ABSTRACT
A bad public image has the power to make or break even multibillion-dollar corporations. A crisis can tarnish the most positive of corporate images, even that of an organization with well-established name recognition. Defending an organizational image during crisis requires a great deal of effort and skill. Yet, despite tremendous growth in the field of crisis management, the communication literature is filled with anecdotal evidence of what corporations and public relations professionals, with a limited scope of expertise and relying on their specific crisis experience, have done when faced with a crisis. As a result, what emerges in the literature are numerous “models” or prescriptions successfully applied to a small number of individual cases. This chapter presents a model developed and grounded in a review of the literature on crisis communication. The model’s heuristic value is then demonstrated by application to examples of both successful and unsuccessful crisis management in the context of two corporate crises: the Alcan Chemical Explosion and the Dow Corning Breast Implant Cover-Up. A crisis is any event “which seriously interferes with the operation of the organization and which can be regarded as unwelcome by those involved” (Wragg, 1992, p. 265). Companies are prey to a broad range of crises, both human-made and natural, such as tampering with a product, discovery of criminal activity, unwanted or hostile takeover, loss of an important customer, environmental accidents, recalls, and operator error. In recent years, efforts to control corporate crises, or crisis management, has matured as a public relations function and grown into a specialty area. Reasons for this development include: the growth of electronic media as the primary source of news; the increasing speed and capability of the media to acquire information, due to technological advances in research such as databases; the growth of special-interest groups and their proficiency in staging media-oriented events; and the expansion of instantaneous global communication capabilities (Birch, 1994; Reinhardt, 1987). Because a common factor found in all of these components is the speed of information transmission and reception, news of a crisis can spread so quickly that it can potentially paralyze top management before they can effectively control the crisis situation. As a result, fear of crises and the need to control them have escalated to previously unforeseen levels in business and industry.
