How to survive a brand in crisis

If your brand is in crisis, complacency will kill you, according to Samantha Allen, New York-based managing director of Ogilvy Public Relations Global Consumer Marketing Practice.

Speaking at the Public Relations Institute of Australia (PRIA)’s Women in PR Forum on March 1, Allen drew case studies from BP, Toyota and Charlie Sheen as examples of ‘Brands that kick the hornet’s nest…and thrived, survived or nearly died in 2010’.

Last year, brands, clients and the general global environment has been crisis rich with BP’s gulf oil spill, the Toyota Prius recall, the European economic crisis the Haiti earthquake, floods, snow and volcanoes.

Worldwide economic losses from natural catastrophes and man-made disasters added up to $222bn last year and the number of deaths due to catastrophe – man-made or natural – reached over 250,000 in 2010, the highest figure for the past 30 years.

Two thirds of the 25 most expensive disasters in the past 40 years have taken place in the past decade, but Allen believes as PR practitioners, we can learn from such terrible journeys that brands and countries have been on to ensure our clients don’t suffer the same traumas.

She enthuses: “We see newspapers, bloggers and a variety of commentators talk about the way many of these crisis struck brands handled their communications. All brands receive criticism when they handle a crisis – it’s the nature of our world.”

As part of crisis management, she says, there is no perfect path and every crisis needs to be handled differently.

Toyota suffered a constant a barrage of criticism in 2010 as its PR was not seen to respond quickly enough or openly enough.

But Allen warns: “If a brand responds too quickly it can risk jumping the gun and not having all the facts. On the other hand, if it responds too slowly, it’ll be attacked for not having all the facts fast enough.”

Furthermore, in today’s media environment, there’s also the role of parody to contend with.

Allen explains: “Parody plays an enormous role in taking the most extreme elements of a crisis and taking it to absurd lengths. It’s these images that are remembered so as communications advisors, we need to be ready to see extremes and approach that by asking how the media and commentators are going to see our brands before they actually do.”

And there is some good news. Companies that take responsibility in a crisis can outperform those that blame someone else when it comes to trust.

Allen explains: “In a crisis, a client’s worse enemy is self absorption. The best way to deal with a crisis is to continue to communicate how the customer will come first.”

Consumer perception can become stronger after a crisis as it can show consumers the real you and transparency is a great place to start when building trust.

Allen concludes: “When it comes to bad news, the more indirect it is, the more likely it is it could have a positive effect.

“We may not remember the context in which we heard something, we just know it is familiar and we feel close to that brand.”

Melinda Varley (Ogilvypr Australia)

LEARNING from GREAT EXPERIENCES

1. How wonderful it is that nobody needs wait a single minute before starting to improve the world. (Anna Frank)

2. To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart. (Donald Laird)

3. Any change, any loss, does not make us victims. Others can shake you, surprise you, disappoint you, but they cannot prevent you from acting, from taking the situation you are presented with and moving on. No matter where you are in life, no matter what your situation, you can always do something. You always have a choice and the choice can be power. (Blaine Lee The Power Principle)

4. There's always the motivation of wanting to win. Everybody has that. But a champion needs, in his attitude, a motivation above and beyond winning. (Pat Riley)

5. You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along... You must do the thing you think you cannot do. (Eleanor Roosevelt)

6. You make the world a better place by making yourself a better person. (Scott Sorrell)

7. Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and you only can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you. (Carl Sandburg)

8. Everyone has a purpose in life. Perhaps yours is watching television.

9. Difficulties should act as a tonic. They should spur us to greater exertion. (B.C. Forbes)

10. If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability. (Henry Ford)

What is ADVERTISING?

Put simply, advertising is any paid message by an identified sponsor, designed to promote ideas, goods or services for exchange.

Most definitions of advertising seem to have five basic components:

* Advertising is a paid form of communication, whether directly or indirectly. Indirect payment would include pro-bono advertising which uses donated space and time.

* The sponsor, meaning the marketer or advertiser, is identified. However, this is changing with new forms and uses of advertising.

* Most advertising tries to persuade or influence the consumer to do something. At a minimum, the point of the message is to inform consumers and make them aware of the product of company. Mostly, it involves positioning a product, service, idea or organisation in the consumer's mind such that it creates or builds a brand relationship. In other words, it is strategic communication driven by objectives and these objectives can be measured to determine whether the advertising was effective.

* Advertising aims to reach the largest possible audience as cost-efficiently as possible that is, in the place or at the time most likely to induce a positive result.

* The message can be conveyed through many different kinds of mass media, which are largely non-personal. This implies that advertising is not directed to a specific person, although this is changing with the introduction of the Internet and interactive media.

A modern definition, then, might be: Advertising  is any form of predetermined, paid communication that uses the media - including forms of interactive communication - to reach audiences in the most cost-efficient way, so as to achieve a marketer's objectives.

(Quoted from Ruth Spence-Stone's book Advertising: Principles & Practice)