Crisis Management

Crisis is a major event that threatens to harm the organization, its stakeholders, or the general public and this element of surprise requires short decision time. In some cultures (e.g. Chinese) risk management represents danger and opportunity. The opportunity comes when PR practitioners get to demonstrate their skills. It is essential that PR practitioners know what people are thinking/saying about the organisation from the outside. Furthermore, crisis shows value of PR and the need of them. Crisis raises the profile, status and PR’s role in the company. It is interesting to see different perception of risk in various cultures. Some cultures such as US have risk zero tolerance. There is so much suing happening for various minor incidents. 

It could be argued that perception of risk is important in PR world and the science behind it not as much. For instance, when Toyota faced the braking problem crisis either their PR people did very poor job or were not heard by the people on the top. Engineers claimed that no mistake occurred from their side which made customers the idiots that can’t step on the breaks. Whatever Toyota says now, and however well it acts, there is a sense that it ignored the problem until it was forced to take action. Interesting was that in Japan, the lower you bow the more sorry you are. However, the CEO of Toyota did not bow low enough indicating that he is not sorry which pointed a negative light on Toyota’s image. It’s fascinating how every culture is different and a lot can be read from body language.