A brand’s worst nightmare: product recall. For brands in the food industry, customers’ health and safety are on the line and any recall situation can turn bad. Every brand should treat a recall situation as a crisis – even if nothing bad has happened yet. Taking the right steps in a recall situation can help protect your […]
Laura Reiley’s first investigation was a small one. But it proved to be a nibble into something much bigger, a story the Tampa Bay Times’ food critic took on this week. Four years ago, over dinner at Tampa’s famous Bern’s Steak House, Reiley listened as the waiter expounded on specials that came from the restaurant’s […]
[by Howard Fencl, Hennes Communications] The University of California, Davis Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi is on administrative leave for spending university cash to push negative news down in search engine results, among other allegations. She authorized spending $175,000 with a search engine suppression (SES) firm in an effort to move five-year-old headlines about campus police […]
The way an organization reacts in the first hours of a crisis will probably determine whether it succeeds or fails in regaining public trust. The way brand managers at Kellogg Co. recently esponded to the release of a video depicting a disgruntled employee should serve as a model for handling a PR crisis. When crisis […]
A colleague of ours, Don Etling, said it best: You can’t spin your way out of bad behavior. The Penn State situation exemplifies that. Joe Paterno & Co. knew that Jerry Sandusky was abusing children – and they looked the other way. They didn’t have a communications problem – they had a performance problem. Volkswagen is […]
For decades, animal-rights activists have gone after SeaWorld and its Orca entertainment and breeding programs. And for years, SeaWorld has fought-off those activists, in the Court of Law, as well as the Court of Public Opinion. Rather than continue to fight in those two courtrooms, SeaWorld did a dramatic turnabout, announcing in full-page print and television […]
From Ragan’s PR Daily: When tennis star Maria Sharapova hastily called a press conference, many reporters expected the athlete would be announcing her retirement. Instead, Sharapova dropped a startling admission: She had failed a recent drug test for the Australian Open. Sharapova’s drug test results came back positive for meldonium, a drug used to treat […]
From Entrepreneur Magazine: Managing a public relations crisis feels like piloting an out-of-control plane. You want to minimize the damage, not point the nose toward Earth and push the throttle. Keep your business from going into an uncontrollable free fall by avoiding these big PR mistakes. Don’t reinforce what everyone is saying. In 2012, Matt […]
[By Nora Jacobs, Hennes Communications] One of the most common decisions we encounter when clients face a crisis situation is helping them choose the individual who will serve as their spokesperson. Rarely does anyone volunteer for this assignment and most draftees accept it with grudging resignation. In truth, being a spokesperson is a high-risk job […]
From The New York Times: Someday, Volkswagen’s emissions cheating scandal will be studied in crisis communications textbooks. And not in a good way. “There was something like a tsunami,” Hans-Gerd Bode, Volkswagen’s communications chief since September, said in an interview. “Thousands of calls and emails coming in at the same time.” “A crisis like this, […]