Bloomberg Businessweek recently ran an article on the Dallas Mavericks basketball team’s sex-harassment scandal last year. The piece highlighted an essential element of crisis response: action. You have to show your constituencies you’re doing something to respond to the crisis.
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A Hilton hotel in Oregon had to react recently to an all-too-typical racial crisis; its messages and response hit many aspects of proper crisis communications, including making heads roll — though that doesn’t mean criticism didn’t rain down on the company.
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Johnson & Johnson is responding to investigative articles in Reuters and The New York Times about a carcinogen allegedly in the company’s baby powder. Given that J&J has lost several jury verdicts on the issue — one for a whopping $4.69 billion — the company has pulled out the stops to defend itself.
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The House Oversight Committee on Monday issued a report on last year’s giant Equifax data breach. While the document mostly focuses on technical mistakes the credit-scoring company made, it does include a useful section on its public response to the crisis. It especially focuses on the dedicated website and call center, both of which, if you remember, were a bit of a disaster.
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Marriott International Inc., the world’s largest hotel company, now has the distinction of bringing us the third-largest data breach. The news, which broke Friday, was shocking — 500 million guests’ accounts accessed from the reservation system of the company’s Starwood unit. But the hotelier did a decent job of communicating the crisis.
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Italian fashion designer Dolce & Gabbana has been whacked with a brand crisis in China, one that arose from its efforts to expand in that country. The tale is a cautionary one about cultural sensitivity amid globalism and about a tepid response that just didn’t cut it.
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