Roderick Low is a social media coach and trainer at Expeditus Media. He helps small and medium businesses make sense of the social web and equip them with the skills, tools and strategies necessary to reach out and connect to their target audience.
A blogger by the name of Kitchen Tigress (KT) wrote about an experience she had with OCBC bank, which serves as a perfect example to why marketers need to be honest, transparent and sincere in their engagement with customers.
According to the bank’s TV commercial (below), customers get a cake on their birthday as a way to show OCBC’s sincerity in serving them.
In KT’s (now famous) blog, she wrote about her visit to one of OCBC’s branches to ask for a birthday cake (It was her birthday, no doubt about that).
Well, instead of getting greeted with friendly smiles and a beautiful cake, she had to wait for ‘eternities’ before the branch manager got out of his office to ask his staff to get her a cake.
In her own words, she wrote: “After an eternity, the bank teller lady who went off to consult her supervisor emerged from the internal bowels of the bank.”
The conversation went like this:
“We don’t have any cake . . . It’s just an advertisement . . . “
The blogger responded, “If you don’t give customers birthday cakes, why do you advertise that you do?”
The bank teller then went back to her supervisor.
“Tick, tock, tick, tock . . . . After another eternity, she came back, this time with a bright yellow shopping bag.”
“Would you like the shopping bag instead?”
“That’s not a cake. NO CAKE! NO CANDLE! NO GOOD!”
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