BRIAN KENNY: Welcome to Cold Call, the podcast where we dive deep into the stories behind groundbreaking Harvard Business School case studies. What do United Airlines, Bud Light, Target, and Dove have in common? They all share the jarring experience of watching their brand reputation and share value spiral due to viral social media. In an era where billions of people engage across multiple platforms, online conversations shape trust, reputation, and ultimately business performance. Today’s case looks at how brands operate at the intersection of AI-powered automation and human judgment, navigating viral controversies, customer engagement, and the delicate balance between free expression and brand protection. The case highlights the dilemma around how much to moderate and how brands should respond in moments of crisis.
Today on Cold Call, we welcome Professor Julian De Freitas, along with case protagonists Jenny Wolfram and Vesa Rikkinen, to discuss the case “BrandBastion: Managing Online Brand Communities.”
I’m your host Brian Kenny, and you’re listening to Cold Call on the HBR podcast network.
Julian De Freitas’ research looks at how customers interact with AI, how firms can create value and assess risks associated with AI. Jenny Wolfram and Vesa Rikkinen are the co-founders of BrandBastion and the central figures in today’s case. Welcome, everybody.
JULIAN DE FREITAS: Great to be here.
BRIAN KENNY: It’s great to have you in the studio. You’re here today because you just discussed this in class. Julian, is that right?
JULIAN DE FREITAS: Yep. Right out of class, straight here. So, you’re going to get the energy from the class.
BRIAN KENNY: I have to ask you, the two of you, how did it feel listening to the students talk about decisions that you’ve made and things that you’ve done?
JENNY WOLFRAM: It was incredibly interesting and very exciting as well. And we actually learned a lot. We took a lot of notes.
BRIAN KENNY: We love having a protagonist on the show, and I know our students love when protagonists visit the classroom because it really brings things to life in a completely different way. So, thanks for being here, and thanks for writing the case and coming in to talk about it.
BRIAN KENNY: Now, as a brand manager myself, I manage, I think, one of the best brands in the world. I think a lot about our reputation, and we very carefully think about what we do before we post things online and before we step out onto those social media platforms. So, I read this with great interest, a little fear, a little trepidation. But I think people here will be able to really relate to what you’re doing because we all use social media, and we’ve all seen brands suffer the consequences of missteps online. It’s just such a big part of what we do these days.
So, why don’t we get started. Julian, I’m going to ask you to start, and I guess if you could tell us why you wanted to write the case about BrandBastion and what broader lessons you hope to draw out in the discussion. And then importantly, how did you start the class today? What was your cold call?
JULIAN DE FREITAS: So, I wrote the case because I think all brands realize that they need to have some kind of social media presence, especially in today’s world. But especially as they try to scale the brand, they run into new challenges. All the negative comments that their brand attracts. Also, as they grow their customer base, and there’s a higher volume of comments, as they are expected to be present on so many additional social media platforms. And as they become global brands that have comments coming in 24/7, how do you scale that engagement? How do you continue to have this conversation with your customer?
So, BrandBastion to me is the perfect candidate to bring this issue into the classroom. Every day they work at the intersection of branding, social media, and AI. So, in terms of how we kick this off, one of the decisions in the case is that there’s a brand, a personal growth company, that’s been using BrandBastion for three months now. They have three months’ worth of data provided to them via the BrandBastion platform. And Jenny Wolfram has to meet with the executives and make a case for why BrandBastion is worth the investment and why they should keep using it. So, the question is, You’re Wolfram. What do you tell the executives of the personal growth company about why this solution is worth the investment?
BRIAN KENNY: And we’re going to dig into that one a little bit. I have a specific question for you, Jenny, about that. But before we go there, can you just tell us a little bit about … This was, like, a career change for you. When you made the decision to do this, what did you see that prompted you to think this would be a good idea and a business that could grow?
JENNY WOLFRAM: Well, already back in 2013 when I started BrandBastion, we were seeing that there was being a huge shift happening in the world of marketing where a lot of ad budgets were shifting from TV, from print, from billboards onto social media. And at the very essence of that is the social nature of social media. So, I was seeing that there’s a lot of ad spend shifting. There’s also a lot more user generated content coming out every single day, year over year. So, the sheer volume of users talking across brand assets and the sheer amount of money that is being put into those brand assets, I realized that there’s something here that technology could really beautifully potentially solve.
And back at that time, I was a lawyer, and I was involved in a case where a pharmaceutical company was getting sued because of harmful comments that had been posted on their Facebook. And I was thinking that 24/7 nature of social media, this whole global world that is everyone’s getting connected, what can brands actually do to be aware of what’s happening and to also protect themselves? And I was then looking into options. Mostly there were PR agencies, marketing agencies, that would manually be able to offer some monitoring; or then there were some tech solutions, but nothing that was really customized. And that’s where I saw the opportunity and that’s where really BrandBastion stepped in.
BRIAN KENNY: Vesa, let me turn to you for a second. If we think about this from a financial perspective, BrandBastion is a little bit of a hybrid play. It’s not one of these pure Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools where people are using the software on their own to do this. It’s not a high-touch in-person intervention tool. You guys sit somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. Can you talk a little bit about why this gives you an advantage and how this works?
VESA RIKKINEN: Yeah. Of course. So, compared to some of the SaaS tools, pure SaaS tools, they’re of course more cost-efficient, but they are very hands off. And the trade for the brand in those cases is that you often need a huge in-house team to work on those tools and that can end up getting a little bit expensive at times. On the other hand, the agencies, they of course provide the people to work on the assets, but they can get expensive, and they are not that scalable at the same time. Now our solution where the cutting-edge AI that we’ve developed for 10 years already, it can scale with the engagement that the brand gets while keeping the cost efficiency down on closer to SaaS tool level.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. Jenny, how does it actually work for your clients? I’m wondering how BrandBastion executes on the mission that they have. I guess the question would be, there’s a lot of judgment involved here about whether something is harmful content or whether it’s a legitimate critique. How do you think about that?
JENNY WOLFRAM: So, a lot of the work we do upfront when a brand becomes a customer is really figure out, what’s their brand voice, who’s their audience, who do they want to have in their community? What do they want to protect their community from? And then a big part of the configuration of the whole system is to figure out these kinds of things. And then on social media, of course, context is everything. So, a key part of what our solution is able to do is look at the post, it looks at the context, it looks at the commentary, it looks at real-world events. And that way it takes all of that into account when making decisions. But it all is really derived from the brand itself where they decide what kind of content they are comfortable with and what they want to encourage.
BRIAN KENNY: And we were talking actually before we started to record here about AI and the impact of AI. It’s having impact on absolutely everything. But Julian, I’ll turn to you for a second because the case does talk about the mix of AI automation and human moderation that BrandBastion uses when they do this work. How do you think this reflects the broader themes around the limits of technology and managing trust and authenticity? Because we know that trust and authenticity are critically important for brand success.
JULIAN DE FREITAS: So, a large part of the discussion we’re having in class is whether brands are being more authentic or less authentic by using these types of tools. And as you might imagine, there’s one argument that says, well, if I’m engaging with a bot, and I don’t know it, that feels less authentic. But there is another view, which is that if the brand has certain promises that it makes to consumers, and if it’s guaranteeing a certain level of customer experience, and it’s able to deliver on that better by using these kinds of tools, which might be providing additional insights and then augmenting the brand’s capabilities, and in some ways it’s being more authentic to that promise than it could have been in the past. So, in some ways it depends on the definition that you have of authenticity. So, that’s one thought.
I think another one is in the class discussion we think about where is AI going to be best because of its strengths, and where are humans going to be best? And some of the examples concretely of how BrandBastion delivers its solution really show us those limits. So, as one example, one of the new offerings that they provide is something called “outbound engagement,” where they’re not just protecting on the owned assets, how the brand shows up, but they’re also now searching for new trends beyond the owned assets that might be relevant to their target customer base. And then finding ways to, in a culturally savvy way, insert the brand into that conversation. And this is something that is still mostly led by the customer success managers, who are of course humans at BrandBastion. And it points to what’s the frontier, and what is it about this task of being maybe culturally savvy, maybe spotting new trends that is still hard for AI? And then what does that mean in terms of how we divvy up the duties? Where do we want to play to AI strengths? Where do we want to play to human strengths?
BRIAN KENNY: Vesa, how do you think about that from a business model perspective? I would imagine that it’s certainly much more cost-effective to have the AI moderation much more so than the human intervention. But how does that parse out for your clients?
VESA RIKKINEN: So, automation is really in the center of our unit economics. Using AI that way, we can process millions of comments, messages, without the cost to us or our clients ballooning out of control—while we can still keep the people in the focus of the edge cases that need that human judgment. For example, last year on Black Friday, we saw one of our retail clients get millions of comments in under 48 hours. With the people approach, it would be impossible to even tackle that kind of a scale, or at least not tackle it profitably for anyone. But our AI was able to handle the scale without any delays. And that is the key that allows us to serve the Fortune 1,000 brands at scale.
BRIAN KENNY: What’s the tipping point where you move from the AI intervention to the human intervention? Is there some sort of a red flag that goes up where you say, Oh, we got to kick it over to the human intervention now?
VESA RIKKINEN: Well, that’s really about the type of engagement. There are some very cutting edge or some very nuanced type of engagement that AI can’t yet handle that well. When the AI is a little bit uncertain on something, then it gets pushed into the human process.
BRIAN KENNY: Jenny, let’s go back to the CFO question, because as a marketer, I always have to make the case with my CFO about why we should or shouldn’t invest in something, and they’re always looking for the tangible results. How do you make that case with a CFO?
JENNY WOLFRAM: This is something we talked about today in the lecture to quite some degree because all marketers know, of course, that having a community on social media is better than not having one. And also, that having a positive engagement is great, and not having a PR crisis is also good. But putting numbers attached to these social media metrics, it’s really complex and hard to do.
So, something that we tend to do when approaching this is thinking about, how can we decrease costs for our clients, and how can we increase their revenue? And in terms of increasing the revenue, if a company is investing a lot in social media advertising, we’ve done a lot of A-B testing, and we’ve come to see that especially if a company is in an area where there is a lot of questions or there might be some skepticism, then responding very quickly to any comments showing purchase intent, it can really improve the return on ad spend. So, there are certain metrics, especially in performance marketing, that we can point to that are showing how beneficial it is managing social media. And then on the cost-savings angle there, we usually look at what … If we think about what Vesa was mentioning with Black Friday, Cyber Monday, these kinds of surges are super common on social media. So, for someone to be able to staff actual in-house people, to be able to manage them, comes at a really high cost, and it’s very hard to navigate. So, there we often talk about the savings by using a technology like ours. But there’s still a lot of areas where I think some of the research that Julian is doing will be very impactful, and that is really tying more of those broader social themes to actual ROI.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. Julian, how are you looking at this? Because the case does talk about the importance of trust versus community. I thought that was very compelling what Jenny just said, but I’m not a CFO. So, as you look at this more broadly, not just in the social media realm, but in the technology realm in general, what are you looking at?
JULIAN DE FREITAS: Firstly, thanks to Jenny’s collaboration, we’ve been able to analyze some of the data from these campaigns that she mentioned and document that for the academic community and then run follow-up studies on that. So, that’s also moving that field forward. But this is a very cutting-edge area. I think people look at notions of brand trust and community as being a little bit fluffy. They have this—
BRIAN KENNY: CFOs do for sure. I know that.
JULIAN DE FREITAS: Yeah. They think that social media is all vanity metrics. And I think one of the concrete things we do in class is point out that that’s not a problem with social media per se, but it’s a matter of what you do with those data. So, a large part of BrandBastion’s solution is all about tagging the comments so that you have meaningful categories that you can then use to quantify whether you think this is working. And in particular, in the case of community, what we know from the research is that community adds a lot of social value. So, I can also influence the purchasing of others. I can tag them, which lowers how much the brand has to spend to acquire them. And by virtue of being connected to me in the community, you might actually stay longer as a customer. And so, there’s one more reason for you not to leave.
JULIAN DE FREITAS: And so, we talk about, what are some of the specific tags that you would use to actually quantify that idea of social value? And then we do a similar exercise for something like brand trust. How do you really boil down whether these members have high brand trust? So, there are tags like fan community, where people are talking in a positive way about the brand. There are people promoting the brand, this sort of thing. And so, it allows us to take this almost evanescent concept and boil it down to a few key tags and then get really concrete and nitty-gritty about how would you define that and make it happen.
BRIAN KENNY: It’s always been challenging to measure brand perception, but this is one of the things that brand managers have to do and understand because you want to know what people think about your brand. So, some of the things you’re talking about make more sense than some of the tools that I think have been available to us before, which is great.
Jenny, I’ll come back to you. The case talks about a specific incident where a healthcare app was accused of exploiting a tragedy. Maybe you can give us a little context for that and then talk about, how do you advise a client in a situation like that? How should they be thinking about sensitivity and transparency when they’ve also got a business to run and they’re trying to meet their business objectives?
JENNY WOLFRAM: Something we often see on social media is that things can start from something small, like one influencer making a statement or one comment, and then it can very, very quickly snowball. And the first thing that is really important is just really active, granular listening to really know what are people actually saying in addition to knowing that there’s, for example, a spike in negative sentiment. What are the topics that are being discussed? Who is discussing it? Is it isolated to a specific campaign or a post, or is it across the board? So, really gathering as much information as possible is always important on social media in general.
And then something that a lot of our clients tend to do is to really go back to their brand values when they’re thinking about, should they make a statement, or should they get involved? And really thinking about what they’re looking to do. In this specific case, the health app for them, it’s really important to protect their community. So, the decisions they decided to take, they were really driven from that as the core value.
And then in general, what we see is that often being silent about something can be harmful on social media just because it’s perceived by people as perhaps the brand either not caring or the brand not actually having a relationship with its audience. So we do often encourage brands to take action when they can, and that could look like, for example, curating the conversation to protect their community, or it could look like deploying a big one-on-one response strategy where they’re actually interacting with every person who’s spreading false information or every person who has an opinion in a very authentic and nice way. So, it really depends a lot on the situation.
BRIAN KENNY: Julian, what are you seeing as you look more broadly across sectors and industries about how brands think about should we respond, should we shut down comments? That’s something we have conversations about a lot because comments can be super harmful, but if you do that, then you’re not being authentic, and you’re not allowing a conversation to play out. It’s a really difficult thing to deal with.
JULIAN DE FREITAS: It is difficult, especially because companies want to protect their hard-won brand equity. They want to maintain control. And the challenge is that when you move on to social media, people are not necessarily there to interact with brands. They’re there to interact with each other. And so, what you often see is that there’s this trade-off between how much control the company has and how much people are going to then resonate with the brand community. And what the literature suggests is that the communities where people are really posting and engaging with each other, not just with the brand, are the ones where brands are playing more of a facilitator role. So, they’re helping you connect with others. They’re giving you the sense that you own the community. And if they’re talking at all, they do it in a way that is mindful of the community norms. They’ve earned citizen status. And so I think what’s interesting about how automation is affecting this is that in some ways now brands have more control than maybe they’ve ever had before, where they can at least keep out some of the really pernicious types of comments, give people a sense that this is still a space for your community, but at the same time, protect that hard-won brand equity.
BRIAN KENNY: And having those community norms is really important, I think, right? You’ve got to make it clear what the norms are and what it means to overstep those norms and what the consequences are of that. So, that’s up to the brand to do that.
Vesa, I’ve been talking about CFOs as if I didn’t have one in the room, but I do, and that would be you. So, let me turn to you and ask, in the case, you draw some parallels to financial rumors sinking banks. I’m wondering from your vantage point, how do you think about the cost of saying nothing, like we were just talking about, versus the risks of engaging?
VESA RIKKINEN: Well, in finance, of course rumors spreading; and if you say nothing, panic often takes over, and you end up with the bank run. Not a great situation. Brands really the way we see it face the exact same dilemma in social media. And silence often breeds mistrust and escalates that negativity and panic. Of course, there is a risk in engaging with something. You might accidentally give validation there. But the upside of being proactive and responding early enough almost always outweighs the risks. And engaging early protects both your reputation as a brand, but also their long-term value in the end.
BRIAN KENNY: And risk management is something every brand thinks a lot about, and I think it’s probably the cause of, frankly, a lot of tension in the C-suite about how you deal with these kinds of incidents when they happen.
This has been a really fun conversation. I knew it would be. We’re coming close to the end of our time, so I have one question left for each of you, and I’m going to give Julian the final word because he’s the professor, and that’s how we roll at Harvard Business School.
So, Jenny, let me start with you. We were talking earlier about AI and how it’s impacting so many different things. I’m wondering, as you look at the evolution of AI and the social platforms that we’re all engaging on, what do you see as the biggest risks and opportunities for BrandBastion in the next several years? And how would you advise your clients to think about where to invest going forward?
JENNY WOLFRAM: Already 10 years ago, we started with BrandBastion using natural language processing and categorizing data. And now of course, things in the AI space have … Every single day there’s new updates. So, one of the big opportunities is, of course, from our perspective, that brands more and more are embracing AI, and they’re excited about AI, which is great. We’re also seeing that trust and credibility, they’re more important than ever. We were just earlier talking about the new deep fake videos and the amount of content being created. So, trust is hard-earned for brands, and it’s going to be even faster to lose than it has been so far. So, there’s a big opportunity there for companies like BrandBastion to help brands in that area. I think a big risk is, of course, for any company or any person is not staying agile and not being able to continuously innovate and utilize AI in the best way. So, that’s something that we’re focusing a lot on at BrandBastion, really focusing on the R&D, really focusing on implementing the new things that are possible. So, I think lots of opportunities definitely for everyone, but also some risks for sure.
BRIAN KENNY: And a lot of that innovation R&D falls on your plate, Vesa. How do you think about where you need to be investing for the future, where you see challenges? There’s always an opportunity, right? That’s the flip side of a challenge, but it’s got to be done in a strategic way. So, as you look ahead the next five years, where are you thinking you’re going to need to invest to be able to continue to serve your clients in the right way, but also to have some distinctiveness in the marketplace?
VESA RIKKINEN: Well, we’ve always invested a significant portion of our cash flows into R&D, and we are in a very rapidly evolving environment, so it’s a must to have a sustainable company in our space. We will keep investing and growing our know-how on technology as well as the new ways of AI helping into the future. And we believe that it really gives us longevity as a company.
BRIAN KENNY: Again, from my brand management role, it’s almost daunting to think about how quickly these things change. When I started at Harvard Business School, Facebook had just launched. That’s how long … I’ve been around for a long time here at HBS. Facebook had just launched; I think Twitter launched to the year that I started here. So, none of these tools existed, and the ability for people to become either advocates or detractors from your brand didn’t exist in the way that it does today where everybody has a bullhorn. So, I think brand managers are always trying to keep abreast of what’s happening, and it almost seems like it’s impossible to do. Julian, I’ll give you the last word here. I’m wondering, as you look ahead and you think about the BrandBastion case, but also the evolving role of AI and how it’s shaping online discourse, how would you advise people who are listening to think about corporate responsibility in this really uncertain realm?
JULIAN DE FREITAS: So, firstly, I think what’s fascinating about BrandBastion is that maybe more than I’ve ever seen in another case study, here we see that AI is not just being used at the back end for operational efficiencies but it’s really influencing how the brand shows up and even how the discourse of the brand community evolves. And the brand even has the opportunity to influence the culture of that community from an early stage. I think that in terms of responsibilities that brands have, I think that in some ways, thanks to these tools, they’re more equipped than ever to really enact their marketing strategy, to really allow their values to show in the community and feed those positive impressions of the brand that they would like to see. At the same time, I think this technology, with great power, raises new questions about what the bounds of corporate control should be, including whether we should allow companies to control the discourse that happens on social media more broadly. It’s not a question we’re going to solve here, but it’s certainly one that I think also is made salient by this.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. That’ll take another whole case. You’re going to have to write another case on that last piece.
JULIAN DE FREITAS: It’s just my roundabout way of finding my way back here.
BRIAN KENNY: We would love to have you back. Jenny, Vesa, Julian thank you so much for joining me on Cold Call.
BRIAN KENNY: If you enjoy Cold Call, you might like our other podcasts: Climate Rising, Coaching Real Leaders, IdeaCast, Managing the Future of Work, Skydeck, and Think Big, Buy Small. Find them wherever you get your podcasts.
If you have any suggestions or just want to say hello, we want to hear from you. Email us at [email protected]. Thanks again for joining us. I’m your host Brian Kenny, and you’ve been listening to Cold Call, an official podcast of Harvard Business School and part of the HBR Podcast Network.
