Damage Control (Revised & Updated). Eric Dezenhall
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that contradict what they fundamentally believe.
This is the central problem with crisis management that has been annexed by many public relations hucksters: the delusional and self-serving belief that you can spin a public that does not want to be spun. One can only persuade audiences within the confines of their psychological circuitry. People are more inclined to give a cuddly company like J&J a break than they would, say, the manufacturer of an allegedly carcinogenic pesticide.
Then there’s the issue of consumer control. One of the first things we suggest to a client in a consumer crisis is that they give the consumer something to do, to put the consumer in charge. In Tylenol’s case, the “control action” was simple and inexpensive (despite the specter of being killed by cyanide): Don’t take the Tylenol in your medicine chest until the crisis is resolved, and throw your bottle away.
But imagine telling a woman with silicone breast implants—a product made by a chemical company, no less—to just throw’em out. Not so easy. If you’re worried about mobile phones causing cancer, just don’t use them anymore. Oh, really? Try telling someone who has just bought an expensive sport utility vehicle to get rid of it when its rollover vulnerabilities are exposed. A huge, inconvenient, and costly move. And what exactly could Enron instantly recall upon its collapse? Nothing.
PLAYING THE ODDS RESPONSIBLY
Consumer product companies are faced with rumors of tampering every day. Sabotage gossip is especially rampant in the Internet Age and since 9/11. The vast majority of these reports turn out to be groundless. If every company recalled its products based on adverse event rumors, there would be no economy for consumer goods. Many times we advise clients to contain recalls discreetly and on a regional basis depending upon the credibility of the report (Internet rumors are notoriously inaccurate) and the severity of the allegation (How seriously could someone be injured?).
Responsible, educated intelligence work and odds-making address most, but not all, crisis scenarios. A company must be prepared to initiate a nation- or worldwide recall immediately, but it is logistically absurd to embrace the “instant” recall canard as the only option for besieged manufacturers.
After initial missteps, Firestone recalled its tires in 2000 and began to rebuild its brand under a new name, Bridgestone. Similarly, after a 1996 plane crash that killed 110 in Florida, ValuJet eventually regained trust by resolving what caused the crash, merging with another airline, and rebuilding under its new name, AirTran. Even ImClone, hit by the Martha Stewart torpedo, has begun to emerge from stormy seas—despite its imprisoned founder—by proving that its once-scorned cancer drug is effective after all.
One outcome that is rarely included in Tylenol lionizations is the protracted litigation between the victims’ families and J&J. Eight years after the murders, J&J settled with the families for an undisclosed sum, according to O’Dwyer, “just as jury selection was to start in Cook County.” That this escaped public scrutiny is a testament to J&J’s damage control, management recognizing when it was time to take a deep breath and cut a check.
We’ve known executives who, at many companies that didn’t enjoy the outcome that J&J did, beat themselves up, wondering what they did wrong. While self-criticism is healthy, the Tylenol dogma has done a disservice to enterprises trying to grapple with crisis management.
The Tylenol crisis taught us good things that responsible companies can do when confronted by murderers. While a quarter century of hindsight may suggest that J&J should have recalled the Tylenol capsules immediately and ceased their production, Monday morning quarterbacks must remember that crisis management by its very nature is about making good decisions, not perfect ones. J&J did most of the right things in a messy world littered with incomplete information.
Perhaps the true genius of the Tylenol crisis lies both in its merchandizing as well as in its actual handling. As media and business pundits proliferate, the two may prove to be equally important.
CHAPTER 2
Know the Difference Between a Nuisance, a Problem, a Crisis, and a Marketplace Assault
[Sudden acceleration] is a mysterious phenomenon in which a short, silly, middle-aged woman with a lawyer gets into an Audi 5000 and—all of a sudden, for no apparent reason—goes through the back wall of her garage and onto the CBS 60 Minutes television program.
—P. J. O’ROURKE
In order to cure an ailment, you must first know what the ailment is. In crisis management, one of the greatest challenges lies in diagnosis. Perhaps the most common misdiagnosis in high-stakes public relations is confusing a communications problem with a conflict.
In a communications problem, some information is lacking. Education and awareness-building can cure the problem. If, for example, people are aware they are at risk for heart disease, they will be able to take tangible steps to prevent it—exercise, eat right, have regular checkups. There’s no side in the conversation making an argument against better health.
But in a conflict, there are sides, with opposing agendas. Information isn’t missing from the conversation; in fact, there’s no introducible bit of information that could change the mind of one side or the other.
In these zero-sum, my-side-versus-your-side conflicts, it is a big mistake to envision the battleground as a graph in which data points are charted and the side with more impressive data wins. A real PR war is multidimensional, with conflicting facts colliding with opposing agendas and unpredictable vicissitudes.
While we call our business “crisis management,” more often than not we are really navigating such marketplace assaults, which are different from pure crises. A crisis is a house that caught on fire because lightning struck. The event was organic, an act of nature. In a marketplace assault, someone wanted the house to be on fire, so they torched it (and placed incendiary devices around the house to sabotage the work of firefighters).
When a business is under a marketplace assault, often, the other side’s agenda has a legitimate component. In a marketplace assault, a crisis, such as a corporate bankruptcy due to scandal, meets an agenda, such as a plaintiff’s attorney looking to profit from the crisis in addition to recovering his client’s assets. In another example, the pharmaceutical industry must respond not only to legitimate concerns about drug safety but also to the public’s outrage over corporate profits and the cost of drugs.
A case in point: A few years ago, an ostensibly “concerned citizen” began alleging online that mainstream feminine care products were harming women with residue supposedly left over from the manufacturing process. It was an allegation that had to be taken seriously because in 1980, women died from toxic shock syndrome, a disease associated with a tampon product that is no longer on the market. Some within the brand manufacturing companies wanted to address these new allegations as a crisis, believing that a public education campaign explaining the falsity of this person’s claims would prove the allegations were unfounded.
The problem with this approach was that the “activist” spreading the rumors was not an ordinary citizen. She was, in fact, affiliated with the manufacturer of an “organic” tampon product competing for market share, and she was launching a marketplace assault. This motivated adversary was financially vested in the argument that branded products (e.g., Tampax, Kotex, Playtex) were hazardous, and no amount of “public education” was going to change that.
Once we realized what our client was up against, we suggested abandoning the crisis management strategy of productattribute public education. Some within our client’s company bristled, having already convinced themselves that such a campaign would improve their company’s PR. As crisis managers, however, we are loyal to our client’s well-being, not to a strategy. We believe in being flexible and are willing to abandon strategies when the operating climate changes. Eventually, with some convincing, we shifted our focus to exposing the smear