Corporate Crisis Management Blog

It is clear that 2017 is going to be a vintage year for crises.

We are not half way through yet and the roll call of brands that have faced challenges and rafts of bad publicity include GM, Lockheed Martin, Nordstrom, United Airlines, Delta, Spirit, Adidas, Pepsi, Target, Wells Fargo, Samsung, Uber and Price Waterhouse Cooper, to name but a few.

Get used to it.

There are fundamentals in the way that issues arise and then have the flames of controversy fanned by social media that means this year is not an anomaly – it’s the shape of things to come.

We are entering the golden age of crisis.

These days, when a consumer wants to share a complaint or compliment about an organization, more often than not, he or she heads to social media. As of 2016, 83 percent of Americans had a social media account, and nearly half of that total were using such a platform to interact with companies or institutions.

So, what was your favorite crisis so far in 2017?

Was it the Presidential tweets which roiled entire industries – notably automotive and aerospace – and the odd department store?

United Airlines and Dr Dao was a doozy, especially as American, Delta and Spiritall followed United into the harsh spotlight.

Maybe it was the ‘luxury’ Fyre Festival with its tents, cheese sandwiches and porta-potties?

In the 2017 Horizon Scan Report from the Business Continuity Institute, respondents reported a daunting array of business disruptions that they had experienced over the past 12 months:

• 72 percent had an unplanned IT or telecom outage.
• 43 percent experienced adverse weather, such as a tornado, flooding or snow.
• 40 percent saw their utility supply interrupted.
• 35 percent were hit with a cyber attack.

Once you become aware of the emerging risks to brands from cultural issues such as gender, race, politics and polarizing social issues, you keep tripping over them everywhere.

This is true whether brands choose to step into an issue publicly or not. We talked in the last blog about Target and the year-long controversy after a blog that merely confirmed its policy regarding transgender use of its restrooms and changing rooms.

Another example is Chick-fil-A whose culture is strongly influenced by its founder’s, Truitt Cathy, southern Baptist beliefs. This can range from hungry customers getting grumpy because the chain does not open on a Sunday to more strongly held opinions, on both sides of the issue, about the causes that Chick-fil-A has chosen to support in the past.

Imagine for a moment that all technology suddenly disappeared from the planet. All those tools and functions you carry around with you every day—from your calendar to your contact lists—are instead only available on hard copy. To reference any of this valuable information, you have to rush back to your office and manually flip through a thick three-ring binder.

I love Target stores. I really like shopping there and so do my daughters. But I also find the company fascinating because over the past few years it has provided really interesting debating points for those of us who make a living managing issues and crises.

Until United Airlines recently showed how to turn a crisis into a disaster and created learning points for years of lectures, Target’s handling of its 2013 data breach was the poster child for “what not to do in a crisis” workshops.

More recently, and a little less clear cut in terms of best practice, Target has been in the spotlight ever since it published a blog post in April 2016 welcoming transgender employees and customers to use the restrooms and fitting rooms corresponding to their gender identities.

In the fast-moving, ever-evolving digital age, risk management is no longer an option that’s relegated to a few select industries; it’s a necessity for nearly every organization. It’s no wonder then that 92 percent of enterprises report having a formal risk management program in place, up from 59 percent less than 10 years ago.

See anything odd about this poster?

Some of you may recall this story. This illustration was for a swim safety campaign created by the American Red Cross.

According to press accounts published at the time (www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/06/27/super-racist-pool-safety-poster-prompts-red-cross-apology), the poster was originally created in 2014 but only became a public problem for the charity in 2016 when a visitor to a pool in Salida, Colorado, looked more closely at it.