Handling Negative Publicity
Any publicity is good publicity… or is it? Bad publicity may be a great way to generate buzz, but it does horrible things to your reputation that stay in anyone’s mind. Any company should take care to avoid the mistake of letting things be or being permissive until the scandal blows over instead of finding ways to mend the problem. Most companies automatically employ or hire a well-known public relations agency to handle the most major crisis, and with their expertise and experience, many a company have overcome the most difficult of storms using the PR steps outlined below.
The initial step in overcoming any bad publicity is to truly own up to any faults that the company has made. In most cases, any scandal or crisis always has roots with the decisions made to get to a difficult point to untangle from and no company is ever clean from blame. Acknowledgement of the problem at hand goes a long way in keeping what trust is left by the consumers once the problem surfaces publicly. The media may attack from all sides, but given the nature of their work in providing information to the people, you can’t really blame editors and journalists despite the sensationalism they are capable of doing.
There have been many issues like the biotech cloning experiment scandal that was reported to have been falsified, its results and findings faked by a scientist simply in order to get a certain laboratory to continue its research into human cloning. The public have voiced a tremendous outcry and the people’s faith in science has plummeted. All other research laboratories have been severely affected by this negative perception and feedback that they were quick to employ strategic biotech PR in order to keep the situation from worsening and having a tough blemish that is hard to remove on the minds of the public even with the best consumer health public relations tool.
After the first step, a company should own it up by making a public apology. Depending on the case or if there are many people that are directly affected by the problematic event, a public apology may be able to help salvage the situation. Take note though, that most of the players in the business sectors take public apologies as admitting defeat or guilt. What’s important is that these public statements should take care that they don’t fall into “shifting blame” game or being on the defensive. As much as possible, public apologies should consist of the current action taking place immediately or a plan of action to tackle the unfortunate incident. In the minds of the public, this creates a concrete and viable way how a company can overcome.
Tags: biotech PR, consumer health public relations, Public Relations