5 Key Tips to Restore Your Reputation After a PR Crisis A PR crisis is always negative, but by using these five tips, the damage can be limited.
By Valeriya Minaeva Edited by Chelsea Brown
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A crisis could be a sudden scandal, an executive's slip of the tongue or the actions of a poorly trained employee with a customer. The impact can be severe, harming reputation, brand image, financial stability and all relationships — with customers, investors and employees.
Those looking to survive such storms would do well to insure themselves ahead of time. This means developing a crisis management plan. While you can certainly do a great deal to try and avoid such disasters, avoiding them completely is never guaranteed.
There are three important moments around a crisis: preparation, response and aftermath. Optimizing each delivers the best chance of survival. Here, we look at how:
Related: A 3-Step Plan for Handling Any PR Crisis
1. Take responsibility
Stay calm. Avoid lashing out at customers or critics and escalating events further. Let them express concerns, and listen to the feedback. This is when you should be seeking information to learn what's happened. Deflecting or going silent can rapidly create distance and accelerate reputational damage.
Consider publicly taking the blame and issuing an apology, perhaps via a press release and social media post. But ensure to also follow up with action to avoid the appearance of empty promises.
In 2018, Starbucks ran into a crisis when an overzealous staff member called the police on two innocent Black customers while they were waiting for a friend, causing an enormous backlash. CEO Kevin Johnson handled it well, firstly by taking responsibility, then shutting nearly 8,000 stores across the U.S. in order to train employees on racial bias.
When a crisis occurs, the public expects whoever is involved to take ownership and show genuine remorse. Failing to do so can result in a loss of trust and reputation damage. Starbucks demonstrated how to take responsibility.
2. Communicate effectively
In a PR crisis, clear and transparent communication is crucial. The damage must not be compounded further by anything appearing as spin. It's at such times that professional PR help can be invaluable.
When communicating with employees and other stakeholders, it's important to provide regular updates and be clear about what's happening, what steps are being taken and what can be expected going forward. This helps maintain trust and reduce uncertainty. Communicating during a crisis also requires empathy and a willingness to listen.
Providing timely updates and offering solutions or compensation where possible can help to maintain customer loyalty and prevent long-term damage to reputation. When communicating with the media, it's important to be honest while also staying on message and avoiding speculation or unfounded rumors. Having a clear and concise message, supported by data and facts, can help to avoid miscommunication and prevent further damage to the company's reputation.
3. Create a crisis management plan
If you didn't have a crisis management plan the first time, learn from what you've experienced, and devise one for next time. Creating a crisis plan involves several steps. Firstly, you need to identify potential risks and vulnerabilities that could lead to a PR crisis. Next, create a crisis management team of key individuals who can help to manage the crisis effectively.
It's important to establish clear communication protocols and assign roles and responsibilities to each team member. Your plan should include guidelines on how to communicate with all stakeholders and the media. Additionally, create a monitoring and evaluation system to track the effectiveness of your plan and identify areas for improvement. Finally, conduct regular training sessions to ensure that your team is equipped to handle a PR crisis should it occur.
In the wake of Covid, PwC's Global Crisis Survey in 2021 examined the global response to "unprecedented social, economic and geopolitical disruption." It found that 62% of respondents used a crisis response plan during the pandemic. Tellingly, 95% of businesses recognized that their crisis management response needed improvement.
Related: How to Turn a Crisis into an Opportunity by Managing Negative Publicity
4. Focus on your audience
It is essential to understand the needs and concerns of your audience to effectively communicate and recover from the crisis. By doing so, you can re-establish trust and credibility.
Understanding your audience can help you tailor messaging for the best effect. To do so, it is important to identify your different audiences — including employees, customers and investors — and develop messaging that speaks to their specific needs and concerns. For example, employees may be concerned about job security and the company's financial stability, while customers may be worried about product safety or quality. Investors may be interested in the company's long-term viability and financial health.
To effectively communicate with these audiences, consider using different channels, such as internal memos, press releases, social media and convening in-person gatherings. Be transparent and honest about the situation, provide updates regularly, and offer solutions or actions that demonstrate your commitment to resolving the issue.
5. Learn and rebuild
Rebuilding a damaged reputation can be a long and difficult process, requiring time and persistence. It's important to recognize that it will take consistent effort to rebuild trust and credibility.
Look deeply into organizational structure and service delivery to discover if the wrong tone is being set, which might have resulted in the crisis. Talk to your team about what went wrong and how improvements can be made.
During a crisis and its aftermath, examining feedback will help you modify your response strategy. Monitor what's being said about your company or brand. This monitoring will include social media, traditional media, blogs, employees, customers and so on. Regular trend analysis maintains ongoing sensitivity to both the good and the bad, delivering clearer information to help you best respond.
In the digital age, a PR crisis can haunt a reputation for years to come. To counter this, a content marketing campaign can be waged, via blogging and publishing articles with as many outlets as possible, as you work to tip the balance back in your favor.
Those who emerge most successfully from PR crises demonstrate a definite pattern of responses. These include avoiding defensiveness and reactivity, respecting the facts and taking immediate action to address the issue. Companies tend to limit damage to their reputation when they respond quickly and authentically to address the concerns of their stakeholders, guided ideally by cool-headed professional PR expertise.
