My neighbor just moved in across the street. When we saw him last night, I asked a simple question, "Did you get your rental truck returned okay?" I then got an earful about how horrible his experience was with U-haul, and he will never rent from them again, and he should have known better, as he'd had problems in the past.
In less than a minute, I got a powerful negative brand impression that will be hard to shake. Companies really need to be paying attention to every aspect of their customer experience, because once those negative impressions are out in the marketplace, it's almost impossible to overcome them. And people love to repeat their negative experiences.
