Crises Management, Exercise 3: Crisis Management in Action

All these cases give an interesting insight into crisis management and just how varied crisis situations can be.

The communication tactics which worked well for Tylenol, Panadol, Arnott’s and Mercury were:

• The open and honest communication styles adopted,
• all organisations reacted to the crises with the publics best interests at heart,
• PR professionals from all organisations engaged early with senior management, governing bodies, the media and the general public,
• most of the organisations accepted responsibility early on in the crisis situation, resulting in solutions being developed sooner which in turn minimised the risk of negative media responses,
• well planned, daily meetings with media representatives and organisational executive through out the day,
• a core team of professionals had been set up to deal with the crises, limiting decision making to one or two people,
• setting up call centres for clients and retailers; and
• direct engagement with public to nip the crisis situations in the bud and not allowing the situations to get even worse.

Although Sydney Water and Exxon Valdez did adopt some of the above tactics, they did not perform the tasks involved as well as the other organisations. This resulted in a larger margin for error. The communication with internal and external stakeholders was limited and no clear direction was set by PR professionals. Exxon and Valdez, were too focused on the initial crisis and did not view the situation beyond the company’s interests. Instead of engaging with the appropriate governing bodies early on in the process Exxon, waited for these bodies to contact them with a negative connotation.

If I were involved with these organisations as a PR professional, I would spend some time on doing some planning around “Crisis Preparedness”, I would mock-up some risk assessments and action plans to possible crisis scenarios the company might face in the future. Although you could never be 100% prepared for a crisis, prior research would alleviate the initial stresses involved in effectively dealing with that particular crisis. I would also mock-up a communication plan for each scenario to determine early on in the process who might need to be involved and to what degree.

A recent example of a PR crisis is the storms in Brisbane. The Prime Minister and the Premier of QLD both attended devastated areas, this worked well and also the setting up with call centres and community shelters also worked well. The things that have not worked are the call centres have not been well equipped and SES help that has been promised to residents took a long time to arrive due to under resourcing of staff.