Sticky Situations

Think viral marketing is hard? Try “antidote marketing,” applying a tourniquet-or a full-body cast — to a brand injured by toxic public relations hits.

Plenty of companies have had to run for the emergency kit in the last year and a half. Some have recovered well, healed their wounds and gone on to live full corporate lives. Others may never be the same again. Just look at a partial list of the disabled:

• Bags of spinach from Dole, Trader Joe’s and more than 30 other brands are recalled in September 2006 for possible E. coli contamination.

• Taco Bell outlets in three North-eastern states are closed temporarily in December 2006 after an E. coli bacterial outbreak sent five dozen patrons to hospitals.

• On Valentine’s Day 2007, JetBlue airlines passengers are stuck on the tarmac at New York’s LaGuardia Airport — without food and with overflowing sanitary facilities — for up to 10 hours due to ice conditions.

• On the same day, ConAgra announces a recall of all Peter Pan peanut butter and jars of Great Value peanut butter made at a single facility in Georgia after the Center for Disease Control said a salmonella outbreak sickened more than 625 people across the nation.

• Menu Foods and other manufacturers recall 60 million cans of dog and cat food of various brands in March after 16 pets die from consuming melamine, an industrial compound illegally added to ingredients imported from China.

• Between Aug. 1 and Sept. 4 Mattel does a product recall hat trick, with a string of three global recalls of toys made in China — 21 million units — mostly for suspected contamination with paints containing lead.

That’s a lot of bad news in need of a fix.

A fix, not a “spin,” says Gene Grabowski, senior vice president at Levick Strategic Communications, a crisis-management firm that has won kudos for handling such cases as the California spinach growers’ E. coli problem last year. He says that companies too often let the survival instinct take over in an emergency.

“When disaster strikes, the first instinct of leadership is often to worry about the company, or the stock price, or the management team, the production line, their own jobs or bonuses,” he says. “The last thing they think about is, ‘What is that mom with two kids in the shopping cart thinking about my product right now?’”

GET THE FACTS OUT, STAT

He adds: “If companies could just do that one thing — put themselves in the consumer’s place, and work backwards from that — 80% of crises could be managed and end up favorably.”

Without doubt, putting consumers first means offering a sincere apology and as full an explanation as you can possibly give of how the problems occurred and what’s being done to resolve them and keep them from happening again.

And today’s news cycles call for a quick response, as quick as you can manage it. “Before the Web, when a problem happened, you could write a letter to the newspaper, introduce your PR and plan how you were going to address the issue,” says Allen Adamson, managing director with brand-management firm Landor Associates and the author of “Brand Simple.” “Today, if you don’t respond quickly and in real time, you can make the problem much worse.”

In the case of the serial Mattel recalls, the apology and the remedy came very quickly, at least once the company realized it faced the possibility of future bad news. Within hours of the Aug. 14 recall decision, CEO Robert Eckert was in front of the cameras at all the cable news outlets extending an “I’m sorry” to consumers in the U.S. and abroad who bought the toys.

Mattel’s speedy apology was necessary in part because the problem involved children. Consumers are quick to pick up on threats to beings who can’t protect themselves, and companies who cater to those markets need to be fast with a full response to a PR emergency. “There’s no greater problem for a toy company than product safety,” Adamson says. “Mattel couldn’t afford to wait for all the facts to come out before handling the issue.”

Tailor The Apology To The Brand

Manufacturing today is often a complex global operation, and offering explanations when things go wrong can be a complex story. But it’s important to tell it clearly and spread it quickly, both to counter inevitable rumors and to get consumers started on a process of reassurance that the issue won’t happen again.

Here again, Mattel gets high marks for laying out the many safety checks on its overseas dealings with subcontractors, why those may have failed, and the economic drivers that led Mattel to move about 65% of its manufacturing over to China in the first place. The basic plotline to that story was that American consumers want lower prices, which means cheaper labor, which means overseas factories for Mattel and most of its toymaker competition.

That’s the corollary to Grabowski’s first law: Level with consumers. “Explain to people how you got where you are now,” he says. “Tell them you did this because you wanted to make these toys as affordable as possible for everybody.”

By contrast, Menu Foods, one of the manufacturers involved in the large pet-food recall this spring, appeared to be stonewalling in the early stages of the pet food crisis. The company produces “wet” pet food that’s sold under more than 60 brand names. That’s a complicated recall, but the Menu Foods Web page devoted to the recall is a very spare list of those brands, completely counter to the highly emotional pull of the problem.

The company was also slow to admit that its basic ingredient systems could be at fault, jumping instead on one scientific analysis that found rat poison in some of the food. Two weeks after the first recall, when it became clear to the FDA and everyone else that the problem was in the raw materials, Menu Foods CEO and president David Henderson held a news conference rather than doing TV interviews.

Meanwhile, TV and the Web were busy featuring photos of ailing dogs and cats. A Southern California fox terrier named Pebbles died shortly after eating some of the Menu-made pet food and quickly became an informal but emotional symbol of the recall.

Significantly, the brands for which Menu Foods supplied product and the retailers who sell them have been as proactive about communicating with pet owners as the manufacturer has been close-mouthed. PetSmart and PETCO both e-mailed recall notifications to their house customer lists. PETCO even matched its lists to transaction records to identify pet owners who might have bought foods involved in the recall.

Pet food brands such as Iams and Eukanuba moved quickly to get recall information up on their Web sites and to update it with each subsequent expansion and refinement — four or five of them so far. Procter & Gamble, which owns those brands, took out full-page ads in papers around the country to inform the public that the dry versions of those brands were not affected by the recall notice.

Of course, P&G may face a different PR problem down the road. The recall has effectively told their customers that at least some items in the Iams and Eukanuba lines — considered “healthier” pet foods and priced accordingly higher — actually come from the same factory as generic pet food sold under the Stop & Shop and Winn Dixie names.

The amount of trust and customer loyalty a brand can muster will also influence the proper strategy for dealing with setbacks.

In the case of Peter Pan peanut butter, the brand has been around since 1928 and is particularly popular near its Georgia home base. After the Food and Drug Administration warned in February of the presence of salmonella in some of the production run, ConAgra Foods pulled the product from store shelves nationwide, sent out messages advising customers to get rid of any stock they might have in their pantries and closed the Georgia plant for inspection and a thorough sanitizing and remodeling.

After six months’ absence, the brand returned to stores in August with a redesigned jar and a prominent guarantee of “100% satisfaction” on the label, but no other reminders of why it went missing.

A press release from ConAgra reported that according to company surveys, almost 80% of consumers who had previously purchased Peter Pan planned to buy it again when available.

Press reports suggest that those stats were correct, at least in the Southern states where the brand’s reappearance on grocery shelves made news. An Aug. 3 poll on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Web site asked if visitors expected to buy Peter Pan again. By Aug. 29 the site had received 65 responses, all but one vociferously pro-Pan. “I need my Peter Pan!!!” one typical respondent wrote. “I miss PBJ sandwiches, and it is the only one I’ll eat!”

With that kind of brand advocacy in its back yard, it seems almost redundant for ConAgra to re-market to consumers via offers. But the Nebraska-based food conglomerate has mounted a very old-school campaign to juice sales of what was the third largest-selling name in peanut butter. ConAgra mailed out 2 million $1-off coupons and is giving $1-off coupons at checkout to people buying other brands.

Customers who contacted the company complaining that Peter Pan had made them ill — and some of the effects of salmonella poisoning are quite memorable — will get a coupon for a free jar of the new stuff. Now that’s relying on brand loyalty.

Use The Web: Your Critics Will

Peter Pan’s old-school approach put a new coat of paint on its Web site but didn’t launch any major online initiatives. But most brands can’t afford to hold themselves so aloof from the Internet conversation.

“The first thing you need to do when there’s a brand crisis is to jump online and see what the bloggers are doing to you,” Adamson says. “You want to get into the dialogue and motivate your loyal users to help you.”

One path into that dialogue is to make sure you optimize Web landing pages for searches related to the PR problem, perhaps even taking out search ads that lead visitors to the information you want them to see.

Lisa Wehr, founder and CEO of online marketing firm OneUpWeb, points out that when Taco Bell had its E. coli run-in last December, the company quickly rolled out a paid search informational marketing campaign, building bilingual microsites to explain the problem and driving traffic with paid search ads on phrases such as “Taco Bell e.coli.”

By contrast, JetBlue handled its flight-delay woes in a less sophisticated Web 1.0 fashion. Then-CEO David Neeleman did the rounds of the news shows; the company took out apologetic newspaper ads and issued 8 press releases in 10 days talking about planned fixes to their system. E-mails went out to their registered customers explaining the scheduling issues that caused the delays.

The problem is, all those good moves got lost in the tidal wave of hostile response, Wehr says. The press releases weren’t optimized for search and so dropped quickly below the fold on a Google results page. Neeleman’s video apology made it onto YouTube but ran up against a host of snarky-to-hostile videos from passengers marooned for eight hours on a JetBlue plane with fully-charged cell cameras and a taste for blood.

After the incident, victims went off and launched blogs with names like JetBlueHostages.com that remain active, still turning up high in the results for searches on “JetBlue delay.” Other social media covering consumer air travel, such as the DailyAviator blog, saw a spike in complaints from JetBlue customers, and even hostile posts from some purporting to be ex-employees.

“This airline had a reputation as hip, cool, customer friendly and a step above everyone else on customer service,” Wehr says. “But they handled the crisis so poorly in the moment and after the moment that people still don’t feel good about it. And those emotions drowned out the Web message that they wanted to convey. Now that brand image is gone.”

People turn to the Web when they want to research news stories and, in particular, when those stories seem threatening. “Optimizing your good news for Google should be a basic tool,” Wehr says. “You should probably also draw up a list of keywords around possible problems. And you should definitely make sure your communications team understands the social media landscape in your company’s field, because that’s where a problem may turn into a PR disaster.”

And it isn’t only poisonous blog posts that live forever on the Web. Grabowski adds that brands need to do everything they can to manage the pictures in a crisis. He points out that a few months after its E. coli encounter, Taco Bell ran into a sanitation crisis at one franchised store in Greenwich Village. The company persuaded the operator to shut the outlet down. But after the closure, news media were able to go to the store at night and shoot sinister video of rats scurrying across the floors. Those clips live on at YouTube, of course, and made Taco Bell’s image problem a hundred times worse.

“Some people said Taco Bell should have boarded up the front windows,” Grabowski says. “But I say they should have kept those windows clear and then gone and cleaned the place from top to bottom. That way the video would have shown not rats but guys in white jumpsuits making the restaurant as clean as it could be. That’s how you get the pictures to work for you in a crisis, not against you.”