Last week, Corporate Counsel ran a piece featuring CrisisResponsePro founder James F. Haggerty with some important advice for lawyers on how to avoid reputational problems that stem from bad behavior of company founders or other brand ambassadors. These are also good issues for communicators to know.
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MoviePass, the subscription service for moviegoers, has struggled over the years to find the right business model — and to communicate it. That situation has gotten worse of late, to the point where the company seems to be running out of cash. It’s an interesting example of the intersection of operations and communications.
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A fledgling restaurant chain based in Chicago is handling its crisis communications so badly we fear it could do permanent damage to itself. The situation points to the importance of thinking through reputational issues when pursuing a legal strategy and of being scrupulously honest in your messaging.
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Last week saw a terrible tragedy in which 17 people were killed after an amphibious “Ride the Ducks” vehicle capsized in Missouri. The operator claims to be hampered in its communications by the ongoing investigation, but it seems it could have done more. A CNN interview particularly did not impress.
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The lead story in this past Sunday’s New York Timesbusiness section covered Sir Alan Parker’s travails stemming from his leadership of Save the Children U.K. The charity was hit with a sexual-harassment crisis, and the piece’s theme is the irony of a crisis-firm head — Parker founded Brunswick Group — not handling such a situation well. It’s an instructive (negative) example of crisis response.
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The Wall Street Journal’s Sarah Nassauer had an interesting piece last week showing that Walmart is increasingly taking political stances. The whys and hows of that are instructive because, almost by definition, doing so affects an organization’s reputation. Yet it’s becoming more common for companies to take positions on divisive social questions — rather than putting their heads in the sand.
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