Business owners facing a public relations crisis often procrastinate before dealing with the issue. Unfortunately, this can cause the business an immeasurable amount of damage, sometimes even years into the future. Here are the reasons why you must deal with a public relations crisis immediately:
You Will Have to Deal with It Anyway
A business cannot ignore a public relations crisis hoping that it will die out and won’t damage your business. Since you are going to have eventually deal with the issue, the right time to deal with it is immediately. That way, you reduce the damage as early as possible and reduce the eventual loss of revenue. By waiting, all you do is create temporary comfort at the cost of long-term success.
Bad PR Tends to Become Exacerbated
One bad comment or negative article about your company can quickly turn into more negative word of mouth or press for your company.
Take Kryptonite for example. Kryptonite’s bike locks had been considered the gold standard of security. Many bike shops primarily carried Kryptonite locks because they had such a strong brand reputation. This was until a teenager released a YouTube video showing how he could pick a Kryptonite locks using a fifty-cent ballpoint pen.
Kryptonite should have offered a refund for the pick-able locks and then released new locks. Few refunds would have been requested and the damage would have been greatly reduced, but Kryptonite did nothing. Then more videos were released showing more people picking the locks open in seconds. Wired magazine wrote an article on the subject, further condemning the brand.
Even today, if you Google “Kryptonite lock,” the front page result will show an article about the lock’s poor security.
Because Kryptonite failed to respond in a timely manner, the PR crisis cost them and is still costing them millions of dollars in revenue.
This is just one example. There are many examples of brands that didn’t protect themselves in a timely manner. Always remember that bad press can and does exacerbate if it is not handled properly.
The True Cost of Bad Public Relations
Remember also that bad press can’t be measured only in sales. A PR crisis might blow over, you will see a few weeks of depressed sales, and then it is back to business as usual. However, damage to a brand cannot be measured so easily.
When people think of your brand, you want them to think of a company they want to do business with, not of a company that was the subject of that well-publicized fiasco.
You must be concerned with whether other companies will seek to do deals with you, or if your reputation will prevent you from doing deals, or how people at conferences will respond when you tell them what company you are with.
The long-term damage that a poorly managed public relations crisis causes is very hard to measure. It costs sales, but it also costs customer loyalty and future deals with other companies.
Therefore, please remember that if your business has a public relations crisis, deal with it immediately before it exacerbates. Deal with it before it can damage your brand and cause long-term damage to your business.
