Crisis Management Successfully Resolved Crisis

Crisis Management

Successfully resolved crisis with the help of PR

The following examples proved to be good learning examples for the proposed study.

Diet Pepsi (Wilcox, 2006, pg. 262-263; Hubbard, 2006)

In 1993, Pepsi-Cola had to confront a crisis situation, when a client claimed to have found a syringe inside a Diet Pepsi can. After the story appeared in the media, various claims appeared all over the country, referring to objects such as bullets or even crack cocaine vials to have been found in Diet Pepsi cans.

Pepsi-Cola knew that the objects could not have entered the cans during bottling process and thus decided on a defensive strategy, by claiming "innocent" in the matter. It knew also that proving its innocence would be essential in protecting the brand from further damage.

The strategies used by Pepsi-Cola included:

Attacking the accuser by claiming that the objects were inserted after the cans had been opened with the intention of gaining money from a settlement. The company also declared that would legally accuse those making false claims.

Denying the existence of a crisis - the Pepsi-Cola President, Craig Weatherup, appeared on television and radio interviews as well as in newspaper articles declaring the safety of Pepsi's bottling line, by bringing even video cameras into their factories to publicly show the bottling process and thus insuring consumers that it was practically impossible to insert foreign objects into the cans before they were sealed.

The crisis turned out to be a hoax and the initial accusers were brought to court. Pepsi recovered from the crisis due to an effective crisis PR campaign that insured a successful communication with the public across all types of media, openness to investigations.

Even if in reality there has been no real crisis, it can be seen that even the perception of a crisis can bring significant negative reaction from the public to seriously damage the image of a company.

2) My Space (Sterling, 2006)

My Space, with its over 11.6 bn page views in October 2005, seemed to have been used by stalkers and sexual predators in order to locate teens. The recent proliferation of such incidents stained My Space's image.

While the largest part of communication taking place through My Space is usually harmless, the incidents alarmed parents and thus created negative publicity.

My Space responded fast with a plan of imposing harsher safety measures in order to provide protection to its users from stalkers and sexual predators. The campaign offers not only online protection, but also education to parents and teens about the dangers of communicating on the internet with strangers and revealing their contact information as well as instructing parents on how to block search terms predators could use in order to locate a child.

This is another example of a well managed PR crisis, where the company admitted the incidents and responded by creating a strategy to prevent such incidents from happening again. The campaign effectively eased the anxiety of nervous users and parents of youngsters using My Space and thus helped the consumers regain confidence in using the service.

Conclusion