Crisis Planning, Barry Bonds and Enron
As a full service agency, we handle a lot of client public relations. The vast majority of our PR work involves what I call “feel good” PR — announcing sporting events, company product launches, hirings and promotions, entertainment events, restaurant news - all positive news items that we feel good about trying to disseminate.
There is a specific category of PR known as crisis management. Some firms specialize in it, some offer it in addition to the whole PR package. We’ve done it here, notably when there were a couple of shootings at malls who were clients. Our head of PR was the spokesperson on the news after it happened. The thing that we brought to the table was pre-assembling a plan that contemplated a crime at the malls and what the response would be. We had the client prepared for exactly what happened and it turned out to be a mush less detrimental event than it otherwise would have been had they be scrambling to respond.
Crisis communications involves planning for problems, anticipating the worst case scenario and having a response plan ready to go “just in case” is an incredibly valuable exercise for protecting a company, its brand and its customers.
Now, look at the current crisis involving Barry Bonds. He has been indicted for lying to the Feds regarding his steroid use. When he went in front of the Grand Jury, he was given immunity for everything he had done in the past. In other words, if he had admitted to steroid use, as Jason Giambi did, he couldn’t be prosecuted for it. The only thing he was not immune from prosecution over was lying. He had a lot on the line as far as his “brand” was concerned — records, money, legacy ” and he decided that taking the risk of (allegedly) lying was worth protecting his Barry Bonds Brand. Now, it has caught up with him, and the crisis is much bigger, and the potential consequences much greater (jail time), than if he had just told the truth.
To me, this is much like a CEO knowingly dumping the waste from the plant into the river to keep the company’s balance sheet strong for investors. Or the CFO cooking the books to drive up stock prices. That is short term thinking for short term gain. But in the long term, the damage can much greater than having slower growth numbers for doing the right thing. Where would Enron be today if they had just kept things above board? Chugging along nicely, I suspect.
We have never been in a situation where a head of a company says, “All right, next crisis communications plan. Let’s figure out what we are going to do if I get caught embezzling millions of dollars.”Â
That’s crisis planning we can do without.
(This is the blog for Frank Best International, an advertising, PR and multimedia agency with national and international clients. Most of us here would be lying if we said we could be objective enough to be on the Barry Bonds jury.)
