Crisis Communication Strategies for Brands
Every business or brand is prone to encounter crisis, especially in the digital media era where individuals have a voice and can share their experiences with the world. It then becomes important that business leaders understand crisis communication strategies to be effective in de-escalating a crisis when it occurs and knowledgeable enough to avoid the occurrence of a crisis in its operations.
A crisis is when things go wrong with a potential negative impact on a brand’s reputation or license to operate. Usually, the financial worth or previous successes of a business becomes less important when there is a crisis. As a matter of fact, well-known and established brands suffer the impact of a crisis more than brands that are not too popular because they already have a name in the environment and the news about the crisis will spread faster than a brand that is not known. A vivid example of a crisis is the incident that happened two years ago when the news headlines globally wrote about Prince Andrew, a member of the royal family for over a year. This further explains that effective crisis communication strategies are important not only to businesses but to individuals and public figures. Typically, a crisis sets off in chain reactions, it is multifaceted and can be complex.
Source: yourthoughtpartner.com
We all thrive on a good reputation, whether as a business, an entity, an institution or government. The importance of a good reputation is seen in how politicians, for example, try to manage their headlines or how some governments clamp down on press freedom because whether or not they are improving the systems, they need a good reputation. This is because a crisis has severe impact on individuals and brands one of which is, that it can send investors and clients away from the organization involved.
It is a huge mistake when business owners assume that the crisis will go away without any effort on their part and it is an even greater problem when you weigh the crisis only from an internal perspective. It becomes very necessary that crisis communication strategies manage the way the organization or entity involved is perceived by the public.
This means that what every communication and public relations professional should do when there is a need for crisis communication is focus on the narrative that is being crafted around the business and work towards responding to it in a transparent and effective manner. It is a time to respond to public perception, sentiments and people’s interest in the issue. Being defensive is the wrong way to manage a crisis for your business and organization.
The first thing to do when a business has negative coverage is to start by managing the incident from its source. Here, you will establish the facts of what has happened, assess the interest of the public in the crisis to know and monitor the ongoing conversation and find out where the news broke out from, that is, is it across multiple social media platforms or intense on just one platform? The knowledge of this helps in knowing where to focus on in responding to the crisis.
Another effective crisis communication strategy is responding to an incident on the media channel where it emerged. It is poor crisis communication to try to de-escalate an incident that negatively affects one’s reputation on a social media channel when the call-out was made by a traditional media or on a social media channel that has made no noise about the incident. If a call-out was made on Twitter, that becomes the platform where all efforts are targeted to de-escalate the crisis but where the business, brand or entity is mentioned across different channels in a crisis, the crisis communication effort should be geared across all channels involved.
The aim of every crisis communication strategy should be to de-escalate. Where the negative coverage around a brand persists amidst your response, this is a prove that your communication is not effective. Responses should be able to clear doubts and concerns raised to bring the situation under control. An effective crisis communication strategy pays attention to care and empathy with the public and external stakeholders rather than antagonizing the sentiments or ignoring them completely. This plays a major role in reducing the grievances and avoiding further escalation.
Click here to watch a video clip on strategic communications in a crisis.
In crisis communication, the spokesperson should always be carefully chosen after the business leaders have discussed the issues and the message they intend to convey to the public. One very important thing to note is that spinning around the incident, lying that the facts do not exist or over-simplifying the incident at hand is a very poor crisis communication strategy to adopt as the crisis will only linger for a longer period. Many times, what results in a crisis starts as an issue that is poorly managed. This is why it becomes very necessary to understand the difference between issues management and crisis management to protect one’s reputation early.