Comparing apology to equivalent crisis response strategies: Clarifying apology's role and value in crisis communication

Crisis communication has begun to systematically examine how people perceive the crisis response strategies using experimental designs. This is an important step in the evolution of crisis communication research. One problem with this research has been the over promotion of apology as “the” response. Too often the value of an apology is established by comparing how people react to an apology and to other less victim-centered/accommodative responses. This “unfair” comparison results in apology appearing to be “the” best alternative. This study compares apology to more equivalent crisis response strategies to more fairly determine if apology is “the” best strategy. The results show that people react similarly to any victim-centered/accommodative strategy meaning apology is not “the” best strategy. The implications of the results for crisis managers are discussed.     

Using value modeling to evaluate social media messages: The case of Hurricane Irene

Emerging technologies, advances in social media, and new communication platforms have transformed how crisis communicators reach their audiences and partner agencies in a variety of situations. Not only do individuals and organizations communicate differently during a crisis, but they are also perceived very differently; social media platforms and messages add to the challenges involved in maintaining the overall reputation of brands and corporations. To better understand the new messaging system and its effects, the researchers analyzed social media crisis messages and messaging theory through various qualitative and quantitative value modeling techniques and generated a simple baseline model for what constitutes a “good” crisis message. Using data collected during Hurricane Irene, the researchers used this baseline model to rank effective and ineffective messages to determine whether the most followed/forwarded messages fit this model, and to identify a set of new best practices for crisis communicators and reputation management monitors using social media platforms.     

How publics use social media to respond to blame games in crisis communication: The Love Parade tragedy in Duisburg 2010

Crisis communication scholarship has been criticized for its “managerial bias” and for its tendency to marginalize the perspective of publics and audiences. However, the understanding of how publics cope with and interpret crises is crucial for developing the body of knowledge in crisis communication, from both critical and managerial/functionalist perspectives. This case study of the Love Parade crisis in Germany 2010 aimed at exploring how publics perceived the crisis response of the festival organizers and how they used social media to communicate about it shortly after the outbreak of the crisis. A content analysis of 1847 postings at two relevant message boards produced support for the assumption that attributions of cause and responsibility are important predictors of publics’ evaluations of organizations in crisis situations. Findings also revealed that stakeholders actively engage in such attributional inferences spontaneously without being prompted by researchers. The analysis of responsibility perceptions as well as evaluative judgments over time supported the situational crisis communication theory. Blaming others and denying responsibility in the context of a crisis that was perceived as human error accident triggered negative reputational outcomes for the organizations involved in the Love Parade.     

Crisis communication in higher education: The use of “negotiation” as a strategy to manage crisis

This case study examined the crisis response strategies of Louisiana State University after its women's head basketball coach resigned amid charges of inappropriate conduct with former basketball players. This case study draws on relationship management and negotiation as the theoretical lens to examine the efforts of the University in managing relationships and restoring its image. Data for this study was collected through opened-ended questionnaires from students, faculty, and staff at the University. The findings from this study indicate that the good reputation of the University was responsible for the positive evaluation of the crisis management. In addition, results from this study suggest that “negotiation” can play an important role in managing a crisis when the conflicting parties are not willing to participate in a dialogue.     

Defining the characteristics of a lingering crisis: Lessons from the National Zoo

This article begins to define the characteristics of a new type of organizational crisis—a “lingering crisis.” A qualitative case study involving the National Zoo indicated that a lingering crisis may involve (1) multiple events occurring over an extended timeframe; (2) intense media scrutiny; (3) escalating involvement of external organizations, including watchdog/regulatory/oversight agencies; (4) incongruent organizational messages and stakeholder perceptions; (5) external/internal charges of organizational deception; (6) insufficient organizational responses to stakeholder concerns; (7) organizational failure to address leadership responsibility for crisis.     

Strategic framing in the BP crisis: A semantic network analysis of associative frames

This paper contributes to the analysis of the interplay of public relations and news in crisis situations, and the conceptualization of strategic framing by introducing the idea of associative frames and the method of semantic network analysis to the PR research field. By building on a more advanced understanding of communication as process of social meaning construction that is embedded in networks of differential relations between different actors, it contributes to extend the perspective of first- and second-order agenda building towards a kind of “third order” or “network agenda building”. Via an automated content analysis of more than 3700 articles we examine agenda- and frame-differences between public relations, UK and US news in the BP crisis. The study documents that BP successfully applied a decoupling strategy: It dissociated itself from being responsible for the cause and at the same time presented itself as solvent of the crisis. It shows that in crises, associative frames in PR resonate partly to associative frames in news. Especially the US news followed BP and did not succeed in presenting political actors as solution providers.     

Examining characteristics of prebunking strategies to overcome PR disinformation attacks

In 2020, Twitter launched a new strategy dubbed ‘prebunking’ in hopes of pre-emptively countering false information about voting by mail and election results. Prebunking was touted as a potential solution; however, little empirical research has tested the strategy to examine its effectiveness towards disinformation in the realm of public relations. Exploring PR-based disinformation attacks as a paracrisis, the purpose of this online quasi-experimental design study (N = 965) was to investigate the effects of an attack and how prebunking strategies, grounded in inoculation theory, can protect organizational outcomes (i.e., reputation and credibility) by interweaving positive psychology. In addition to examining effects on attitudinal components, this study also inspected dimensions of social amplification to determine if prebunking messages can thwart the spread of disinformation via Facebook. Findings provide insight into advancing the conceptual framework of proactive disinformation responses for crisis communication by demonstrating the success of using prebunking with autonomy support and explicit details to thwart adverse effects of disinformation.     

Remembering disaster: Since the media do,so must public relations

Only recently has research begun concerning the longer-term aftermath of organizational crisis. This essay presents the genre of disaster rhetoric as a viable strategy to address the problems and opportunities that arise when the media write about crisis anniversaries or news stories that refer to any crisis or disaster, past or present. After a brief review of genre theory, the authors outline the seven functions of the “rhetoric of disaster” and provide multiple examples of their application to public relations activity and its news coverage. The essay concludes with questions that practitioners may use proactively in the development of copy points to address each of the rhetoric of disaster's functions.     

Reflexive audiovisual methodology: The emergence of “minority practices” among pluriactive stock farmers

This paper proposes a new way for sociology, through both methodology and theory, to understand the reality of social groups and their “minority practices.” It is based on an experiment that concerns a very specific category of agriculturalists called “pluriactive” stock farmers. These stock farmers, who engage in raising livestock part-time alongside another full-time job, form a minority category within the agricultural profession.We address the question of how to analyze and represent the practices of this kind of “social” group or category through participatory filmmaking. Our research shows that beyond the collaborative production and screening of the film done in close cooperation with the stock farmers themselves, a second unexpected dynamic emerged around the sequences that were cut in the final editing round. These cut sequences reveal hesitations and disagreements among the breeders about their own practices in relation to their work and to animal welfare. These hesitations are not considered weaknesses, but rather as proof of the emergence of this group of stock farmers as “practitioners”. In the realm of intervention research, the participatory film-making process is attractive because it enables the farmers to raise new questions on their own, discuss them, and eventually resolve them, while also encouraging the researchers to identify the conditions that must be met in order to achieve this fragile linkage. This process and its outcomes force us to revisit the theoretical question of what constitutes a pragmatic definition of a “practice.”     

L’accountability à l’épreuve des incertitudes : le mandat des acheteurs d’énergie

Based on a survey of energy buyers in big industries, this article inquires into the different ways of explaining the actions they perform in situations of high, uncontrolled uncertainty. Describing energy buyers’ activities, the uncertainties and contradictions affecting them, shows how hard it is to explain them, make them visible or justify the decisions made. Energy buyers develop two forms of “accountability”: they claim to have been granted decision-making powers and ask to be evaluated on the basis of their results; or else they “socialize” their activities by involving corporate managers in decision-making. It is argued that “accountability” is stabilized in line with a collective learning process where the experience of uncertainty has a key place.     

Empathy as a main ingredient of impactful crisis communication: The perspectives of crisis communication practitioners

Sixteen in-depth interviews with Belgian crisis communication practitioners were conducted to get their perspectives on the role of empathy in crisis communication. While demonstrating empathy toward crisis-affected stakeholders is considered an essential best practice, the role of empathy in responding to crises has only received limited attention in research. The aims of this study were to examine how practitioners interpret the concept of empathy in crisis communication; to what extent they value the expression of empathy in crisis responses and for what reasons; and what exactly constitutes an empathetic crisis response according to them. In addition, instances in which stakeholders may in turn experience empathy for organizations in crisis were examined. As such, the aspiration behind this study was to provide insights that can initiate further theorization and research on the role of empathy in the context of organizational crisis communication.     

Crisis communication online: How medium,crisis type and emotions affected public reactions in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster

Social media play in today's societies a fundamental role for the negotiation and dynamics of crises. However, classical crisis communication theories neglect the role of the medium and focus mainly on the interplay between crisis type and crisis communication strategy. Building on the recently developed “networked crisis communication model” we contrast effects of medium (Facebook vs. Twitter vs. online newspaper) and crisis type (intentional vs. victim) in an online experiment. Using the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster as crisis scenario, we show that medium effects are stronger than the effects of crisis type. Crisis communication via social media resulted in a higher reputation and less secondary crisis reactions such as boycotting the company than crisis communication in the newspaper. However, secondary crisis communication, e.g. talking about the crisis communication, was higher in the newspaper condition than in the social media conditions because people consider traditional media as more credible. We also found higher levels of anger in the intentional crisis condition than in the victim crisis condition. Anger in turn was related to reputation, secondary crisis communication and secondary crisis reaction. The results stress the need for more complex models of crisis communication.     

Nanoblogging PR: The discourse on public relations in Twitter

By analysing 653 tweets that include the word “public relations” or the acronym “PR”, the purpose of this paper is to show how Twitter contributes to the development of the theory and practice of public relations. In order to achieve this aim, an exploratory research has been conducted.     

The National Review “fires” Christopher Buckley: Image restoration and the rhetoric of severance and restraint

Image Restoration Discourse, Situational Crisis Communication Theory, and related crisis-response models tend to involve charges leveled at entities: individuals or organizations. In The New Rhetoric, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca suggest an important mid-ground: stakeholder concerns regarding aberrant actions of a member of a larger public. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's “techniques of severance and restraint” comprise 11 strategies for countering the possible effects of an aberrant member's acts on the image and reputation of a larger public. This article will explore those techniques through an examination of how the National Review Online, the Web site complement of National Review magazine, responded to columnist Christopher Buckley's endorsement of Barack Obama in the 2008 U.S. presidential election.     

The parallel power in organizations’ defense: Exploring faith-holders and their crisis communication

Publics can be active participants of discussions around organizational crises. Through digital media, they can provide information about a crisis, criticize crisis participants or defend the organization experiencing the crisis (Coombs & Holladay, 2014). Limited research exists on the active role of publics in defending the organization. A handful of studies have looked at crisis communication of active organization supporters, including faith-holders (Luoma-aho, 2015); however there is a limited amount of public relations scholarship about the nature of faith-holders, their communication under crisis circumstances, and whether they in fact attempt to help organizations in times of crisis. By using a combination of content analysis and rhetorical analysis, this paper examined the crisis communication strategies offered by the organization’s faith-holders in the comments to the crisis-related articles published on the websites of media outlets. Through a case study of Tesla Motors’ crisis, the paper determined that faith-holders are a powerful force in defending the organization during the crisis, using both traditional reputation repair strategies identified by Coombs (2015) as well as new strategies identified by the study. Faith-holders were not a monolithic group and differed in terms of what aspects of the organization they had faith. Their communication was not restricted by legal and ethical demands. The results provide insights into understanding of faith-holders’ communication during crises, and also highlight the need for reconsidering the situational crisis communication theory in respect to organizations' faith-holders.     

Examining the expertise,experience, and expedience of crisis consultants in Singapore

By most accounts, crisis preparedness in organizations globally has been appalling (0035 and 0250). The situation is no different in Singapore (Wu & Dai, 2001). With crisis expertise often lacking from within organizations, many resort to engaging public relations (PR) agencies to help. This study, which is inspired by Frandsen and Johansen's (2008) study in Denmark, aims to evaluate the contributions of consultants from PR agencies. Adapting indicators to assess professionalism proposed by Lages and Simkin (2003) and Sallot, Cameron and Lariscy (1997) and integrating them with variables from the contingency theory (Pang, Jin, & Cameron, 2010), this study seeks to examine: (1) the level of expertise of consultants in offering crisis management consultancy; (2) the level of experience of consultants offering crisis management consultancy; and (3) the value and expedience of the consultancy services offered. Findings showed that agencies in Singapore hired consultants based on skills such as writing, speaking and ability to manage the media. For some, lack of direct experience was compensated by in-house training. International agencies appeared to have an advantage over the local agencies by virtue of their access to expertise and knowledge from their international network. However, as the majority of agencies had only managed few crises, it was difficult to assess the value these consultants added. Studies examining consultants in PR agencies are rare. It is hoped this study would trigger research around the world.     

Appropriation et régulation des innovations biotechnologiques : pour une comparaison transatlantique

This article analyzes two biotechnological innovations — the tests of tracking the genetic risks of diseases and the transgenic organisms — and explores the controversies concerning the status of these new knowledges and the ways there are applied. It shows how these innovations were received in a different way in the United States and in France. The market regulation, which is strong in the USA is problematic in France. It is marginalized by the professional regulation in the case of the genetic tests. And in the other case it is limited by the control of the state, which constitutes some resources for the mobilization of the civil society against transgenic organisms. Finally the comparison consolidates the hypothesis of the emergence of a new regime of production of the knowledge, specified by the tension between a “market” regulation and a “consumerist-civic” regulation.     

How financial crisis history informs ethical corporate communication: Insights from corporate communication leaders

This study explored how financial crisis history can inform corporate crisis communication practice across industries and over time. Thirty-eight interviews with chief communications officers (CCOs) and their counselors were conducted to explore what lasting lessons these corporate communication leaders learned from their crisis communication practice during the 2008 Financial Crisis. Key lessons learned include: 1) the importance for corporations to tailor their financial communication strategies according to victim vs. perpetrator perception and ethical response expectations held by stakeholders; 2) the importance of stakeholders, and employees in particular, when creating and implementing the plan; 3) the balance between speed and legal concerns, as well as the need for reducing complexity by making sure stakeholder communications are delivered with clarity and accessibility; and 4) a recipe for success includes honesty, transparency, trust/integrity, taking action to reform questionable practices, and abiding by one’s own personal morals. Insights from this study shed light on how learning contributes to ethical corporate communication practice in times of crisis and crisis spillover.     

Construction d'un problème public autour du dopage et reconnaissance d'une spécialité médicale

The formation of a professional specialty — sports medicine — is described with emphasis on how drug abuse has become a public issue. This notion's itinerary is traced between 1955 and 1999 so as to show how doctors with different profiles and activities successively raised the issue of “doping”. The objectives of medicine, as it was being applied to sports, gradually changed. At the start, the intention was to cure, a view that celebrated the virtues of practicing a sport and it condemned using drugs. A new field of medical competence was opened with the “biological preparation of performances”, which, though presented as an alternative to using drugs, blurred the boundaries with doping. Medical positions became polarized: on the one side, a science of training took shape around the physiology of physical efforts, which made it possible to intensify activities while optimizing them thanks to rest periods; and on the other side, clinicians who, in closer contact with the everyday life of players, both understood the requirements ensuing from a continuous renewal of performances and tended to favor taking “products” for “curative” purposes. Sports medicine was legitimated as a medical specialty on two grounds: the one, obvious, sets doping at odds with health; and the other, aberrant from the viewpoint of health but nonetheless accepted, associates intensive sports with health.     

When tourists are your “friends”: Exploring the brand personality of Mexico and Brazil on Facebook

Adopting Aaker's (1997) framework, this study explored how popular tourist destinations, Mexico and Brazil, communicate their brand personality through Facebook, and which personality traits their Facebook “friends” associate with them. Results of computer-aided content analysis indicated that both countries’ tourism promotion messages emphasize distinct brand personality traits. However, Mexico's public relations efforts were more successful than Brazil's in transferring projected brand personality to its Facebook “friends”.