WELL THOUGHT PR STRATEGY REQUIRED TO FIGHT THIS CRISIS

The ghastly act of the terrorists to India’s financial capital and the gateway to tourist destinations will further hamper inflow of tourists to this great country. The government and several tourism corporations across India from each states has painstakingly built brand India and through the Incredible India campaign over the last few years in the foreign markets by raising our graph in the tourism world. To the best of my knowledge this brand building exercise has been going on for over 10 years and significant progress has been made by us in the world tourism map for tourists to consider India in their choice of destination when one thinks of going on a holiday. While some of the foreigners did express their views that they would like to come to the lovely city Mumbai and India after they were rescued but at a global level this will take a considerable beating as some of the countries has already issued advisory orders.

All of us know that building brands in foreign markets is a long drawn process both in terms of time and cost. Having reached so far we now need to re visit our drawing board and come out with some immediate measures to fight this crisis. This is a very classical case of CRISIS and PR will have to play a major role to restore the lost glory. India should immediately act, so that whatever equity we have in the tourism space should be closely protected and should not erode further.

How this can happen? A special task force needs to be set up to address this problem to guard our image. India should work closely with all the countries whose people visit our country immediately, before negative word of mouth start spreading though various media and other agencies. Our first strategy is to instantly protect the image we already have before it slides down. We need to go on a war footing to handle this crisis. This will involve a great amount of orchestration with the home, defence, foreign and tourism ministry so that there is cohesive strategy to handle this internally before we chalk out our strategy to hit the global media etc.

All this will cost more rupees and time but at this hour of crisis every Indian should think positive and help India restore the lost shine. We have come out from several difficult situation and I am sure we will counter this and teach a strong lesson to who ever is jealous behind India’s growth both on the economic and tourism front.

I have been working with PR agencies in India for almost 12 years and the last 3 years have been with a leading agency in India. One of their key clients that I handled was on mobile telephony. As is true to the nature of the client, crisis was an everyday issue.

Crisis always led to chaos and chaos to confusion, resulting in numerous phone calls, direction less running around and tension. I wondered why such situations cannot be approached in a more systematic and planned way. While conducting my study with the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) UK, I chose Crisis Communication as my personal project. I would like to share with you some of my thoughts and the theories behind it.

Let us first define what is crisis. Crisis as described by Banks K.L. is a, “major occurrence with a potentially negative outcome affecting an organization as well as its public services, products and good name.” It interrupts a normal business transaction and can at its worst threaten the existence of an organization. Not all crisis are alike and the response to different crisis differs at any point. Nevertheless, crisis management regardless of parameters requires strategic action be taken both to avoid and mitigate undesirable developments and to bring about a desirable resolution to the problem (Burnett J 1998).

Crisis management is a continuous effort. It is a strategic issue that looms as one of the most difficult to resolve because of both the additional elements of time pressure, limited control and high uncertainty. Crisis is better when it is averted. Weick (1998) in his “enactment perspective” also focuses on the prevention of error occurrence in an effort to reduce the magnitude of those errors. The anticipatory model of crisis management therefore argues that effective crisis management is prevention oriented because it is hard to cope with a crisis for which one has not prepared. The anticipatory model states that although human error cannot be eliminated in their entirety, it still is our responsibility to engage in prevention efforts that require anticipation of these errors.

Public relations experts are urged to move beyond traditional communication responsibilities and to develop skills in researching the company and industry history

and forecasting potential problems with remote stakeholders. Being prepared requires having self awareness knowledge, realizing one’s vulnerability to crisis and engaging a plan of action that counteracts the risk of crisis (Udwadia and Mitroff 1991). Paying attention to the interactions of human, technological and general management factors are the only way to exacerbate a crisis.

A typical crisis situation comprises of 5 stages as referred by Barton (1993). The initial prodromal stage when the organization is watching for warning signs. The second is the preparation or prevention stage. The third stage is that of containment, the efforts to limit the duration of crisis or keep it from becoming more serious. The fourth stage is that of recovery, the efforts spent in salvaging the situation. The fifth stage is that of learning, the process of evaluation and how to convert the learning as knowledge base for future warning signs.

Some of the best practices involved in a crisis management as enlisted by (Fearn Banks 1996 a) are given below.

* The public relations head should be a part of the top management team. Being a part of the dominant coalition, it helps the PR personnel to be privy to all management decisions. They are aware of the issues from the initial stage which may lead to a crisis situation.

* The programmes are designed to build relationships with all key stakeholders who are ranked and segmented according to importance. The organization should know who its stakeholders are and strive to maintain a strong relationship with them.

* An ongoing public relation plan is developed for each key stakeholder. A continuing dialogue with publics helps to bridge the gulf between an organization and its stakeholders. This is what has been defined by J. Gruning (1992) as ‘excellent communication’.

* A strong network and bonding with the media is essential during a crisis situation.

* An ongoing two way symmetrical crisis communication plan is developed as a response to a crisis. The plan should identify the crisis team, spokesperson, duties and the key talking points.

* The organization maintains a reputation for having an overall ‘open and honest’ policy with publics all the time.

The public relations manager should use their boundary spanning role to provide a contingency plan in case of a crisis situation. Given the public relations manager’s knowledge on communication concepts they need to assume a leadership role to resolve the crisis. Crisis like competition is a phenomenon that public relations managers can plan for and produce strategic responses to minimize adverse effects. Public relations is about an effort to mitigate uncertainty. It can do so by manipulating public behaviour or by being proactive to deal with uncertainty strategically.

Crisis communication is not a stand alone module of communication. It has a boundary spanning role and encompasses organizational variables such as strategy, leadership, training, culture, structure and socio-psychological behaviour of both the organization and their stakeholders on whom crisis creates a greater impact.

I was in at the Bangalore’s Forum Mall when I got the first call about the bomb blasts behind it in Madiwala. Having grown up during the time when Punjab insurgency was at its height and traveling through Delhi was a hurdle race through checkposts, the Bangaloreans (is there such an entity?) response to the Friday happenings was interesting. There was not even a controlled aggression visible on the faces of the security staff of the Mall. I actually walked back into the Mall a second time to put up a ticket I left in the PVR vending machine and voila this time I dint even pass through the metal detector because the Security Staff was checking with the public on where the next blast had been reported by ?? (TV or radio). The next blast was somewhere near Adugodi, a close by area.

By telling you all this my intention is not to eulogize how I proverbially escaped etc etc or lament the internal security situation in India (homeland security as the Americans call it), Im building up to a point which for all of us in Communications is a gold mine to debate - Does India have a Crisis Communications Policy? Isnt it time we did?

Worldwide and in India, the Industry has by far been quick to grasp that while management of a crisis is critical, the advance alerts or post crisis response has communication at its core making it one of the key factor of “to what extent” the crisis impacts the stakeholders. When we speak of National or state level crisis, these stakeholders are us – the common wo/man.

I spent years in newspapers and amongst other beats buried my nose into the power sector to understand why all the MW produced did not reach the consumers and YET s/he paid for the entire power production and WHY therefore the power company was answerable to the people for its process management. Part of this process was T& D losses and some of this was attributable to those next to the consumers house who hooked onto power lines to steal it without paying! This consumer when told so could be galvanised to protect and report power theft!

This experience has come really handy in understanding the skill of mass communications and I now believe that the credibility of the source of Communication is a subject worth a study - be it a corporate or a country. Even after hours of whatever was happening over the past weekend whether you were in Ahmedabad, Bangalore or Surat, the main source of information was the media / journalists and some tidbits here and there on Crisis Management by local authorities. What and where was the citizens credible / believable / actionable source of information? Till today some TV channels in Karnataka continue to insist that the blasts left 2 dead and most others put the number at 1.

A few months back, the Computer Society of India, was doing an issue on ICTs and asked me to author one of the articles. In writing that my attempt was to extrapolate learnings in the Industry and investigate if the corporate processes can be juxtaposed to how a country and its management communicates with its stakeholders, specifically during a crisis. In this article I alluded to a model that can be implemented by the top management of the Business House (India) and its Strategic Business Units (States). I just got to know that the magazine was published and therefore feel at liberty to discuss that idea in this forum as well.

At the heart of such a model are the same few questions that chief communication officers in companies ask their managements when penning crisis communication manuals.

Scenario build up - Kinds of Crisis experienced in the past and feared for the future (both for India & SBUs)
Designated Spokespersons and Chief spokesperson who are credible and their call to action is heeded to by stakeholders

Types of stakeholders in each crisis

Channels of communication to reach the stakeholders

Human Networks to use when ICTs (Information Communication technologies) fail as they almost always do in a natural disaster

Understand the holding statement concept

Who prepares and who contributes to the holding statement

Practice runs at frequent intervals of the crisis scenarios …

A potential draft of such a policy lies in the answers to the above questions and in the article I answered each head assuming that the Corporate in question is India, the Strategic Business Units were the States and the chief communication officer was myself. All answers were based on the assumption that Ive not been debriefed yet by the nation’s CEO or the SBU units but I’m building answers to the questions through intelligent hypothesis.

I can’t reproduce the article here but I hope I’m able to convey that such a model can be built for India – more efficiently if bigger brains than yours or mine go to work on it. In fact quite possible that this is being done somewhere but as a citizen if I look at what communication reached me over the weekend, its obviously not yet in place. Take for example the city of my current domicile, Bangalore, I as a citizen don’t know who to believe when reasons are enlisted on what happened to my mobiles on Friday at 3 PM - when the somebody tells me that mobile phone operators jammed the signals post the blasts so that people couldn’t spread rumors, I believe it. When others say the cell phone were jammed because Police wanted to stop miscreants from triggering live bombs using mobiles as possible detonators, I nod and almost believe it. The easy answer we all know as citizens is that the cell network was jammed because panicky citizens were trying to check on each others safety but then that’s “so obvious” an answer that you would say nahhhh! Quite possible its the Crisis Management Standard Operating Procedure given out to service providers but do I know this ? No. Maybe its top secret confidential modus operandi that a citizen needn’t know about but do I know that or have heard about it? No.

Take another example of credible spokesperson . Lets assume that the Chief Minister of Karnataka is the chief spokesperson whom the citizens of the SBU believe in as its head of management (please don’t drag us into the mindless debate that state chief secretary should be the chief spokesperson since bureaucracy are the real managers!) . What information was coming out from the CMs office at the time – the anchor sitting in Mumbai was asking the Bangalore correspondent about updates and all he had was this - a meeting at 5pm had been convened to take stock of the situation. That’s it. Any advisory for the citizens ? Hmmm..Oh yeah I did hear somebody say that the CM said, “Nothing to worry”. Of course the next day a live bomb was found outside a mall in a flower pot, left by a man in red T shit, which was defused by a bomb squad. Later the media wrote that a cobblers wife clipped the wires which hung by its sides the day before which could possibly have been the reason for it going dead.! I’d love to explain this in detail but its as funny as its sad..all this in India’s IT capital no less

So to cut a long story short, we really need a Crisis Communication Policy in India as we are surely and quickly becoming the eye of the storm..and a crisis hits only once and effects directly or indirectly – after that there is pin drop silence or a deafening noise made by those alive to take stock of what could have been done instead. If the lines between crisis management and crisis communications seem to blur, then they should as the latter is the core of the former and its time we gave it some thought.