During COVID-19, some business owners are their own worst enemy
Originally published in PR Daily
Despite government and health care experts’ best advice, some business leaders are making headlines for all the wrong reasons during a global pandemic.
So many companies have undone all the good work done by their PR agencies and gone viral for the wrong reasons.
At the risk of sounding like a Facebook meme, the Warren Buffet quote that “it takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it” has never been more apt, but unfortunately not everyone did “think about it and do things differently.” Many businesses went against government advice (not to mention the guidance of their PR advisors), demanding their employees come in when they could have easily been working from home or made staff redundant before waiting for government advice on wages.
Cineworld is a brand whose reaction sticks out for all the wrong reasons. Jumping the gun and terminating the employment of its staff “with immediate effect”, staff were particularly riled when their previous employer stated it hoped they would return when the cinema could reopen, expecting their loyalty without offering any of its own.
What did their reputation probably the most damage though was the fact that it was all needless. If Cineworld had waited a few days, as the government had asked, they could have retained their staff with 80% of their wages funded by the U.K. government.
We’ve seen a number of other brands garner negative attention for their handling of the situation, with the insensitive message to “go and get a job at Tesco” from Tim Martin at Wetherspoons, and Sports Directs’ Mike Ashley boasting of business as usual and vowing to flout guidelines by remaining open.
A slightly staggering “coronavirus party” idea from Red Bull motorsport boss Helmut Marko to deliberately join his Formula 1 drivers together in a COVID-19 camp to make his team ill now so they “would be prepared whenever the action starts”, was not just ill-judged, but reckless and misinformed. Luckily, the rest of his management team rejected the idea but not before the press got hold of it.
For PR professionals who work tirelessly, making themselves available 24/7, ready to jump in and act as a filter for their clients’ comments, interviews and even emails, it’s beyond frustrating to see those at the top suddenly cut loose and go rogue.
It’s not just household names and global brands, but smaller companies too. We all know someone who’s been asked to go into the office, despite advice to the contrary.
What company owners aren’t grasping or taking seriously enough is the power of word of mouth. Desperate for human connection, people are talking more than ever at the moment—on the phone, in WhatsApp groups, on Facebook—and they’re all swapping stories. Make no mistake, people will hear how you treated employees and this will affect your business when things finally go back to normal.
Granted, it must be a very scary time to be a business owner right now. Through stress and panic, knee-jerk decisions are being made, but this scary time will go on a lot longer if business leaders don’t take a second to think these decisions through. Listen to your PR agency.
For those of us working in PR, the battle will continue long after things return to “normal”.
What happens when our clients reinstate us and we have to pick up the pieces? When we have to work twice as hard to repair a destroyed reputation just to build you back up to where we’d left off?
It’s your human reaction, how you react and conduct yourself in the moments that matter that control how people see you. We’re here to guide you, but you make your own PR too.
