Sounding Off: Damaging trust can take years to rebuild

Each Friday, PhocusWire dissects and debates an industry trend or new development covered on our site that week.

There is a famous incident from the U.K. in the early 1990s.

Jewelry retail impresario Gerald Ratner stood in front of a room of fellow business leaders and jokingly criticized his company's own products, saying they were cheap and of poor quality.

The speech triggered a collapse of the brand's value, which almost saw it go out of business completely and, unfortunately for Ratner, eventually gave creation to the term "Doing A Ratner" in the corporate world to describe a business suicide.

It's a useful story to regale in the context of the above commentary from Peter Matthews, written earlier this week on PhocusWire.

Ratners, as a brand, never truly recovered from the gaffe of its boss. And the same goes for the brands that have fallen prey to those hell-bent on causing mayhem with their hacking skills.

Marriott will survive (it's arguably too big, has worked overtime with its PR, etc.), as will many other travel brands that are impacted in such a way. But their reputations are perhaps somewhat tarnished.

Whether trust is eroded to the extent that customers think twice before booking a product, because they're worried that their data may be compromised, is difficult to determine in this initial, short-term period.

Affected brands and their CEO leaders have been extremely careful to say and do the right thing, in an attempt to reassure existing and future customers.

It's a similar situation as when travel brands have made a mess of other incidents, often not entirely of their own creation, such as delays or IT outages.

They walk a communications tightrope, where a loose word or two can trigger doubts in the minds of consumers that can last an age in business years.

The travel industry has perhaps never had one of its leaders truly "Doing A Ratner," but, with more tech-led issues to contend with as the digitalization of the industry continues, being careful with any language post-incident should be of paramount importance.