When faced with a threat, first impressions might not count
When the worst does happen, there’s a natural human reaction to minimize the problem.
One way this happens is that you try too quickly, with too little information, to categorize the risk, deal with it and move on – but then it changes shape, takes on new context and suddenly the problem looks different and your response is inadequate.
Many years ago I handled the crisis communications for the UK operations of a leading global beer brand. It seemed to have a peculiar knack for suffering crises which arrived in disguise.
It got a letter from a consumer who had swallowed a piece of metal from a can of beer. They checked the file and found a small number of similar letters, but not enough to believe there was a widespread problem.
But then, on a hunch, it checked for other complaints filed under categories such as ‘foreign object in beer’ or ‘beer undrinkable’ or ‘manufacturing fault’.
In fact, there were many, many letters about a single problem.
A ‘widget’, a device which makes the beer pour smooth and is normally attached to the bottom of the can, was consistently coming loose. But the problem had been given many names and labels.
The beer company had to withdraw 1m cans of beer and took a reputation hit from the adverse media coverage.
On another occasion, the same brewery spent three months on a wrongdoing investigation because its in-house gasoline pumping station had an unexplained loss of thousands of gallons of fuel.
The pumps were discreetly monitored with surveillance cameras. But still the fuel disappeared without the thief being caught.
Then, the logs were checked just a little further back, before the fuel began disappearing. It found there was an accident when a truck drove off while still attached by the hose. Further checks were made and a crack was discovered in an underground fuel storage tank.
The fuel had been leaking out into the ground. In fact, it had been pouring into the water table in a town famous for brewing due in large part to the quality of its water.
The crisis had now taken on a very different hue!
Careful crisis preparedness planning will get you through those first few hours and even days of a crisis, when often you don’t yet know the full extent of the problem.
You also need the full crisis team engaged in those early hours, including all the in house functional experts such as HR, engineering, operations, manufacturing and sales, in addition to communications and risk.
All your plans, processes and crisis team details should be accessible via a crisis app on your smartphone, enabling you to activate the team and share information – even when the crisis breaks at midnight on the Friday of a holiday weekend.
Check your crisis plan – if it's more than two years old, it needs a refresh both for content and activation.
Find out more about the author by visiting www.thehatcliffegroup.com
