ABSTRACT
In an end of year review of 2010, an Observer journalist (Wachman, 2010) compared the public relations handling of two major incidents by leading British companies, BP and Rolls Royce. The former compounded the environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, in which 11 workers died, with inept comments from the CEO, Tony Hayward; the latter mismanaged its communications following an engine blowout (with no casualties). The journalist comments:
In themselves these events have little in common. They were different in nature, with the fall-out from the Trent engine failure altogether less severe than the BP conflagration. But the thread that links the two is the hash that both firms made of their public relations afterwards.
