VerriBerri are an award-winning crisis management PR agency specialising in improving and maintaining reputations. No matter your industry, from finance to pet brands we have worked with a whole host of sectors. We have been known as industry experts for over a decade. As such, we have a wealth of knowledge when it comes to getting your personal brand or your business out of a crisis. We will uphold your reputation and protect your image.
What is Crisis Management?
We all know that negative news is more interesting to read than positive. At least that’s what psychology shows. Psychology shows that negative news makes us feel better about our own lives. In fact, it’s for this reason that 95% of all news is based around negative topics. The media loves to jump on businesses and release potentially detrimental stories about them. Unfortunately, they’re just sat waiting for you to make a mistake. The job of a crisis management PR agency is to stop these stories from hitting the news or, managing the fallout if the crisis has already happened.
Potential Crisis’ You Could Face
It would be silly for you to assume that your business is safe when it comes to your reputation. Sadly, no business can escape this. Luckily for some, crises are more regularly reported on when your company is larger and in the public eye. Having said this, smaller companies are more likely to go under if this happens due to having a smaller overflow of disposal money to survive a fall in profit. So, let’s discuss some of the potential crisis’ you could face as a business.
The types of predicaments can be split into the following categories:
Staff Crisis
The best way to often explain things in the simplest way possible is to give examples. Let’s look at a children’s brand for instance. You would hope that anyone working with children has been properly vetted however, a scenario has definitely happened before where they haven’t. Let’s say you employ someone without knowing that they have a criminal record or are in some way deviant. If anyone catches wind of this, it’s likely that your business will be featured in every publication possible; making it extremely difficult to come back from. This is where having a crisis management PR agency on-board may be helpful in protecting your reputation as a brand and stop this from happening.
Customer Crisis
Now let’s imagine you’re a property developing company. All it takes is one customer to be unhappy with your work and they can take it to the tabloids. People can be picky and sometimes their comments are unfair. Despite this, news outlets are quick to jump on these stories and ruin your reputation. One of our clients actually came to us once with this exact issue and we were able to completely turn it around for them and get them back on the right track. This has massively improved their business and they still work with us today. All the PR now, thankfully, is positive.
Product Crisis
No matter your industry, there are thousands of things that can potentially go wrong with your product. From recalls to badly planned marketing campaigns, sometimes things are unavoidable. Crisis management can act as a way to minimise the damage meaning your brand doesn’t take too much of a hit when problems arise.
Why it’s Important to Avoid a Crisis
It’s hard to escape the news and even harder not to believe what you read. It’s for this reason that it’s important to avoid crisis no matter how important.
PR can already be quite a hit and miss process. Imagine putting all your hard work and effort into securing quality publications only for a negative news story to overshadow them all. With the way of the world, bad coverage massively overshines the positive, as we mentioned previously. With the country being in a recession currently, it’s unlikely you’ll want to take a hit in profits.
It takes seconds to shatter the reputation of a company. However, it can take years to build it back up. Look at SeaWorld for example. Although they’re somehow still in business, the Blackfish documentary completely ruined their reputation and they are now known for their mistreatment of animals. This is bound to have had a detrimental effect on their revenue. Although they have tried to turn this around, their efforts seemingly have failed.
Another example is TSB. When they experienced their IT failure, they had a total of 95,000 complaints made and as a result, lost 12,500 customers.
How to Avoid a Crisis
Now we have discussed why you should avoid them; we should probably discuss how you can avoid a crisis. Afterall, it would seem counterproductive not to.
Although sometimes impossible, avoiding negative or controversial topics is absolutely imperative. Comparatively, this can also go the other way. It’s hard to get the balance right but not speaking out about things that really matter, such as the Black Lives Matter movement the LGBTQ+ community; to name a few examples, can actually make your company look bad as well.
Planning for the future is also a great way to avoid potential crisis. Being aware of possible things that can arise from upcoming marketing will help your company to be proactive in your approach. A way you may plan for the future is by liaising with a crisis management PR agency.
Contact Us
Every company should have a contingency plan in place however many forget to consider crisis management. If you’re looking into bringing on-board a crisis management PR agency, we would be more than happy to get involved. For more information on how we can help your brand, get in touch today or call the office on 01376 386 850.