this (as one of our clients recently presented) technology has never moved faster than it is now, and will never ever again, be this slow.

What happens next will be interesting as it’s hard for brands to recover from incidents that have compromised their brand promise. For every Burberry that recovers from the ‘chav’ tag, there’s a Malaysian Airlines or a Tiger Woods waiting to unfold. There has been a quick response from the website but the impact to the brand, we feel (and hope) will be long lasting and more immediate. It is the nature of brands in today’s marketplace – it might take awhile to build them, but it’s very, very easy to lose them. And when what is core to the brand disappears, you’re left with nothing but a website rather than a living, breathing brand.

The tagline for Ashley Madison is “Life is short. Have an affair”. We agree that life is short – and believe it could indeed be very short for this brand. We hope your promiscuous customers leave this relationship as they have so often done in the past.