Marketing and crisis management

IMAGINE this scenario: you are the boss of a company making infant milk powder. One day, your marketing head and product quality head come to you with grave news: a hospital has contacted the company informing it that 10 babies in the hospital’s ward have contracted kidney stones, and that the one common factor in all of them is that they had been consuming your brand of infant milk powder.
Your product quality head cannot explain why and he needs time to investigate.
Your marketing head, after having faced a mounting number of angry calls from customers, wants to know what to do next, as, every day, your company is shipping out 90,000 tins of milk powder to retailers and exporters. What do you do?
We should be fortunate if we, in the course of our lifetimes, are never put in such quandaries.
"Tough" armchair marketers who like to talk about strategy and grabbing market share can freeze and wilt during times like these.
Chances are, however, that a problem of this nature is bound to hit sooner or later, especially in mass consumer market food companies.
Crisis management 101
How a company’s manage-ment and its marketing and communications department react to it can effectively determine its fate.
The important elements of crisis management are:
1) recognising a crisis early and dealing with it swiftly;
2) establishing regular and daily communications with customers and the public, through media sources;
3) updating the public on the company’s response and steps being taken to arrest the crisis;
4) not focusing on blame, or culpability, and just doing all that can be done to protect its customers and, hence, its brand, its reputation, its very future.
In the case histories of crisis management, these are the best practices that have pulled companies through difficult times – examples include the Tylenol poisoning crisis of 1982 and, recently, the Mattel lead paint crisis of 2007.
Nothing is more important than item 1 – acting early. As in the case of an earthquake or a tsunami, it is worthwhile imagining a countdown clock starting the moment it happens … every second that ticks away without anything being done means more lives lost.
In the case of Sanlu, it seems it had plenty of chances to start managing the crisis – as early as December 2007, some report.
But by ignoring or burying its bad news, it actually sealed its fate. Doing this tells the public that your management would choose its own image and reputation over that of the lives of its customers.
Its probably fair to say that from being the No. 1 market leader in China, Sanlu is now quite finished.
As for steps 2 to 4, the various Chinese companies affected should borrow a leaf from their own political leaders.
From the winter storm crisis to the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, Chinese leaders at the highest levels had been perceived to be actively involved in doing their best to solve the problem, with even Premier Wen Jiabao making appearances in crisis hit areas and addressing victims directly.
Crisis management 201
Another scenario: you are the local country head of a global, billion-dollar investment bank.
Through weekly conference calls and updates, you know your company is facing a cash crunch due to a worldwide seizure in the credit markets, and you are nervous about the company’s future.
Business, however, must go on. One day, your regional boss instructs you to market a new series of financial products, to be distributed through local banks to retail investors.
The products are themselves quite complicated and, in your view, rather risky, as they are linked to financial derivatives such as Credit Default Swaps.
However, looking at the prospectuses and marketing material, you see they are couched in investor-friendly phrases designed to give the impression they are safe, as they are backed by the full faith and guarantee of your own bank.
Your regional boss tells you to launch the products ASAP and is breathing down your neck every day for sales.
Meanwhile, your own questions about the health of your company are swatted away. What do you do?
Unlike the first dilemma, where doing the ethical thing – responding quickly – helps save the company, this second is a lot harder, as doing the ethical thing actually harms the company. Resolving this problem is not covered in this post..!

Interactive PR and Your Online Brand

Chances are if you are a company, you have an online presence - even if you’re not the one that has created it. Consumers are alive and active online and are, in all likelihood, talking about your company. Companies need to be proactive in managing their online presence and a vital component of this is an interactive PR campaign.
Interactive PR is the use of online tools and technologies like: search engines, social bookmarking, new media relations, and blogging, to disseminate information about your company online. Allowing you to communicate directly with the general public, consumers, and potential prospects.
The following are key elements of any successful interactive PR campaign:
Promotion of content through social networking sites
To launch a successful social networking site campaign, you need to have something to promote on these sites – social media content. This content can take any number of formats, including but not limited to; videos, photos, and blog posts.
What content gets read is no longer decided by an editor, social networking sites, including news sharing sites, democratically allow users to choose which news stories will make it to the popular pages and get in front of readers eyeballs. Aside from the initial traffic that you receive from hitting the front page of these sites, there are other benefits, including: increased subscribers and highly targeted valuable inbound links.
If you get an article, picture, blog post etc to the front page of digg or the other news sharing sites, you can expect to get well over 40,000 unique visitors. Having your social media content succeed at one social networking site, greatly increases the chances that it will become popular on the other sites - multiplying the effects of the campaign.
Blogger Outreach
An integral component of any interactive PR campaign is to get influential bloggers to talk about your product or service. A blogger outreach campaign will connect you to leading relevant bloggers in your niche to have them review your product honestly in their blog. The 3 main benefits of a blogger outreach campaign are: branding and WOM review from a thought leader in your industry; targeted relevant traffic to your site from the blogs; and natural inbound links that will help with your sites search engine rankings.
Corporate Blog Integration and Podcasting
In the open and transparent age of social media, blogs and podcasts are vital for reputation management and consumers have come to expect them. Companies and brands should consider employing blogs and podcasts to create open and honest dialogue.
Proper blog integration, distribution, and strategy is vital to the success of any corporate blogging initiative. Any blog that spins the truth will be found out - in a world of social media, transparency is the only option. The proper implementation of a blogging and podcasting strategy for your company company blog is vital to ensure that your company is aware of and follows corporate blog conventions. Without a proper strategy in place, companies may be better off not blogging at all and will end up missing out on all of the benefits derived from a corporate blog.
Online Media Center
Once you have driven traffic to your website and have started to create an online community around your brand, you need to ensure ease of coverage from both traditional and online news sources. Building an online media center on your site that provides these writers with ease of access to your marketing and brand collateral. You need to ensure it is as easy as possible for people to cover you as possible. The harder you make it for them to get collateral to insert into their coverage, the less likely it is that they will cover you.
Social Media Monitoring and Brand Management
Your brand no longer lives in a corporate environment where you can control your message; everyone with a stake in your brand now controls the message. Your brand lives everywhere online, from blogs and forums to twitter and youtube.
Monitoring your brand across all online channels to determine where your brand conversations are taking place and their tone is critical when undergoing an interactive PR campaign. This reporting will allow you to make strategic decisions with your online and offline marketing and advertising initiatives and provide you with a real time snapshot of your current brand landscape.
With this information, you can: adjust, on the go, your online marketing initiatives to capitalize on or respond to customer feedback; evaluate the effectiveness of both online and offline advertising initiatives with greater accuracy allowing for better targeted campaigns in the future; and deal with situations as they occur online, increasing brand loyalty.