The Mohamed Al-Fayed case and Crisis Communication for luxury brands
At Communicate Media we’re providing an increasing number of crisis management and crisis communications courses for luxury brands. That’s why we’ve been particularly interested in the coverage of the allegations against Mohamed Al-Fayed and the way in which Harrods has handled them.
Luxury houses are discovering that, as is the case with organisations of all kinds, that they’re increasingly at risk of hostile media coverage and negative social media sentiment.
Crisis communications training for luxury brands
As we explain in our crisis communications training for luxury brands, crisis management involves minimising the negative impact of an event that has the potential to damage the reputation of the brand.
For luxury houses this could be the behaviour of a senior manager within the company. We’ve also helped luxury brands deal with allegations of rudeness or bad customer service made against staff. The incident doesn’t have to be as significant as the one currently involving Mr Al-Fayed. For luxury houses brand image and reputation is so important and so easily damaged that they need to take every incident seriously and act quickly. This involves being ready to manage the media reaction.
Crisis issues in the luxury sector
Other crisis issues in the luxury sector might include a data breach such as a ransomware attack. This can have a severely detrimental impact on your customers, employees, and suppliers – or any of these groups. Again, the effect on your brand image can be disastrous. The reputation of a luxury brand lies partly in the idea that it does everything well – from excellent craftsmanship to superlative customer service. If you’re a luxury house and you can’t protect my data, then you can appear to be either incompetent or sloppy – or both.
Crisis communications course for a luxury brand
The realistic scenarios that we develop with luxury sector PR agencies and in house comms teams might include a fire at a store or offices. We also recently provided a crisis communications course for a luxury brand around sustainability. Here we imagined that an investigative journalist had shown that some of the supposedly sustainable materials and manufacturing processes that the brand claimed to use were, in fact, anything but. A few years later something very similar to this fictional situation arose in real life for the luxury house. They told us that they felt much better able to manage and contain the issue.
With the explosion of social media, a more vocal and demanding population, as well as the pressures of the 24-hour news cycle, organisations such as luxury houses are subject to more risks than ever before. That’s why their crisis management should be comprehensive, effective and ready to roll out at a moment’s notice.
The Importance of Good Crisis Communication for luxury brands
A crisis can damage the reputation of an organisation – but it can do worse. Many luxury brands are finding the current economic landscape difficult to negotiate. On top of this, a badly handled crisis can hit their bottom line.
Remember when United Airlines was accused of abusing a passenger and ejecting him violently from an aircraft? In this case the company saw its value fall by around $1billion in a single day.
You can’t prevent a crisis happening, but good crisis communication can reduce its detrimental impact. Good crisis communications, put simply, means encouraging your target audiences of consumers and others to take the view that sometimes bad things happen to good people. You’re aiming for your audience to regard you as having behaved as well as anybody could under the circumstances.
We work with the in-house communications teams of luxury houses to help them to prepare for managing a crisis. Because all of our media trainers are working journalists (operating under strict nondisclosure agreements) they have real life experience of reporting on crises. We bring this practical experience to bear in our crisis communications workshops for luxury stores.
Assessing Potential Crises for Luxury Brands
As well as providing crisis communications for luxury houses, we also help them to identify where a crisis might erupt. We can do this because our trainers are working journalists who regularly report on crises or companies finding themselves in difficult situations. At Communicate Media we know what kind of incidents will make a story for the media, both social and conventional – and will make life difficult for an organisation.
We can work with you to explore the risks in your company, and we can help you to ensure that you’re well prepared should an incident arise. Although we talk about crisis communications, we also help organisations to deal with difficult issues. This might be mistakes they’ve made, controversial decisions they’ve had to take all issues within the sector generally that can be awkward and embarrassing.
We then help luxury brands to develop strategies to manage these difficult situations. This means developing and testing messages for the media, clients, employees and suppliers. As a result, we can ensure that all spokespeople are comfortable with these messages. They must be able to deliver them confidently and effectively, but also authentically in a way that sounds natural and believable.
Drafting and Distributing Crisis Messages
There are many examples of organisations who put out the wrong message during a crisis or who simply fail to respond in the right way. We work with luxury brands’ media teams to help them to draft and distribute crisis messages. Luxury companies can develop crisis communications templates covering a range of issues that can be amended to make them relevant to the particular crisis or incident when it arises.
The advantage here for luxury houses facing a crisis is that it gives them a head start, enabling them to get ahead of events.
Monitoring and Adapting the Strategy
Once a luxury house has released its crisis statement it will need to monitor relevant media outlets – both conventional and social – to see the kind coverage that it’s getting. No doubt Harrods is doing this now with the Al-Fayed situation.
In a crisis, it’s important to respond strategically and carefully rather than simply offering, a knee-jerk reaction to every comment. One lesson that we teach in our crisis communications training for luxury companies is that you cannot change your overall message. United Airlines, for instance, came up with a number of different explanations, excuses and responses. As a result, they looked chaotic and shifty.
Luxury houses need to constantly develop, refine and practice their crisis communications. As one business leader in the sector put it to us when he asked us to provide crisis communications training for their brand: “In our business reputation is everything.”
Nobody likes to think about a crisis, and everyone hopes that they will be spared the embarrassment of having to handle a difficult situation. However, crisis communications training for luxury houses is increasingly important.
Media Training for luxury brands
We’d love to work with you – come and speak to us about our crisis communication training for luxury brands. You can follow us on LinkedIn here.
