One of the major parts of Public Relations is crisis management. A business crisis as described by Kristin Baker, “is an event that has the potential to threaten the success and health of a company by tarnishing its reputation, damaging its business operations, negatively impacting its finances, or harming its employees.” There are so many different types of crises a business can go through such as financial, natural, technological, and organizational to name a few. A crisis management plan is important because it makes you prepared for things that may come and can protect you and your company from potential very long lasting negative effects. A crisis management plan is a set of steps that are prepared before a crisis happens in order to deal with or solve the problems that may arise in the future.
When thinking of crisis management, a crisis that instantly jumped to my head was one involving H & M in January of 2018. As part of their online platform a new arrival was posted including a photograph of sweet looking young black boy, however, the crisis was clearly visible as you began to read the green pullover hoodie he was wearing. The hoodie read “coolest monkey in the jungle”, immediately you can literally see the issue here. Social media went crazy, everyone was outraged, one person to note who was especially vocal about the incident was well known singer, The Weeknd (Abel Makkonen Tesfaye). After Abel saw the fire storm taking place on social media, he took to Twitter to express his feelings. Abel said in a tweet on Monday, January 8 “Woke up this morning shocked and embarrassed by this photo. I’m deeply offended and will not be working with @hm anymore…”
To evaluate this crisis, I have applied it to a model on how to communicate in a crisis. The model is found in the book Public Relations Strategies and Tactics by Cameron, Reber, and Wilox, and is pictured below.
One of the things I think H & M implanted best was taking responsibility for their actions. The day after the picture was posted they released a statement saying “We sincerely apologize for offending people with this image of a printed hooded top. We believe in diversity and inclusion in all that we do and will be reviewing all our internal policies accordingly to avoid any future issues.” Making this statement so soon reveals to the public that they are aware of the issue and agree that it was a poor decision. From here H & M can begin to try to repair its image with the public.
Throughout the crisis H & M was honest with the public, they released details that made their apology believable and seemed to tell the truth about the matter. There was also no way H & M could have said they didn’t post the image seeing as it had gone world wide but the right choice was made in being open about things and keeping the public aware of what was going on in the matter.
There was not too much to be found on if H & M had a central command center during the process but it is recommended in the model. It seems to be a good idea to have everything in one place with everyone focused on the same thing. The company made a few official press releases or statements to the public however they were always from a spokesperson but not a specific one. I am not sure if they were coming from the same person or not but if they were it would have aided in keeping everyone of the same page and having the same voice through all of the media contact.
Once H & M made an official statement about he incident they also chose to at first remove the image of the boy and only keep an image of the sweater. This kept the social media fire still burning, it was not until a short time after that they decided to completely remove the product from not only their website but also to stop production of it completely. H & M followed many of the suggestions in the model. Following these suggestions, I believe put the fire out on the topic more quickly than it would have if they had said no comment or not wanted take responsibility for it. It is still insane to me that such a large successful company could let something so blatantly offensive get pas so many people including photographers and editors and still allow for it to be posted for the world to see.
References-
Wilcox, D.L., Cameron, G.T., Reber, B,H. (2016). Public Relations: Strategies and Tactics Updated Eleventh Edition. Person Education, Inc.
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