CRISIS COMMUNICATION

First of all what is crisis?? A crisis is a major, unpredictable event that threatens to harm an organization and its stakeholders. Crises are unpredictable and unexpected. They affect all the constituencies of an organization. Crisis can be categorized into avoidable and unavoidable crisis. Avoidable crisis are those crisis which occur due to employee negligence, carelessness, malicious intent etc. unavoidable crisis are due to natural calamities such as fire accidents, earthquakes, tsunami etc. hence a company should have the ability to manage these crisis effectively for its survival. The practice of crisis management involves attempts to eliminate technological failure as well as the development of formal communication systems to avoid or to manage crisis situations and is a discipline within the broader context of management. Crisis management consists of skills and techniques required to assess, understand, and cope with any serious situation, especially from the moment it first occurs to the point that recovery procedures start. Crisis management consists of methods used to respond to both the reality and perception of crises such as a Crisis Management Plan. Crisis management also involves establishing metrics to define what scenarios constitute a crisis and should consequently trigger the necessary response mechanisms. It consists of the communication that occurs within the response phase of emergency management scenarios.

Centralized communication is the most efficient component during the crisis. In today’s world there are a number of companies facing crisis due to the lack of efficient internal and external communication network. Some of the companies which faced the crisis in the recent years are Coke India (pesticide issue), Cadbury (worms in the chocolates), Johnson & Johnson (Tylenol) etc. But all these companies are still successfully running their business in the market and the reason being they all developed a good communicating strategy during the crisis. One important decision to be made by the corporate communication manager during the crisis is Channel Choice to convey the message directly to the affected constituencies.

Few years back there was a sudden change in the packaging of Cadbury’s chocolates from its traditional style. The reason behind this was the company was trying to communicate to its customers through its new look, that it was selling a quality product. It immediately removed its affected products which was accused of containing worms from the self and stopped its production for few months. Then it came up with a new product advertisement endorsed by the Bollywood superstar “Amitab Bachan”. Cadbury was successful in overcoming this crisis and this was done by adopting the most strategic communication.


RELATED LINKS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_management

http://www3.niu.edu/newsplace/crisis.html

http://www.managementhelp.org/crisis/crisis.htm