Take your pick. Whether you’re involved in the pet food poisoning incident or the offensive behavior and words of your top on-air personality, a crisis is a crisis … and you better be ready to deal with it.
Crises are not something corporate America embraces, of course. But neither should we run away from them.
No matter how good your product is, a poorly handled crisis can destroy it … and even your entire company. Even if the pet food contamination was caused by Chinese wheat gluten, most consumers will cast a wary eye for a long time to come toward Menu Foods and the many products they manufacture … products that were previously trusted.
And even if you don’t believe Don Imus is a racist, you have to know that his credibility (and that of your company if you employ him) is badly damaged. Whether or not the damage is permanent remains to be seen, but for now, Imus is not exactly on the preferred listening list of most people.
Ask Procter & Gamble, which cancelled its sponsorship of the Imus show, whether or not they want to be associated with him again. WFAN radio reports that Imus was responsible for $20 million in annual revenues. Now, that’s a crisis!
When a crisis happens, it happens. What’s important is how you handle the crisis and yourself. You can either react (and pray) or you can be ready with an already in-place solid plan that enables you to present your company in the best possible light and perhaps even save your brand.
Think of how much it cost to develop your brand. Is that not worth saving? The old idea of "just ignore it and it will become yesterday’s news" is the kind of head-in-the-sand thinking that leads companies down the road to disaster.
Just as every company needs a disaster recovery plan, so do all need a crisis communication plan … before a crisis hits. The money spent now can save you lots of money and even your good name down the road.
The majority of the companies in the World Trade Center on 9/11 in 2001 did not have crisis plans in place. However, a crisis need not be of the magnitude of the 9/11 disaster to have catastrophic consequences on a company … a law suit that draws bad publicity day after day … a storm that knocks out power to your shop and limits your ability to meet customer orders … an accidental discharge of industrial chemicals into a nearby creek … an unfounded claim by a disgruntled former employee that finds its way into the press.
A crisis can even be your inability to deal with a media surge if something good and unexpected happens to your company.
When I spent three-plus years as the crisis communications chairman of a national trade association in Washington, D.C., we dealt with the early days of the AIDS crisis. We did what is always the best thing to do in a crisis – we tackled it head on. We told the truth about the situation. We explained it in layman’s terms. We talked what we were doing to protect safety. And we went through much, much less bad publicity than another national organization, which chose to be defensive, rather than helpful.
Steve Gardner is a public relations account executive at Johnson Direct LLC in Brookfield. Additional information is available at http://johnsondirect.wordpress.com.
