Is there Golden Rule for crisis management?

(This is Chanchan Zhang publishing blogs via Nika's account. Thanks Nika~)

As a PRP (PR Professional), what actions would you take when the organization you worked for is involved in a crisis? Either the organization seem to be innocent – in which case the situation was viewed as unintentional or accidental, or your organization should be fully responsible for the scandal – such as it has committed illegal activity. Should you apologize immediately? Or trying to shift the public focus by blaming other parties? And, of course you can ignore the negative information and pray for its disappearing in the crowded online buzz. But when it comes to practice, what are the most effective and efficient methods? Is there Golden rule for crisis communication?

What did scholars say?

Crisis communication has long been an interest for PR scholars, Benoit came up with Image Restoration Theory (IRT) decades ago. According to IRT, there are 14 specific message strategies fall within five broad categories -- Denial, Evading of responsibility, Reducing the offensiveness, Corrective action, and Mortification, with which an organization could employ during crisis communication.

Too complicated? Let’s see what PRPs recommended.

Which of them were considered to be the most effective and preferred methods to impair the damaged organizational image? In a survey conducted among PRPs who are members of Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), the respondents were asked to evaluate those strategies under three situationally distinct organizational crises – unintentional accident (mild reputational threat), illegal activity (moderate reputational threat), and product safety (severe reputational threat) – this classification was drawn from Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT; Coombs, 2007) , according to which the damage level was evaluated by how publics attributed the crisis to the organization.

  

Interestingly, the respondents’ preference on crisis communication strategy seemed not to dependent on the crisis scenarios but to be consistent with their evaluation on the strategy itself. When dealing with crisis, Corrective Action, Compensation, Mortification and Bolstering were always the “best choice” for PR professionals. And you better keep in mind that Denial was perceived to be the least effective crisis response and the least likely to be recommended, followed by Silence, Blame shifting, and Provocation.

A typical case featured with top ranking strategies                              

A supermarket employee pulls King Car Industrial Co products from shelves

Source: Taipei Times

In 2008, right after the scandal of using nondairy ingredient melamine outbreak in China, King Car Food Industrial Company of Taiwan had begun tests of its products and found the nondairy creamer to be contaminated. On the press con followed by, King Car vice manager Lee Yu-ting bowed in a show of apology to consumers.

King Car immediately recalled all 120,000 cases of the contaminated products. Consumers who have bought the contaminated King Car products can receive a full refund through the King Car Web site unconditionally.

In this case, King Car was an “victim” in a way, as it had no knowledge about the melamine when purchasing them from vendors. However, it still took full efforts to repair its reputation by employing all top-ranking strategies of crisis management.

Here’s what you shouldn’t follow suit:

Response crews battle flames on the Deepwater Horizon, off Louisiana

Source: REUTERS

In 2010, BP has officially taken responsibility for the accident which caused by its drilling rig that blew up and created a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico – BP knew that denial would be foolish. But obviously BP didn’t take itself as the only one should be blamed. There are levels of responsibility, otherwise it wouldn’t have filed papers to court in 2011, asked for sharing responsibilities (as well as bills) with Cameron International, Transocean, and Halliburton – the partners it worked with during the spill out accident. This Blame shifting caused secondary damage to BP’s reputation and not surprisingly offset its previous efforts.

Another company who joined the “bad crisis communication” club was Southwest Airlines. In 2008, upon ithas been fined by Federal Aviation Administration (F.A.A.) with $10.2 million for misleading officials about whether it kept flying older Boeing 737 planes for several days after failing to inspect them for cracks in the fuselage. Southwest declared that it should not be fined because it had the F.A.A.’s concurrence when it continued to fly the incompletely inspected planes. This Provocation behavior brought no desirable results for Southwest Airlines but only draw more attention on its compliance and resulted in tighter scrutiny.

If there’s only one suggestion to take from this blog, I would say: when you are involved in a crisis, apologize first.  

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About the author: Chanchan Zhang is a Master student at the Department of Communication Science of UvA, the track she’s pursuing is Corporate Communication. She holds a degree in Psychology and has several years of experience working in PR agency.

Reference:

Denise P. Ferguson, J. D. Wallace & Robert C. Chandler (2018) Hierarchical consistency of strategies in image repair theory: PR practitioners’ perceptions of effective and preferred crisis communication strategies, Journal of Public Relations Research, 30:5-6, 251-272, DOI: 10.1080/1062726X.2018.1545129