posted by Tom Gable via www.gablepr.com
When unexpected events or outside forces suddenly impact your operation, rapid, reasoned response is essential to protecting the brand and organizational image for the long term. You gather facts, analyze the impacts on all constituents and then determine your strategic management and crisis communications plans going forward. But options exist. You have reached a critical fork in the road to the path toward continued trust and credibility or possibly something less. How do you decide which road to take?
At Gable PR,
we’ve used a quick litmus test over the years in handling a variety of crises (hostile take overs, threats to public safety, food-borne illnesses, religious scandals, etc.) – three questions to focus on the essentials:
1. Is the strategic plan true to the brand or organizational values and what you stand for?
2. Will it solidify your reputation for the long term, despite short-term issues?
If the answer is no, maybe not, or hedged in any way, ask:
3. How will this be played in the media and by your competitors?
The recent Apple “antennagate” and BP oil spill crisis provide good case histories where the organizations may have let ego, arrogance and perceived invincibility get in the way of critical thinking about strategy. An NBC San Diego reporter got to the point when he asked me in an
interview about crisis as a metaphor for company values.
“How you operate in a crisis is probably a better indicator of the quality of a corporation than (how you operate) during good times,” I replied.
A wide range of business, technical and PR media noted that Steve Jobs puts a crack in the rarely sullied brand image of Apple when he admitted that in the smart phone world, “phones aren’t perfect.” And that consumers were guilty of the lost signals because, well, we held the phone to make a call.
Jobs said the issue was all so “blown so out of proportion,” then proceeded to add his own momentum to the blow out.
He dragged Motorola, Samsung and Droid into the fray by showing they too could have problems. Using the famous Kindergarten Defense, Jobs basically said that since everyone else is doing it, what’s the big deal?
Motorola had a great time with it, running ads that promoted a phone with “
no jacket required.” As quoted from a recent Fortune brainstorming panel, Motorola co-CEO Sanjay Jha was asked how he felt about Apple posting video showing its own “death grip” testing of Motorola’s new Droid X Smartphone, and if he thought it was a fair business practice. Jha answered: “You know, I heard (probably apocryphal) that the most popular voice message on iPhone4 was, ‘Sorry I can’t answer your call, because I am holding my phone!’ I don’t think this is an issue with Droid X,” reported Fortune writer Seth Weintraub.
The Motorola ad noted: “At Motorola, we believe a customer shouldn’t have to dress up their phone for it to work properly.”
The press conference videos disappeared from Apple’s site shortly after the Hitler meme and other parodies blanketed the Internet. A College Humor video (NSFW) offered one of the cruder send ups of the Apple iPhone press conference and Steve Jobs attitude.
The Register (UK) nailed it:
“…Apple thrives by saying that its products are simply better than everyone else’s, and anyone who can’t see that is clearly not cool enough. Running down the competition is very uncool, and it’s not the Apple way of doing things.”
Lesson learned: which fork did he take? Did ego override sound crisis PR strategy? A review of comments by assorted experts found general agreement that Apple should have simply owned up to the problem and offered the bumper fix immediately via a press release rather than an odd video press conference, with follow up interviews. The approach would have protected the integrity of the brand and reduced risk to the CEO, with no follow up parodies and “antennagate ads.”
In contract, the concept of owning up and moving on was demonstrated clearly by Google when it announced it was discontinuing Wave. It offered a straightforward assessment and showed the integrity of a company and a culture dedicated to taking changes and not being afraid to fail. For an attitude toward failure, my favorite quote is from Thomas Edison, who said: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”