5 Things Companies Can Learn from Tiger’s Crisis Communications Mistakes

Unless you’ve had your head stuck in a sand trap lately, you’ve undoubtedly seen the endless news images of Tiger Woods’ smashed SUV and the photos of women who claim to have been intimately involved with the superstar. What you haven’t seen is Tiger Woods. He’s been conspicuously absent from the public dialog that exploded in the wake of his early-morning car crash and the frenzy of allegations of infidelity and domestic violence that quickly followed.

Far worse than the crumpled fender and smashed rear window are the huge hits that Tiger Woods’ personal brand has taken the past couple weeks. Team Tiger ignored virtually every tenet of crisis communications and as a result, the Tiger Woods brand has been severely tarnished. The unanticipated and rapid damage highlights the importance of a crisis communications plan as an essential component of brand management.

Here are 5 things every brand should know about crisis communications.

1. Respond quickly: Get out in front of the story. Set the pace and tone of the communications. Tiger’s 40+ hour response time was the media equivalent of a lifetime – and plenty of time for the story to take on a life of its own.

2. Respond openly and publicly: Deal with the situation head-on and in the open. If you or your company don’t talk, someone else will. Blogs can be an essential tool in crisis communications, but be careful that you don’t give the impression (like Tiger) that you’re hiding behind it.

3. Be honest: Be as open, candid and responsive as appropriate under the circumstances. It’s about regaining trust; truth and transparency are key. Explain what steps are being taken to address the situation and promise to keep the public and the media informed.

4. Acknowledge the Harm: Someone’s been hurt and everybody knows it. You need to show that you know it too. This is the time to step up and demonstrate compassion.

5. Apologize: This doesn’t mean admitting guilt. But there’s nothing so powerful as a contrite apology and an expression of sorrow or sadness for the harm done.

Tiger Woods doesn’t get a mulligan on this one. But if you’re carefully managing your brand and have a solid crisis communications plan in place and ready to execute, you shouldn’t need one.

An Attitude of Gratitude

The late professor and philosopher, Robert Solomon, may have been right when he commented on how infrequently Americans speak about gratitude. We don’t give it much thought except on one day of the year – Thanksgiving.

This year expressing our gratitude is especially needed – and, perhaps, especially difficult. Over the past two decades, we’ve developed a sense of need and entitlement. Our culture told us that we can’t be happy until we have certain things; that our sense of well being and fulfillment will be complete when we buy (product name here). As individuals – and as a society, that mentality was all fine until the stock market came crashing down and the overall economic downturn caused all the but the shamelessly wealthy to rein in their spending. So what now? How can we be satisfied if we don’t have more things? Amidst the housing crisis, record job loss and domestic and global economic chaos, how can we feel grateful when there’s so much going wrong?

There’s reason to feel grateful and researchers have found that gratitude makes a powerful impact on health, happiness and social connection.

Robert Emmons, a professor at the University of California, Davis, and author of the book “Thanks! How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier” found that people who display gratitude are in better physical health. Other researchers found that grateful people have lower stress hormones. (McCraty, Barrios-Choplin, Rozman, Atkinson and Watkins, 1998.)

Now marketers have a reason to be grateful. Recently published in the Journal of Marketing, research shows that when Relationship Marketing generates feelings of gratitude it has a strong influence on customers’ short-term purchase intentions.

So whether your motivation is personal or aimed at giving your company’s sales a boost, we could all use to express a little bit of gratitude – today and every day.

Will your brand survive or thrive the recession?

This has been a tough year for consumers and marketers alike. Amidst rising prices, job layoffs and an uncertain (at best) economy, consumers have tightened their belts and postponed spending on non-essentials. Even luxury purchases, which were seemingly recession-proof, have taken big hits as their customers took similarly big hits as the market tanked and they watched their assets shrink.

Marketers, too, have become more lean in the past year. They’ve trimmed the fat wherever possible and figured out ways to do more with less.

Although economists don’t agree on when and how quickly we’ll crawl out of this recession, there are indications that at least some aspects of the economy are improving. But recovery won’t come quickly.

In the meantime, the question marketers should be asking themselves is whether they intend to just survive the recession or whether they will position themselves to thrive when it’s over. The answer to that question – and how they manage in the coming months – will have a direct impact on what their business will look like when the recession is over.

Smart marketers will remember lessons learned from previous recessions: keeping focus on brand building will pay off in the long run. Forward-thinking brands will use their time and resources to build brand loyalty – not in terms of increased consumer spend – but in the raw terms of true loyalty – so that when brighter times arrive, their brand will be healthy and relevant, and poised to take advantage of what is sure to be a more favorable economic environment.

Everything Old is New Again

When I was growing up, my grandfather owned an appliance repair and housewares store in our small New Jersey town. I vividly remember him at his workbench, breathing new life into toasters, blenders and other appliances; and even replacing broken slats in window blinds. In those days, we had relationships with our stuff. We purchased things with the intention of keeping them. If something broke we fixed it.

Then things changed. Just about everything became a short-term purchase. If the jar to the blender broke, we bought a whole new one. Never mind that the motor still worked just fine, or that the cost of replacing it was many times more than that of just buying a new jar. If one of the slots in our toaster no longer toasted our bagels to perfection, we bought a new one.  No matter that the other slots still worked just fine.

The current economic climate has changed things again and we’re seeing Americans embrace attitudes of thrift and frugality. People are keeping and repairing the things they have rather than simply replacing them.  Old habits like repairing shoes are back in fashion.  The Shoe Service Institute of America reports that shoe repair shops are experiencing 25 – 30% increases in their business over the prior year.

I recently came across one new business that is capturing a piece of this new repair-not-replace mentality: Denim Therapy. You know that favorite pair of jeans that ripped in the wrong place?  Denim Therapy will make them almost-new again! Just send them your jeans and they’ll analyze the indigo saturation, weight and wear, select from their wide-range of threads, and reconstruct the original denim material. Voila! Good-as-new jeans. And all for a fraction of the cost of a new pair!

According to Denim Therapy, “we not only fix jeans, we rebuild relationships.” How’s that for helping Americans reconnect with their stuff?