Issue link: https://nebusinessmedia.uberflip.com/i/1121164
www.HartfordBusiness.com • May 27, 2019 • Hartford Business Journal 21 CRISIS COMMUNICATIONS How brands can recover from a violation of trust By Andrea Obston T rust has taken a beating in the last few months for some of the biggest institutions on the planet. Boeing's handling of the 737 Max crashes; big pharma's role in the opioid epidemic; and continued reports of mis- use of customer data have meant trust in our institutions has gone into the toilet. Why should business people care? If your company isn't in the airline, pharma or social media arenas, what does this trust violation have to do with you? Everything. When trust is violated the first casualty is a com- pany's relationship with their current customers. The second is their ability to attract new customers and eventu- ally that loss of trust shows up on the bottom line. What can your company do to rebuild trust after a crisis? Here are a few tips: Understand that trust is a commod- ity that's hard-won over many years and easily lost in a matter of hours. In today's 280-character environment, a single tweet can reverberate through- out the world in a matter of minutes and destroy a company's reputation. Someone in their basement in sweat- pants and a pizza- stained T-shirt can destroy a Fortune 500 company with a single tweet. Cri- sis manager Eric Dezenhall calls this the "Glass Jaw" effect. These big scary guys can be taken down with one well-placed punch at their point of weakness. Companies need only be hit in just the right spot (often by "lightweights" on social media) to set off a cascade of plunging trust. Respond to a trust-shattering crisis like a human; not a corporation. Your first response to a crisis needs to dis- play compassion and concern. Boeing learned that lesson the hard way. After more than a week of near-silence after the crash of a second 737 Max jet, their CEO, Dennis A. Muilenburg, made his first substantive public comment. In a statement released on March 18, Muilenburg expressed remorse for the deaths of 346 people in the company's 737 Max jets — referring to the acci- dent in Ethiopia on March 10, and the crash of Lion Air Flight 610 in Indone- sia in October. But, for many it was too little too late. Part of the communica- tions problem here was that Boeing's communications style has evolved to meet the needs of their customers. They are used to talking to busi- nesses. But, in this case, they needed to adapt their language from a business- to-business communications style to a business-to- consumer one. Respect, re- spond and learn from a social media disaster. Last May, Burger King found out the hard way what social media can do to a brand. That's when a Facebook user took a video from inside a Delaware Burger King showing two rats skitter- ing through a bag of burger buns. The video reaped almost 1 million views and 24,000 shares. It was also picked up by traditional media nation- ally and internationally. The store was closed by the Delaware Division of Pub- lic Health Office of Food Protection. After it was cleaned up and re-inspect- ed, Burger King told SFGate.com that the location had reopened after the franchise took "appropriate measures to address the issue and prevent this from happening again in the future." Adding that, for Burger King "Food safety and hygiene is always a top priority … ." Not exactly the best response to a gag-worthy situation. It did nothing to rebuild trust in Burger King's ability to prevent a similar incident in the future. Take advantage of increasing trust in the media. When rebuilding trust, do not overlook the power of traditional media. While trust in journalists has tak- en a beating lately, there are signs that the public is beginning to come back to them as a trusted source of information. In Edelman's 2019 Trust Barometer, 65 percent of the people in the U.S. and Can- ada said they put their trust in traditional media as opposed to 34 percent for social media. In fact, that same report said that consumers are increasingly more engaged with traditional news outlets. The bottom line is this: Trust is hard-won and easily lost no matter how beloved your brand is. Getting through a crisis that shatters consum- er trust is only the beginning. The critical next step is the job of re- building trust. That takes active and ag- gressive communications to win it back and regain a positive reputation. Andrea Obston is president of Bloomfield-based Andrea Obston Marketing Communications. BIZ BOOKS How to embrace, learn and adapt to failure to achieve success By Jim Pawlak "Fail More — Em- brace, Learn, and Adapt to Failure as a Way to Success" by Bill Wooditch (McGraw-Hill Education, $28.). When you learned to ride a bicycle, did it have training wheels? Mine did. When the training wheels came off, did you fall a few times until you figured out how to maintain your balance? I have a scar on my elbow that reminds me I did. What from your childhood or adult life reminds you of failures and how choices made turned them into successes? Think about how different things would have been if you hadn't made those choices. Keep these in mind as you read the book. Like life, there are no sure things in business. Everything comes with a risk. The risks are magnified because decisions have impacts on stakehold- ers. Fear of failure keeps organizations from taking risks, which means they stick to what's currently working — until that doesn't work anymore. When that happens, it's usually too late to try something else. Good things happen when you take the lessons from failures and use "embrace, learn and adapt" to shape what's next. Example: Google keeps track of its failures. At killedbygoogle. com, you'll find tombstones for 137 services, 12 apps and 12 hardware products Google killed on its own. You'll find birth-death dates; some had a relatively long life but became outdated; others were killed quickly because Google recognized they weren't going to achieve their ex- pected outcomes. Click on tombstones and you'll find obituaries; you'll also find many references to elements that were incorporated into other "new and improved" Google services, apps and hardware. Google employees don't view this as an idea graveyard. They think of it as a reference library of creativity that remembers what didn't work, what no longer worked, what was resur- rected and how failure can help shape the future. It's also a place to revisit ideas whose time had not yet come. Wooditch characterizes decision- making as waging battle "against the need for certainty and the discomfort of uncertainty." By pushing the bound- aries of your comfort zone outward, by applying what was learned and staying inquisitive, you will avoid the danger zone of same old same old. He provides a three-step, boundary- pushing way to frame failure so you don't fear it: 1. Ask: "What's the worst that could happen?" Then, "Identify the worst possible scenario." Describe all its gory details. Next, provide perspective by writing down everything that could be lost and what it would take (e.g. actions, time, money, people, etc.) to recover. 2. "Expand your choices." Create "options, options, and more options." Using your worst-case scenario as a yardstick, evaluate each by asking: "What happens if ?" Use bullet points to develop a response tree, with each response being a separate "trunk." Ask that question again for each re- sponse to create bullet-point branches for each trunk. There will be trees whose branches you can control (i.e. pruning, fertilization) and those out of your control (market forces). Your trees become a decision forest, from which you can make informed choices. You will also find that the responses identify other options that may not have been apparent until you began branching. 3. Now that you've selected the best option, remember: "Labels limit. Don't be so quick to label something as a fail- ure." Plans rarely go as planned or stay on their original timetable. Throughout the process, examine milestone results and develop action-steps that respond to what's happening. When evaluat- ing potential actions, use the steps in numbers 1 and 2 to help you make the what's-next decision. Mindset reset — "Failing more" triggers for "trying more." Andrea Obston Jim Pawlak Book Review Trust is hard-won and easily lost no matter how beloved your brand is. Getting through a crisis that shatters consumer trust is only the beginning.