How your company or business is perceived is so important in the current climate, it can help you to boost sales and create the effective persona that you want for your business to ensure you survive in difficult times. In general, people make their own opinions on your brand based on how they perceive the messages you deliver, so working with their perception to create or change your public image will result in effective PR.
But wherever there is effective PR, there is the opportunity for bad, ineffective or poorly planned PR and I am writing this blog post to give you examples of truly terrible PR so you can learn from their catastrophic mistakes.
A company that went through substantial bad PR at the beginning of its time, is the money saving site Groupon. Initially hailed as a success and one of the fastest growing businesses ever, the coupon company even had offers from Google for an acquisition, but as the company seemed to be doing everything right, they were turned down. Substantial profits meant, when the advertising slot of the year (half time at the Super Bowl) came about, Groupon decided to invest, and air an advert to promote the company. A misguided attempt at controversial humour meant that their parody of the Tibetan plight against China was not well received. The advert was automatically deemed controversial and as discussions grew and opinions formed, the founder issued an apology. Opposed to traditional apologies used to get out of difficult PR situations that offer sincere and heartfelt sentiments, Groupon released a statement that was said by many to be a feeble attempt, that wasn’t actually an apology at all. On top of this Groupon’s accounts were criticised and said to have been embellished to show the company to be doing better financially that it actually was.
When Blackberry mobiles went down for almost a week last year, one would assume a company of that magnitude would have effective and thorough public relations strategies in place, but when the crisis hit RIM (the Blackberry operating system company) were far from prepared. Blackberry users were forced into a week long black out, unable to use social network facilities, receive their emails, BBMs and enjoy all the services that their hard earned cash paid for.
In an act of what seemed to be thoughtless self provision, throughout the debacle, Blackberry remained silent without commenting on what was happening or what its customers should expect. Messages mobile phone users received when attempting to use their phones were complex and uninterpretable for example “message delays were caused by a core switch failure in RIMs infrastructure”. Not only was the message given, unhelpful but also extremely infuriating due to its lack of content. Blackberry received particularly bad press from this and this morning reports claimed that 71% of Blackberry users would switch to an alternative smartphone service given their disasterous customer service.
It’s not just businesses that can fall foul of poor public relations, the Catholic Church was recently criticised for the way in which it handled child abuse claims. In 2010, a priest from a church in the UK was found to possess child pornography and other compromising pictures of children, including those in his parish. The church failed to report this matter for over a year, in what appeared to be an attempt to sweep the events under the rug , resulting in a costly law suit, and a multi-million pound pay out to victims and the promise for a change in the way these types of cases were dealt with. Although there is the promise of change, the damage to the Catholic Church is undeniable, and acts as yet another example of misconduct to reinforced the already tarnished reputation of the Catholic Church.
When looking through these examples of bad PR, there are certain mistake that are made in each culminating in a complete lack of control throughout the situation. Combined poor organisation and little to no communication resulted in what could have been a small problem sky rocketing into something, that even those unaffected by it can hear and complain about.
This is the controversial advert about Tibet and China, created by Groupon, to advertise their brand during the Super Bowl. What do you think?