Spotify’s learnings

Over the past few months, Spotify demonstrated their need for a Chief Communications Officer or at least  a proper PR manager within the dominant coalition. I shall illustrate their lack of knowhow about strategic communication with one case and illustrate their learnings with another one.  

Logo

On the 15^th of June, Spotify changed the color of its logo and had no idea of how much the recoloring would do to its users. Users were not fond of the new color, couldn’t appreciate the change without notice and in some cases thought that their phone was broken. According to Spotify’s chief designer, Tobias Schneider, the new color is part of a freshening of Spotify, to present itself less like a technology brand and more like a music brand. Surprisingly enough, the new color was known for months within the organization. You’d think this would lead to a more strategical approach of the communications around the change, but the opposite seems to have been the case. In hindsight, Schneider acknowledged that the absence of a notification prior to the change caused the fuss among users. In my opinion, Spotify lacked peering the recoloring with their external stakeholders and focused only on their internal stakeholders.

User agreements

On the 21^st of August, Spotify got hit by another  shit storm of negativity after announcing the new user agreements. The NOS stated that a lot of people think the new agreements will violate their privacy and Telegraaf said Spotify was scrabbling to data. Basically, Spotify wanted access to users’ personal photo’s, video’s, locations and sensors. To me it seems that Spotify’s CEO (Daniel Ek) got word of Coombs (2007) situational crisis communication theory and applied it. On the 24^th of August, Ek apologized deeply for the new and heavily criticized user agreements. In order to temper the public outrage, Ek offered his apologies on Twitter and through a blogpost.  A Few days after the apology, Spotify altered its privacy policy by adding additional information in an attempt to clarify the seemingly extreme policy.  By adding a new introduction, Spotify sets out clearly what data they collect and why.

Learnings?

For now the storm of protest has flowed away, but the question remains whether Spotify could have prevented these communication failures in the first place.  The way I see it Spotify could and should have prevented the second crisis by anticipating on the content of the privacy policy. If you’ve seen that a relatively small change of the logo produced such a big fuss, it is – in my opinion – incomprehensible that an organization presents  a hypersensitive privacy policy with such ambiguity.

Florian ter Voert