42. Crisis Management

In my last blog, I spoke about the importance of maintaining a reputation. In this blog, I would like to talk about the importance of managing the aftermath after one’s reputation is affected which is crisis management. Crisis management is the process by which an organisation or a brand handles sudden emergencies or an event that threatens to harm the reputation or its stakeholders. Crisis management is an interesting and challenging field. It is in your hands on how to proceed when a crisis arrives. Crisis management can be divided into three phases:

1) Pre-crisis

2) Crisis response

3) Post-crisis

At SCoRe, I have crisis management as a subject. In a class assignment, we were divided into two groups where we were given two crisis and we had to work on them as a team. One group had to manage the KFC crisis where KFC outlets run out of chicken and my group had to work on the Toyota crisis where Toyota cars have been facing speed acceleration issues leading to accidents. Working as a team we realised how complex managing crisis procedure is. We have to deal with legal advisors, digital teams, CEO, internal and external stakeholders, situation analysts, media, etc. Crisis management involves managing digital media, creating holding statements, communication for internal and external stakeholders, preparing FAQs, manual on how to handle the crisis and so on.  If a brand or an organisation fails to handle its crisis smoothly it can ruin its reputation forever. In today’s day, a simple comment on social media can cause destruction. Companies have to be extra cautious regarding their reputations because now it is considered extremely fragile. At SCoRe we students are trained practically as well.  Hence, we know during a crisis three steps are most fundamental which includes Avoid, Minimize and Mitigate.