Just a few weeks ago I wrote about how to handle the PR when some disaster hits your company.
Well it seemed no time after the ink dried (which on a computer is a very short time), your morning berry smoothie turned very sour. Four cases of Hepatitis A were traced, ostensibly, to packets of Nana's Frozen Mixed Berries. They were imports from China and somehow had been infected.
For parent company Patties Foods it was a grenade tossed into a smoothly growing year. Suddenly they were under orders to recall the berries, and to their credit they also pulled out any of their similar products, like frozen raspberries.
But they had to act swiftly and decisively - at stake was their other range of more important products like Four 'n' Twenty pies and Herbert Adams pastries - pillars of the supermarket food aisles.
Remember my advice previously, about speaking quietly and honestly to explain what is happening? Because usually the truth is not as catastrophic as the media make out. But it is also difficult to admit there is a problem when already, behind you, is the sound of lawyers' knives sharpening. A lawyer's advice is always, as we know from the TV crime shows, to "say nothing". Because there's always another lawyer waiting to pounce on the words as a confession of guilt.
So we see these chief executives putting out a tortured, non-admitting statement that sounds like an apology, and then standing mute before customers or relatives. Like we've seen in the two recent Malaysian Airline crashes. You can't help feeling sorry for managers blamed for disasters they did not cause - and forced to wear the abuse.
Product recalls are easier to handle. If you look at the ACCC Product Safety Recalls site you'll be amazed at how many car recalls there are. Every make you can think of from Mercedes to Ford to Nissan has recalls - and that's only this year.
At least car dealers have records of their customers, tightly controlled so recall is swift and clean. Nevertheless it can be an expensive exercise. Five year ago Toyota's sticky accelerator pedals hit a whole range of cars in the US - including Corolla, Prius, RAV4 and various Lexus models. The eventual cost (it hasn't ended yet) is expected to hit $6 billion. What would that do to your bottom line?
Because of their vast variety of products, stores and supermarkets are regularly in the recall news and mostly they have developed effective procedures they call "crisis management". A lot of the money they pay PR firms is to have experts on hand whenever a boiler bursts.
They develop "crisis and issues manuals" for the client - lengthy wordy documents which in brief repeat what I told you the other week. Don't be sneaky, don't think you can hide anything, be frank and friendly but try not to admit blame. Not in a legal sense anyway.
Make your top executive readily available to the media.
In the case of Patties, they have not been as open as they might - their web site is perhaps too defensive and sounds more concerned with the well-being of Patties rather than the customer. But on the whole they have been open-faced so I'd give them eight out of ten. Fortunately the outbreak has been quickly stopped and nobody died. So there is not too much the lawyers can sink their teeth into.
ray@ebeatty.com
