Welcome to the first edition of the Brand Preppers newsletters.
Today, we're going to be answering the question that is probably on your mind once you saw that I was starting a new newsletter...
A crisis is categorized as anything that could "negatively impact a company's operations or reputation."
In other words, a crisis could be anything from a natural disaster like an earthquake, a global pandemic (Thanks, COVID-19), or rioters storming the U.S. Capitol.
But you're a brand leader. Meaning if it's something that affects your company and makes you say "Oh $#%!", it's probably a crisis.
However, there are a group of people who think of crisis differently. Crisis communications expert Stephen Fink has a different perspective, saying that a crisis is:
A fluid and dynamic state of affairs containing equal parts danger and opportunity.
Essentially? Fink is saying that yes, a crisis is painful. But it's also a chance to rethink your strategy, get creative, and grow in ways you couldn't have even imagined.
Because we still don't know how 2021 is going to turn out (Hopefully better than 2020) I'll give you another example in history of a brand who turned a crisis into an opportunity.
In the early 1990s, fast food giant Jack in the Box ran a special promotion for a very discounted Monster Burger.
The good news? People love cheap burgers.
The bad news? More demand = lack of quality control, which led to a major e.Coli outbreak that hospitalized hundreds and killed a few kids.
Obviously, things had to change because all of a sudden, people were afraid to eat anything from Jack in the Box.
So management did the following:
And slowly, the people of Washington state (and the rest of the nation) began to trust again.
Would Jack in the Box gone through all those efforts to rebrand without e.Coli? In my opinion, probably not. Who wants to change things when things are going right?
For more reading about crisis management and the e.Coli crisis at Jack in the Box, check out:
If you happen to be an #emailgeek and free on January 28th, 2020, make sure you attend Mailcon 2021, a virtual conference on email marketing. I’ll be hosting a panel with marketers from brands like Americhem, Butterfly Network, and Pitney Bowes about how they pivoted their email strategy amidst a global pandemic.
Grab a ticket |
Pssst! If cost is an issue, I have a limited number of tickets. Reply to this email asap if you want one.
Welcome to the third edition of the Brand Preppers newsletter, where we cover everything a marketer needs to know about getting through a brand crisis. While the first two issues have been about doom and gloom for Jack in the Box and Intel, you may be thinking: “Okay, I’m convinced. But what can I do to prevent these things from happening in the first place?” To answer that, let's go back to my days as an "emergency preparedness public educator" (Say that one fast 3x) and talk through the...
Welcome to the second edition of the Brand Preppers newsletter, where we cover everything a marketer needs to know about getting through a brand crisis. Today we’re going back in time to 1994 (aka when I was 7 years old) and talking about Intel’s bug in the Pentium processor crisis, which cost the company almost half a billion dollars to resolve - ouch. So what exactly went wrong? Intel’s $475M Pentium Processor Crisis As an emergency manager who’s studied the destruction of natural disasters...