How can a brand handle a PR crisis?

PR crisis! The night made for any brand! It takes years when we are trying to build the reputation for our brand, but if someone is a little careless then even a simple mistake is more than enough (there goes the reputation of your brand). Some of you might be wondering what a PR crisis is? So let's answer this question first.

Public Relations crisis can be described as an event where any negative review or comment that is related to your business gains immense attention from the public. This can revolve around malpractices that are going on in the business sphere, negative experiences that a customer had due to your products (example, severe allergic reaction) or it can also be an employee related issue or maybe are wrong advertisements produced for your company. Just imagine you had spent days and nights thinking about the kind of advertisement that is going to be right but it takes a wrong turn. Something that could have otherwise opened a flood of sales during the special occasion turns out to be a complete disaster.

So if this never happens how can we deal with it or how should we deal with this?

Keep our team that will keep away controversies regarding your company.

Anything that will start a controversy regarding your business is a huge no, and it will remain a ‘no’ as long as your business is running. So make sure you have a group of experts that can deal with such matters if things go south because no matter how hard we try, sometimes a certain message or AD campaign might give out the wrong message to our target audience or target consumers.

Why does this happen?

Well it is next to impossible if you try to figure out whether a piece of creativity is going to be misunderstood by the masses so there is no clear answer for this question in general.

This is the very reason why every new business or even a well established business should have a team of editors, decision makers, and public relation professionals who can work out the context for the creative in a way that will reduce the chances of misjudgment by the public.

Prompt response (it should be the right type of responses well).

Yes, things can go wrong despite all the protocols and precautions that you have adopted. That is why we need a quick and smart response for the situation to calm down.

These types of responses depends on several factors such as:-

• What went wrong with your campaign?

• How bad are the responses from the audience?

In most cases a simple and sincere apology is going to be the best. You must stand up for the value no matter what the situation is or how bad the situation is. Let us assume that things don't go as planned and your ad campaign goes south. You know that you did not have any wrong intentions so you might want to stand up for yourself and your brand and of course stay consistent with your belief system. However, be very careful because this might not go smoothly. Even then if you believe in the message that your campaign gives out then standing up for your value is worth the try. All the best for this one.

Maybe you are very confident about your public relation strategies but keeping a defined Public Relations crisis strategy is really going to be very helpful. For any business specially during the current times it is uncertain how companies would be perceived.

That's why having a defined Public Relations crisis strategy is very important (the more emphasize on this the better), because if your company somehow manages to get a really negative feedback whether justifiable or not, you should know which strings you have to pull in order to fix everything so that you can go back to normal and your audience turn to your favor once again. Yes, outlining one public relations crisis strategy is very difficult (doing this is a no joke). Executing it is even more tricky, as it will involve real time data (actually data) to make sure that it is effective in nature.

For example if you are in the mix of controversies adding actual data about your branch performance from Analytics on key channels of all the defined strategies might prove to be very helpful in return.

You must always stay prepared for the worst

Several businesses just assume that the worst case scenario would not hate them but in reality if you are producing content -on whichever platform- you are always at high risk of pulling the wrong strings instead of the right ones and you might end up being in the middle of a controversy.

Many big as well as small businesses have faced it so it is safe to be prepared for your own good. Having a strong and well organized PR manager is a necessity and no longer just an option.

Form a team with specialists

In a 5, in planning for managing and executing a PR crisis strategy you must consider working with the best digital marketing agency, a good company with proper PR specialist and social media managers can be really helpful for you and your company to grow.

This is not just about social media platforms ( Facebook, Twitter and Instagram)

In addition to public outrage, if your company has created a bad reputation which can be really fatal for your business then this department hiring would be a good option. An SEO company is going to be a good idea. They can help you expand your business and also with your online reputation management (very important, don’t ignore this) out doing the bad press with the correct desirable messages.

Reach out to Turiya Communications, check out our website at www.turiyacommunicstion.com, see what our clients have to say about the services that we provide to them. Let us help you with the vision for your company mail us at sandhya@turiyacommunications.com (Monday to Saturday)

We hope you find this very informative stay tuned for more