Whoever suggested that all publicity is good publicity clearly never envisioned the wave of catastrophe engulfing high-profile corporations over the last year, laying waste to some of the most meticulously tailored reputations on earth. Toyota endured revelations that its most popular models sometimes accelerated for mysterious reasons. The energy giant BP now confronts the future with a new identity: progenitor of the worst oil spill in American history.
And the Wall Street icon Goldman Sachs found itself derided in Rolling Stone as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Last month, Goldman agreed to pay $550 million to settle federal securities fraud charges.
“These were real reputational implosions,” says Howard Rubinstein, the public relations luminary who represents the New York Yankees and the News Corp. “In all three cases, the companies found themselves under attack over the very traits that were central to their strong global brands and corporate identities.” For members of the protective tribe known as the crisis management industry, the scandals capturing headlines in the corporate realm involve high stakes, threatening the lifeblood of global behemoths worth hundreds of billions of dollars. The calamities have served up a lifetime supply of case studies to be mined for lessons on best practices, as well as pitfalls to avoid when disaster arrives.
In the view of many who are paid to extract corporations from terrible situations, Toyota, BP and Goldman exacerbated their woes by either declining to fess up promptly, casting blame elsewhere or striking adversarial postures with the public, the government and the news media. “Companies that typically handle crises well, you never hear about them,” says James Donnelly, senior vice president for crisis management at the public relations colossus Ketchum, who — like many practitioners contacted for this article — required elaborate promises that he would not be portrayed as speaking about any particular company. “There’s not a lot of news when the company takes responsibility and moves on.”
Are some crises so dire, though, that public relations victory is simply not on the menu? And, if so, what’s an embattled company to do? Eric Dezenhall, a communications strategist in Washington who worked in the White House for President Ronald Reagan, argues that the standard playbook is useless when the facts are sufficiently distasteful. “The two things that are very hard to survive are hypocrisy and ridicule,” Mr Dezenhall says. “It’s the height of arrogance to assume that in the middle of a crisis the public yearns for chestnuts of wisdom from people they want to kill. The goal is not to get people not to hate them. It’s to get people to hate them less.”
Those in the trade generally share a sense that the companies at the centre of recent events committed grievous errors. At the top of the list is BP. “It was one of the worst PR approaches that I’ve seen in my 56 years of business,” says Rubinstein. “They basically thought they could spin their way out of catastrophe. It doesn’t work that way.”
Source – Economic Times
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About Hitesh Bhasin
