ABSTRACT
During the Love Parade in Duisburg 2010, one of the largest techno music festivals in Europe, a panic in a tunnel at the festival site resulted in a stampede that killed 21 people and injured more than 500 revelers. Shortly after the incident, organizers of the festival as well as the police and the Duisburg authorities started publicly blaming each other for having caused the stampede. The detailed crisis response of the involved stakeholders is analyzed in this chapter. The objective is to better understand a complex crisis case and draw conclusions from the actors’ strategic use of traditional media relations and web-based crisis communication. This case study shows that blame games in the context of tragedies such as the Love Parade do not pay off. Rather, they provoke stakeholders, fuel negative media coverage and amplify reputational damages.
