Jasper Schrage
In 2019, you would expect that the idea of making an Asian model
try to eat Italian food using chopsticks, would never leave the boardroom. Well,
at Dolce & Gabbana they thought otherwise. They launched a video of a model
doing just that, to promote their Shanghai fashion show later that year. True,
it happened in 2018, but even back then, it was not a good idea either. And
that showed in the days after the release, when people and other companies
started boycotting D&G and eventually the show even got cancelled.
"Now say sorry"
In an interesting blog, my colleague Alexandra already analysed
how their response to this crisis was subpar to say the least. After screenshots
leaked out of an Instagram conversation with Stefano Gabbana (the G in D&G),
where he reacted very aggressively and even racist to the controversy, their
reaction was that his account was hacked. Not really the response you expect
after a crisis this big.
"And now you apologize to China"
As Alexandra pointed out, it took them 5 days to issue an apology
video, with Dolce and Gabbana apologizing for the campaign. It’s something, I
know, but it didn’t feel really sincere. To be honest, it felt more like two
boys who were forced to say sorry by their mother. This was partly because of
the total lack of emotion showing on their faces. What probably also had to do
with it not feeling sincere, is the long history Dolce and Gabbana has
(singular as in the brand) with racist and sexist controversies, a subject
Alexandra didn’t touch on yet.
Long list of Controversy (capital C intended)
If you find yourself thinking now: ‘hmm, I don’t know of any
other controversies involving D&G.’ Read up on it here, or just a quick
google search will enlighten you as well, they are not that hard to find.
Now you’re all up to speed, you probably see why the apology
didn’t really feel sincere. Controversy seems to be more on brand than
apologizing.
Of course all these mishaps will have an impact on the
reputation of your brand, which will not help you when you want to restore your
reputation. As we know from the Situational Crisis Response Theory (there it is
again!), the organizational reputation is impacted by the responsibility attributed
and the crisis history. The crisis history impacts the responsibility as well.
And as D&G has a new controversy almost every year, we can say a crisis
history is established and a bad reputation has been taken care of. Other research
has already shown that the responsibility really has an impact on the
reputation and that the link is not just theoretical.
Not a care in the world
But they apologized right? Why are we then still talking about
past actions then? It’s true, apologizing was the right way to go here, seeing
their bad reputation prior to the current crisis.
But in the words of academic A. Greyser: “The most important
actions, however, are those taken to build a “reputational reservoir” as a
strong foundation for corporate reputation.” And that’s where D&G went wrong.
There reservoir has been drained for a while, if there even was one to start
with.
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| Photo by @Diet_Prada |
There comes a moment when all the apologies are not very believable
anymore. And I think D&G has reached that moment. If you have controversies
surrounding your brand almost every year, maybe you just don’t care about
sensitive subjects at all. All the apologies in the world couldn’t change that.
About the author: Jasper Schrage currently is a
master student in Corporate Communication at the University of Amsterdam.
During his Communication Science bachelor at the same university he did an
internship at a PR firm where he developed his interests in this direction. Another
interest of his is crisis communication.
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