Communicating in Extreme Crises

Lessons from the Edge

Elina R. Tachkova, W. Timothy Coombs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000553529
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Public Relations
• Index: Business

This book is an evidence-based approach to handling common, extreme crises. Extreme crises involve strong moral outrage; moral outrage creates situations where traditional crisis communication advice no longer is effective. These extreme crises create unique demands for crisis managers. Moreover, much of the traditional advice and crisis key performance indicators (KPIs) no longer apply.

Validated through research, the book establishes the nature of extreme crises, the optimal crisis response for such crises, and the KPIs (outcomes) crisis managers need to measure for extreme crises. It serves as a guide for how to communicate effectively during extreme crises and provides advice based upon experimental research that validates the effectiveness of the crisis communication interventions. Readers do not require prior knowledge about crisis communication and crisis management as the book contains summaries of crisis communication and management before exploring the more specialized topic of extreme crises. Chapters include extended case studies, examining communication within such events as the Westpac money laundering, VW emissions and COVID-19 crises.

Communications in Extreme Crises will be of direct interest to scholars of crisis communication in public relations, corporate communication, strategic communication, organizational communication programs and management.

1 Evidence-based crisis communication How research helps us to understand what works

DOI: 10.4324/9781003094661-2

Every organization experiences a crisis in its life cycle. No matter how big or small the business, crises are inevitable. In fact, we often say that it is not a matter of if a crisis will happen, but when it will happen. Therefore, crises are defined as unpredictable negative events that violate stakeholder expectations and can threaten the operations of organizations. Crisis management aims to mitigate the negative consequences of a crisis and protect both stakeholders and the organization from harm. Moreover, crisis communication lies at the heart of crisis management because it brings crisis management to life. Crisis communication moves crisis management from a written document to actions by the crisis team. A critical aspect of crisis communication is the crisis response, or what can be termed the crisis intervention. Interventions are actions taken to improve a situation; hence, a crisis response can be called a “crisis intervention.” Researchers study what organizations should say and do following a crisis (the crisis intervention) because it can have a significant effect on both the stakeholders affected by the crisis and the organization in crisis. When Volkswagen (VW) found themselves in the middle of the #dieselgate scandal for faking the CO ₂ performance of their diesel engines, the company suffered serious losses. The initial response shifted the blame to individuals, and management refused to accept responsibility. VW handled the crisis poorly because the public did not believe nobody else in the organization knew about the fraud. In another example, General Motors also suffered a severe crisis. Faulty ignition switches led to one of the biggest recalls in US history. However, the company handled the crisis differently. GM accepted responsibility for the faulty switches, paid millions of dollars in fines, and agreed to federal monitoring to improve safety. The company also created a specialized investigation team to identify safety issues and fix them faster and started a Speak Up for Safety program to encourage employees to submit safety concerns. The GM crisis was well managed because the organization was very transparent with the way it handled the crisis and implemented different corrective action policies to prove it is dedicated to improving its practices.

Early work on how to manage crisis interventions represented conventional wisdom about crisis communication (Holladay, Coombs, & Tachkova, 2020). These crisis communication writings represented ideas and expert opinions on a specific topic that were generally accepted as “true” by the crisis practitioner community. Examples of conventional wisdom for crisis intervention include responding quickly, speaking with one voice, and expressing empathy for victims (Coombs, 2019). Academics have built upon the convention crisis intervention wisdom to both explain why this convention works or does not work and provide insights into how to improve the effectiveness of crisis interventions. Academic crisis communication research has developed and proliferated mostly in the past 30 years. This could be explained with the emergence of two major theoretical frameworks in the field, namely image restoration theory (IRT) (Benoit, 1995) and situational crisis communication theory (SCCT) (Coombs, 1995). Additionally, research in crisis communication has adopted a plethora of methods to study crisis communication.

The crisis intervention research reflects what is called an evidence-based approach. An evidence-based approach can be used in any area where interventions are utilized and seek to fuse the best ideas from research with the experience of practitioners. The crisis intervention research provides ideas (evidence from research studies) that crisis managers might use in their crisis management efforts. One goal of crisis communication research is to prove the practice of crisis management (Coombs, 2019). In this chapter, we explore the basic elements of evidenced-based crisis interventions. The chapter begins by examining the various research methods used to create potential evidence for crisis managers. The focus then shifts to elaborating on the idea of an evidence-based approach for crisis interventions.

Research methods: creating evidence

Research is not one method, but it comprises a mix of various ways to collect and interpret data. The various research methods all produce research results that can be used as evidence that evaluates the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of crisis interventions. Before exploring evidence-based crisis intervention in more detail, we find it instructive to consider how research is used to create crisis intervention evidence. The research methods used in crisis communication research can be categorized into three groups: informal, transition, and formal (Stacks, 2011).

Informal research methods

Informal research methods are characterized as subjective because they provide little or no control over variables and are not systematic in the collection or interpretation of data. In a crisis communication context, informal methods are most often represented by case studies. Case studies provide a deeper understanding of the phenomenon that is being studied (i.e., a particular person, organization, or an event). They provide insights into both good and bad practices. Moreover, case studies help us understand the theory but more importantly how the theory is applied to the specific situation in the case under study. The results of case studies could be used to identify patterns or common themes in the data. Case studies can help to identify the range of crises an organization faces or the types of crisis interventions being used by crisis managers. However, the findings of case studies could not be used to make predictions or generalizations; this is the major disadvantage of using case studies. The researcher interprets the data, and that interpretation is subjective. The interpretations often are speculations about the relationships between variables, not evidence that the relationships actually exist. There is a risk that the insights are idiosyncratic to the case or that the researchers have misinterpreted the data.

Another way to think of case studies is to look at them as snapshots of time, where a certain crisis and the organizational and stakeholder responses are examined in detail applying a specific crisis communication theory. For instance, Zhu, Anagondahalli, and Zhang (2017) employed a case study approach to examine how McDonald’s and KFC used social media to manage crises they experienced in 2012 in China. Both crises included food safety issues. McDonald’s was accused of selling expired food, while KFC was reported to be working with a supplier who raised poultry to maturity within a period of just 45 days. The objective of the study was to understand how multinational companies use social media when responding to crises, as well as how culture affects the way stakeholders engage with an organization during a crisis. The results of the analysis corroborated previous work on the role of culture as a contextual modifier to stakeholder perceptions. The findings suggest that crisis responsibility and crisis severity should be evaluated from stakeholders’ perspective and cultural sensitivity and awareness could help organizations respond more effectively. Furthermore, the study suggested that an apology following a severe crisis could be more beneficial than Chinese companies anticipate and therefore should be considered as a crisis response when appropriate. In this example, a case study is an appropriate methodology for the purposes of the study because it provides a detailed analysis of the crises and helps understand how they evolved particularly in the Chinese cultural context. However, the relationships between the variables are speculative and require further research to determine if those relationships actually exist. Informal research, such as case studies, are a good starting point for exploring new ideas but serve better as a starting point than an ending point when creating potential guidance for crisis interventions.

Content analysis

The second category of research methods most commonly used in crisis communication research is content analysis. Content analysis could be regarded as a transition between informal and formal methods because it uses qualitative data that is being studied in a quantitative manner (Stacks, 2011). The data used for content analysis could be responses to open-ended questions or messages from a certain media, for instance. However, content analysis is quantitative in nature when it meets the requirements of social science research such as random sampling and answering questions of fact. It can be used to objectively describe a group of messages or to help understand how these messages are created. Cheng (2020) performed a content analysis to provide an overview of how scholars have been using the social-mediated crisis communication model (SMCC). The model was created to address the impact of social media on crisis communication (Liu, Jin, Austin, & Janoske, 2012). The aim of the study was to explore how social media changes and influences the dialogue between organizations and their publics. Additionally, the study sought to understand the impact of culture on socio-mediated dialogues. The results of the content analysis of scholarly resources indicated two main ways that social media may impact dialogues between organizations and the public during crises. First, social media could be a mediator for faster information dissemination and can thus promote more transparent dialogues. Second, because social media platforms are generally open and anybody can express an opinion, it is hard to control the information available, and sometimes organizations can suffer reputation damage. The content analysis performed in this study allows researchers to look at a larger data set and helps quantify it in a way that provides a broader understanding of how the SMCC model has been applied in crisis research. Furthermore, content analysis can also be used to study media releases, interviews, and crisis responses adopted by organizations.

Another trend that has emerged recently is using computers to conduct content analysis. Automated content analysis identifies key words in crisis messages, as well as their sentiment (e.g., positive, negative) and different frames (what parts of the message are more salient than others) (van der Meer, 2016). This is a useful methodology because crises are constructed through conversations among different actors; computer-based content analysis allows us to look at large data sets and provides better insight into crisis discourse. Performing this type of analysis helps identify and systematize patterns in large amounts of texts while at the same time reducing time and labor costs. However, there are certain drawbacks as well. Although computer analysis could be more reliable and systematic, it cannot replace the human element because it cannot provide a careful reading of text but rather looks only at word frequencies to inform the analysis (van Der Meer, 2016).

Case studies and content analysis can be used to study what was done in a specific crisis situation, to identify key variables such as crisis types and crisis response strategies, or perhaps to explore how these are related to one another. For example, what crisis response strategies do organizations use depending on the type of crisis they are experiencing. However, case studies or content analysis could not be used to make any inferences about causation. In other words, we cannot explain why organizations choose one crisis response over another in a given crisis situation. Furthermore, we cannot use this type of research to make any recommendations about what the best crisis response might be for a crisis intervention or how the response will affect stakeholder perceptions of the organization. Formal research can address these issues because it seeks to understand cause–effect relationships between crisis types, crisis response strategies, and crisis outcomes. This type of research is quantitative in nature.

Formal research methods

Formal research seeks to establish the relationship between different variables and outcomes. Moreover, experiments are the most rigorous type of quantitative research because they require researchers to carefully control for any factors outside of the study that can influence the results. The experiment is the only way to know for sure whether one variable causes a change in another. For example, we can test whether an apology after a product recall affects organizational reputation with an experiment. In this case, we will be testing the relationship between the crisis intervention (i.e., apology) and the crisis outcome (i.e., reputation). Cause-and-effect is critical for interventions because we need to know the specific effects of an intervention on the intended outcomes. For instance, we often want to know what effect various crisis response strategies (interventions) have on post-crisis reputation and purchase. Formal methods provide stronger evidence because the evidence can establish a cause–effect relationship through statistical analysis and not just rely on a researcher’s interpretation of the effects.

Triantafillidou and Yannas (2020) used an experimental design to examine the effects of three social media platforms and four crisis response strategies on stakeholder perceptions following a racially charged crisis. The social media platforms were Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and the image restoration strategies included denial, evasion of responsibility, reduction of offensiveness, corrective action, and mortification (i.e., accepting responsibility for the crisis). The results indicated that Twitter was more effective in restoring post-crisis reputation than Facebook. Additionally, the corrective action response strategy affected online engagement more positively than any of the other strategies, regardless of the social media platform used to communicate the message. The most obvious advantage of using experiments is they help explain cause–effect relationships and, therefore, guide evidence-based recommendations for crisis communication praxis. However, caution should still be exercised when generalizing the results. Even though the Triantafillidou and Yannas study included more than 500 respondents, it examined only one type of crisis (racially charged one), and therefore the results could not be considered necessarily true for other crisis types. While any evidence is better than no evidence, cause-and-effect evidence is the most valuable when evaluating interventions (Pfeffer & Sutton, 2006).

Evidence-based approach to crisis communication

Crisis communication is applied because theory and practice go hand in hand. Many of the cases that research uses to develop and improve theories are based on real-life organizations and their actual responses to crises. Theory should help the practice by enhancing problem-solving capabilities. An evidence-based approach suggests that recommendations for crisis communication interventions should be accepted only if they are based on data and not just assumptions or accepted wisdom (Rousseau, 2006). The practitioner then interprets the research results through their own experience. Practitioners determine if the research would fit their situations or if some factors not covered in the research might limit its application to their situations. The value of an evidence-based approach has been recognized in many fields such as medicine, where it originated, as well as management and social work, for instance (Latham, 2018). We will use an example of interventions to explain the process because crisis communication consists of interventions at different points in time regarding a specific situation (i.e., a crisis). The idea is that the research is used to assess how effective or ineffective different interventions can potentially be. The practitioners then use this data as evidence when making decisions about how to go about a certain situation. However, the quality of the data depends on the method used to collect the data. Typically, the cause-and-effect evidence provided from formal research is of the most value. As mentioned earlier, quan...