Advancing Crisis Communication Effectiveness

Integrating Public Relations Scholarship with Practice

Yan Jin, Bryan H. Reber, Glen J. Nowak, Yan Jin, Bryan H. Reber, Glen J. Nowak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000328509
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Advancing Crisis Communication Effectiveness shows how crisis communication plans and efforts for complex and challenging issues benefit when academic perspectives are connected with practitioner experiences. This book brings crisis and public relations scholars together with practicing professionals to integrate academic theories and research with the knowledge and lessons learned on the frontlines of crisis communication and management.

This book illustrates how having insights and observations from both leading crisis communication scholars and professionals strengthens crisis management and communication strategies, plans, and coordination. Chapters co-authored by leading scholars and professionals highlight how academic theories and research can inform crisis management and response - and how practitioners can utilize, inform, and strengthen academic theories and research. For each topic area covered, examples and applications are provided that show how integrating public relations scholarship with practice can advance crisis communication effectiveness.

This book represents a unique and timely contribution to the field of crisis management and communication. It will be an important resource for public relations and crisis management and communication scholars, educators, professionals, consultants, and graduate students.

Part I
Overview and Context

1 Complex and Challenging Crises

A Call for Solutions

Bryan H. Reber, C. Richard Yarbrough, Glen Nowak and Yan Jin

This book is the product of collaboration between university scholars whose research focus is on crisis communication and professionals who practice crisis communication. In this chapter, we begin with a discussion of definitional issues of crises. We introduce theories that will be more fully examined later in the book. We examine the definitions of crisis and crisis response and how those are rapidly changing, often becoming what we call “sticky” crises. Sticky crises are those that are particularly difficult to deal with or solve. Sticky crises are complex and challenging. We end the chapter by examining the benefits of collaboration between the academy and profession.

The Evolving Definition of Crisis

Traditional definitions of crisis often include words like “difficulty” or “danger” or “turning point.” But traditional definitions are evolving as the breadth of crises and needs for crisis communication have also expanded.

The Institute for Public Relations defines a crisis as “a significant threat to operations that can have negative consequences if not handled properly” (Institute for Public Relations, 2018). In their textbook, Effective Crisis Communication, Ulmer et al. (2019) define an organizational crisis as a “specific, unexpected, and nonroutine event or series of events that create high levels of uncertainty and simultaneously present an organization with both opportunities for and threats to its high-priority goals” (p. 7). Crisis scholar Timothy Coombs defines crisis as “the perception of an unpredictable event that threatens important expectancies of stakeholders and can seriously impact an organization’s performance and generate negative outcomes” (Coombs, 2019). Consultant Steven Fink’s book, Crisis Communication: The Definitive Guide to Managing the Message, states “A crisis is a fluid and dynamic state of affairs containing equal parts danger and opportunity. It is a turning point; for better or worse” (2013, p. 7).

So, crises are not only difficult and dangerous turning points but also can be “significant,” potentially “negative,” and “unexpected.” They create “uncertainty” and “perceived reality,” which can affect stakeholders and “an organization’s performance.” And the causes of crises seem to be ever-changing and growing. Crises are also increasingly difficult, demanding, and complex. They can threaten not only an organization’s public image, but also its reputation long-term. For example, in Chapter 3 of this book, Coombs and colleagues define sticky corporate crises as “crises that are made complex and challenging due to some combination of the situation increasing susceptibility, extending over an extended period of time, evoking moral outrage, spreading across an industry, and/or affecting multiple industries and geographic areas.” Finally, while “crisis” is a word that usually strikes fear in business communicators, it entails both danger and opportunity for a crisis-stricken organization (Fink, 2013).

Like definitions, theories or ways of understanding crises are evolving. Among the early academic efforts to understand, describe, and test effective crisis communication was the Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT). Coombs’s SCCT is discussed in detail in Chapter 11 of this book. But briefly, Coombs and colleagues suggest that crisis response by an organization should be influenced both by crisis responsibility and potential for reputational damage. Evidence of the effectiveness of SCCT via experimental testing is summarized and further discussed in light of crisis communication practice.

Another normative theory is the contingency theory of strategic conflict management (known as the contingency theory in public relations research), developed by Glen T. Cameron and colleagues. The contingency theory is examined in Chapter 12 of this book. In sum, the contingency theory describes the dynamism of crisis situations and how organizational stances and situational variables affect whether an organization primarily accommodates any affected publics or primarily advocates solely for the organization.

The internalization, distribution, explanation, and action (IDEA) model has been developed by Timothy Sellnow and Deanna Sellnow. It is the focus of Chapter 13 of this book. The IDEA model was created to provide an easy and empirically tested way to develop instructional messages meant to alleviate risk or mitigate crises. Messages should help recipients “Internalize” the problem (i.e., how will/could I be affected). “Distribution” of messages depends on communicating via credible sources. “Explanation” describes what is happening and how it is being addressed. The “Action” in IDEA is the goal of moving message recipients to the desired behavior.

The social-mediated crisis communication (SMCC) model, which is covered in Chapter 14 of this book, was first developed by Yan Jin and Brooke Liu. In Chapter 14, Liu and their colleagues argue that existing crisis communication models do not account for the complexity that social media enter into the equation. The model identifies three types of SMCC publics: influential social media creators, social media followers, and social media inactives. It also describes how crisis information flows both directly and indirectly among online and offline communication channels and between the organization and its publics.

There are other crisis communication theories and models but these four illustrate the possibilities among the tested and validated scholarship in crisis communication theory building. Understanding these theories enables crisis communicators to apply tested and actionable insights to their work. The theories address persuading publics to avoid risks, communicating in an effective way that both satisfies stakeholders and manages risks to organizational reputation, and managing relationships between publics and organizations during and after a crisis.

Listening to Crisis Communicators

If the public relations professional is not relevant in their organization before a crisis occurs, they won’t be when it does. In practice, public relations serves as an organization’s ombudsman. While public relations pros represent their organization to the various publics they serve (inside out), they also must accurately represent the public’s perceptions back into the organization (outside in), sometimes telling management what they do not wish to hear. That is not always a comfortable situation in which to find oneself. A lot of public relations practitioners are not willing to run that risk and content themselves with carrying out decisions made without their input.

Professional Insights: C. Richard Yarbrough

At both BellSouth Corporation and the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games, I spent much of my time with my colleagues in other departments talking about the role public relations had within the organization and how we could assist them.

Paramount in those discussions was that they consult with us on their issues and let us work with them on solutions. Said another way, don’t come into our department saying there is a problem and we need you to put out a news release. Responses needed to be a collective determination.

Lest all of this sounds adversarial, it was just the opposite. The departments welcomed our help and we worked as partners. It also raised the level of expectation on us to come up with satisfactory solutions and in turn earn their respect.

One important point that crisis managers need to get ingrained into their management’s thinking is that there is no general, singular “public.” There are, instead, “publics” and they interact with each other. How one group reacts to an organizational crisis can differ dramatically from another (e.g., media vs. customers vs. competitors vs. public officials). The publics can be defined by race, age, gender, income, etc. and may look at a crisis from their own unique perspective.

It is important that an organization not wait for a crisis to occur before communicating with these many publics. Communications must be proactive. And clear, concise messaging is critical as is proactively conveying those messages to the various publics.

Distinguishing Characteristics of Crises

Crises are not simply a bad news day for an organization. They threaten the organization’s ability to meet stakeholder needs and demands. Crises also have the potential to threaten the organization’s very existence. Crises cross organization types and can be caused by natural disasters, such as Hurricane Sandy in the Northeastern United States in 2012, or health challenges, such as the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Crises can arise from corporate malfeasance, as exemplified in the 2001 Enron Energy case of creative accounting or employees’ and consumer relations’ demand for accountability in diversity and inclusion programs. Industrial accidents such as the Pacific Gas & Electric power lines causing the Camp fire in 2018 can be crisis creators. Nonprofit crises are often linked to donors, like the extreme case of Jeffrey Epstein, a sex offender who gave millions of dollars to the nonprofit MIT Media Lab as revealed in 2019. The list could go on almost endlessly. Data breaches, consumer and shareholder activism, consumer product recalls, and food-borne illnesses are all additional sources of sticky organizational crises. The breadth and speed of mass media has affected the nature of crises and accentuated the necessity of seemingly instant crisis communication.

There is a longstanding crisis communication dictum that any initial communication following a crisis must occur within the first hour, the “golden hour.” In 2017, the blog Crisis Response updated that axiom: “those in command of the immediate response to a crisis no longer have the comfort of a ‘golden hour’ – today it is routinely not even a ‘golden minute’” (“The Demise of the Golden Hour,” 2017). The timeframe has only condensed since 2017. The need for speed arises because of the increase in particularly complex and challenging crises. Such crises make it more difficult to respond quickly because knowledge of the crisis doesn’t yet exist. One doesn’t typically know at the start of a financial embezzlement, chemical exposure, food or waterborne illness, or infectious disease outbreak that something is amiss. Additionally, it is news to no one involved in crisis communication that in a world where everyone has cameras in their phones and events can be livestreamed on a variety of platforms, knowing about and responding to a crisis is expected to be nearly instantaneous.

Adding to the challenge of the speed and breadth of the communication environment is the omnipresence of these demanding crises. A 2019 global crisis survey by professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) found that of the more than 2,000 respondents to its survey, 24% had one crisis in the past five years, 38% had between two and five crises in that timeframe, and 7% had more than five crises in five years—more than one crisis a year. The PwC report noted, “But crises often travel in packs. And a crisis is never more dangerous than when it spins off one or several ancillary crises – each of which can create its own feedback loop of consequences” (Rivera & Stainback, 2019). These challenging or ancillary crises are part of what we call sticky crises. All the challenges and the diversity of crisis causes discussed thus far are the fodder for this book.

Sticky crises demand not only a near-instant response, but they may require crisis communicators to see possibilities, understand the potential breadth and scope of an emerging crisis, and be ready to change strategy and tactics quickly. As the PwC study noted, what we call sticky crises can spawn a host of additional crises, each which can bring it additional complexities and communication demands. PwC identified “three bedrock elements to successful crisis management: preparedness, a fact-based approach, and effectiveness of (all!) stakeholder communications.”

Dealing with Sticky Crises

Preparedness, facts, and effective communications to all stakeholders are, indeed, the hallmarks of successful crisis management and successful crisis communication. But for sticky crises, which are complex and challenging, we offer some additional specificity.

The first and perhaps the most important element for successful crisis communication, sticky or otherwise, is being sure that the communicator is in the decision-making hierarchy. In the book, Excellence in Public Relations and Communication Management (Grunig, 1992), Jon White and David Dozier wrote:

The general theory of public relations [the Excellence Theory] maintains that the senior public relations practitioner must be part of the dominant coalition, function at a high level of decision making, and participate in strategic management if public relations is to be excellent and is to make the organization more effective.

(p. 91)

This seminal book introduced “dominant coalition” into the public relations lexicon. The dominant coalition, according to White and Dozier (1992), is the “group of managers who hold the most power in an organization” (p. 91). For successful crisis communication in every situation, an organization’s top communications person should be a member of the dominant coalition.

Second, elements of an effective response to sticky crises are a combination of classic crisis communication tactics, including those linked specifically to social media. As with all crisis communication, sticky crisis communication relies first on crisis preparedness, that is, having a plan and having practiced or reviewed the plan enough that it is internalized and fixed to muscle memory among the key players in the organization. It is important to recognize that an effective crisis response depe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Overview and Context
• Part II Most Challenging Organizational Crises
• Part III Most Challenging Public Crises
• Part IV Crises Amplified by Media and Aggravated by Misinformation
• Part V What Can Crisis Theories Do (Better) for Practice?
• Part VI Looking Ahead and Trekking Forward Together
• List of Contributors
• Index