“Through chances various, through all vicissitudes,” the poet Virgil wrote, “We make our way.” But moving on from a public relations disaster or crisis management blunder is no sure thing, according to Otter PR’s Gigi Marino.
In the era of 24/7 news and social media, the institutional crisis has become a constant. From Facebook to Netflix to the Federal Reserve, our largest organizations are flailing in the throes of some media storm or another. But Marino, a former merchant marine, communications director, and editor, says that calamity is nothing new. “I think that there are always crazy times and you can do your best to predict something and plan for it,” she says. “But there’s always something that you wouldn’t have planned for. How many of us plan for a global pandemic?”
While past controversies were more likely to involve deadly products — remember the Tylenol scare of the 1980s and the Ford Pinto? — and environmental disasters — think Bhopal (Union Carbide), Prince William Sound (Exxon) and Deepwater Horizon (BP) — recent crises have tended towards issues of social justice. But Marino says that whatever the communications crisis, what follows is all too familiar. “Human nature is such that we say stupid things without thinking,” she says. “If you’re representing a company and you do something really dumb, then you have to have somebody come in and help repair the reputation of the company. And that I think is where your crisis communications planning comes in.”
One lesson Marino learned years ago is that the best time to get to know people is not in the midst of chaos. Organizing before a crisis happens, and identifying the people who will need to be in the know, is essential. She recalls a group of first responders who’d met the day before the Pulse shooting in Orlando, where both she and Otter are based. When the horrific details of the shooting began to emerge, the group was able to coordinate across various agencies and put a consistent message out because they had planned for a crisis, even though no one had predicted the shooting itself.
Crisis Response Reversal
One of Marino’s favorite examples of crisis management is the Tylenol scare, in which several boxes of the pain reliever were laced with cyanide. In that case, Johnson & Johnson, the drug’s manufacturer, was able to turn the horror of seven customer deaths into a positive legacy — tamper-proof containers. “They did such a great job of handling that crisis,” Marino recalls. “They reached out to people and took responsibility for what happened, even though it wasn’t their fault. And they really did turn that into a positive.”
An example of a missed opportunity, she says, was the Deepwater Horizon oil leak, in which top executives, including rig owner BP’s then CEO, portrayed themselves as victims rather than owning the environmental disaster. “No one took responsibility,” Marino observes. “And they’re still fighting it!”
May I Please Be Excused?
One of the most common deflections one hears in the thick of a crisis is, “No one could have imagined this would happen.” Marino says that while the statement may be correct, it’s also irrelevant. “In the moment,” she explains, “you’re dealing with the crisis, you’re taking responsibility, you’re getting your message out and you’re trying to be helpful. You’re trying to solve the problem. And you have an awful lot of relationships that are involved: you’ve got relationships with the public, you’ve got relationships with your people in your own company, and you’ve got personal relationships. What you need to do is put people’s minds at ease that there is somebody taking charge of the situation handling crisis communications appropriately.”
What’s In a Name?
Another ineffective response is to disassociate one’s brand from the crisis entirely. Last week, for example, Facebook rebranded itself as “Meta” just as a series of media exposes and political hearings on both sides of the Atlantic were making headlines. The company’s CEO and founder, Mark Zuckerberg, dismissed the crisis and insisted that the timing was purely coincidental. He quickly found himself widely mocked — on social media, ironically enough!
Marino remembers a similar episode decades ago when Exxon rebranded its supertankers as SeaRiver Maritime after the Valdez oil spill. That dissociation largely worked because the story eventually cycled out of the front pages while the tankers remained out of public view. She predicts that Facebook-Meta will have a harder time reinventing itself. “In the social media age, it’s just making the reputation of the company much worse,” Marino observes. “Facebook looks ridiculous.”
Failure to Feel
The worst thing a company can do in a crisis is attempting not looking stupid while trying to not appear apathetic. Corporate lawyers will always advise a great wall of silence, Marino says, but expressing empathy is non-negotiable when lives are affected. “Be human,” she tells her clients. “That’s the most important thing that you can do while carrying out a crisis management plan.”
But what if the client is simply clueless, or utterly narcissistic? “You need to train people how to respond in situations,” Marino says, “tell them what’s appropriate and what’s not appropriate. People just don’t think sometimes. Being prepared for what not to say is even more important than being prepared for what to say.”
Follow Up
For a communicator like Marino, the crisis is not resolved by a press conference or a media cycle, or even when the situation itself has been fixed. During a crisis, emotions run high and they take more than just time to cool down. “You need to go back into the community and check in and get a temperature of how people are doing now,” she says. “Take action. Show the community and your customers that this will never happen again.”