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Bad news, good publicity?
3/28/2013 8:25:57 AM

There is an old adage that gets thrown around every now and then that goes something like this: there is no such thing as bad publicity. Some attribute this to P.T. Barnum the circus showman extraordinaire who never passed up any news, be it good or bad, to promote his Greatest Show on Earth. If you are a Hollywood socialite - keeping your name in the circus of gossip that now passes for news - bad publicity serves you as well as good publicity as long as you are trending on the daily news feed. However, companies who take such a view of public relations or their marketing efforts soon find out the opposite is true.

In the day in which we live, you can be buried if bad news goes viral. This past week, an advertising agency in India leaked an ad for the Ford Figo, a subcompact car that touts its large cargo area. The ad used an illustration of three scantily clad women, bound and gagged in the back of a Figo, with the former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi flashing a victory sign in the front seat. In case you didn’t know, Berlusconi’s career has been pock marked with several sex scandals. The ad had not been approved by Ford, but someone in the ad agency leaked it and it was not long before Ford had a PR crisis on its hands. The repulsion in Indian society was huge. India’s parliament just tightened its laws regarding sexual abuse after the gang rape and murder of a woman this past December. Ford quickly moved to apologize and to distance itself from JWT, the ad agency responsible for producing the ads.

Most of the time, bad news does not happen with such a huge self-inflicted wound. For most, it is a series of customer complaints and dissatisfactions that more resemble death by fork stabbings: just a bunch of little pokes that bleed a company to death. How do you combat bad news, be it big stuff like the Ford case, or the small stuff like a bad experience with a client? First, listen to your customers. There are too many businesses that try to outwit their market. This really never works. Your market defines good taste in your advertising. Your market tells you what works to sell them, not the other way around. Focus groups used to be commonplace in seeking out this kind of information. In a rush to get your message into the marketplace, don’t forget that the opinions of those in the marketplace will determine your success or failure. The wise marketing plan has some component of finding out these opinions before you dive head first into the campaign. This is not just for the front end of things – where marketing campaigns are launched. This is for the back end where customer satisfaction follow up happens. If your client is unhappy, ignoring their opinion is about the worst thing you can do. This is where so many companies fail on the social media front. Once someone is dissatisfied enough to "dis” you on your own site, you are too late. Build in some component of finding out if customers are happy with what they received from you – be it your products or your services. Let them grade you. But make sure you are doing something with that information. Are they all happy with you? Promote this in your advertising. Are they unhappy with you? Find out how you can fix a problem.

What if the bad news is out there before you can fix the problem? The best thing is to publicly recognize the problem as straightforwardly as you can, and state how you will fix it. Communication is key here. In March 1979, the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania suffered a partial meltdown. The company that owned the plant, Metropolitan Edison, attempted to keep the crisis under wraps. Word leaked out and people began to panic. The company assured everyone that there was no reason for alarm. Two days later, it was reported that a small amount of radiation had escaped from the nuclear site and that people should stay inside their houses. Instead, 100,000 people fled the area. As it ended up, there was never enough radiation released to be any more harmful to people than a sunny day. But because of the negative publicity, the power plant was closed for the next six year, despite the fact that it still had an operational nuclear generator. Beyond all of this, the Three Mile Island crisis stopped construction of nuclear plants within the U.S. Compare that to the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion that caused an oil slick to cover the northern beaches of the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. Both had huge implications for the companies involved. BP committed early in the process to fix the problem and clean up the mess. They ran national ads about their commitment to clean the beaches in the panhandle areas of Florida and Alabama. A year and a half after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, BP resumed drilling in the Gulf. Last year, the U.S. issued 90 new drilling permits for oil companies operating off the southern gulf coast.

Bad news for your company is still bad news, regardless of how you try to spin it. But if you are in charge of putting out the fire with your public relations statements, or formulating a marketing plan to gain the confidence of your customers, keep in mind the strategy that works best is to fix the problem before it becomes news. If you are too late to fix the problem, be honest without revealing too much. Remember that news has a very short life in the mind of most people. The crisis of today will be forgotten in a short time. Tackle the bad news quickly and then be patient. Storms don’t last forever.

_________________________

Ford Figo India Ads Lead to Firings, by Santanu Choudhury and Jeff Bennett, The Wall Street Journal, March 27, 2013.

Mar 28, 1979: Nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, This Day in History, www.History .com

BP to resume drilling in Gulf of Mexico, By James O'Toole, CNN Money, October 26, 2011

Photo by DNY59

 

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