The Prita case changes everything, virtually

The Prita Mulyasari case contains valuable lessons for Indonesia’s marketers, especially the ones that hold the view that Indonesia is not yet ready for marketing efforts through social media or other online platforms.

Their arguments against taking online marketing efforts seriously are now classic: only 10 percent of Indonesia’s population have access to the Internet and with bandwidth being so slow, there is little point taking online efforts seriously.

In short, their view is that online activities will not be able to tap into the consumer’s psyche until some time in the indefinite but far future, when Indonesia’s population enjoys higher population, better lifestyles, acquires more modern habits of buying and selling and all together evolve into something altogether different from what they are.

This is a fallacy that was dismantled as the Prita case unfolded. Prita is, of course, the housewife and mother of two children who became a cause célèbre when she was imprisoned for three weeks for complaining about the services provided by Omni International Hospital.

When news of her imprisonment broke, journalists and, as importantly, bloggers and onliners – those who tweet, Facebook, plurk and engage in other social media – took up her cause.

The result is a virtual tsunami of popular opinion supporting Prita and against Omni. The Facebook Cause Page supporting Prita garnered over 250,000 members within a couple of days, posts and tweets venting their spleen against Omni proliferated in the Indonesian blogosphere and Twittersphere.

The effect of all this activity was a groundswell of popular opinion in cyberspace that spilled into the real world in the form of print, TV and radio reports. These in turn spurred politicians, officials and even the government to act, criticizing and chiding Omni. Within a week Omni and its directors had become virtual pariahs in Indonesia, leaving them vulnerable to further lawsuits (a patient is suing them for malpractice and guess who the public and judges would be more disposed to in the trial to come?)

The more important lessons for marketers that the Prita case contains is that consumers in Indonesia have shown that they can flex their muscles collectively, using the internet.

This is good news for brands that are ready to engage with stakeholders empowered by the Net to talk back and make their unhappiness known, but very bad news for brands and companies who are still mired in the mindset that their company is smarter or wiser than consumers, and therefore should be talking at them.

The problem in Indonesia is that there are so many companies – even multinational ones – who have such low standards of customer service that they are bound to harvest discontent once this happens. The problem is then compounded by a management in denial of the leveling effects of the Net.

One thing that all companies should do in the aftermath of the Prita Mulyasari case is to ask themselves whether the same thing can happen to them as to Omni if circumstances were similar.

If the answer is yes then they should be ready for a radical change in mindset about how their treat customers offline and how they treat these same customers with an ability to scale their complaints online. If the companies answer no, then they should probably study the survival behavior of ostriches for any clues to continued existence.

About Writer
Ong Hock Chuan
Founder of Maverick PR Consultant, Indonesia

Ong has been a journalist for 15 years before moving into PR. In Indonesia, he headed the Ogilvy PR team that won the PR Week award for Asia’s Consultancy of the Year 1999. He was Managing Director of Ogilvy PR in Singapore before founding Maverick in 2002.

Ong specializes in strategy, crisis and issues management and is an accomplished trainer in media handling and crisis management for top executives. He is a Nuffield Press Fellow at Cambridge University, a regular contributor in the opinion page of The Jakarta Post and a certified Associate Business Continuity Planner. He is also a member of AmCham, BritCham and an advisor to Yayasan Mitra Netra.

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     Comment By : Sammy on July 11th, 2009 on 9:03 pm

   I can not other than agree with what you say. In the rise of Digital era, Indonesia is in no way behind the other developed countries when internet is put into question. Time to change for companies with out-of-date mindset…