Crisis communication strategies for perceived breaches of trust

Abstract

While a need for adequate crisis response is ubiquitously understood by PR professionals, most research in the domain of crisis management is focused on the immediate crisis impacts, often underrating the importance of such fundamental matter as the relationship with an organization’s stakeholders and the way they perceive a crisis in the process of its development. Moreover, the existing crisis communication theories always implicitly assume an organization’s ability to overcome a crisis, without allowing a possibility of failure as a plausible outcome. Additionally, they do not provide clear criteria for identifying what elements constitute a crisis, which is an impediment for making specific recommendation for crisis response. This study examines two cases of crises that were caused by breaches of trust in organization-stakeholders relationship in the form of an in-depth case study. The two chosen instances are the Apple Batterygate scandal of 2017 and the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2018. The reasons for selecting these particular cases are twofold: first, both events have evolved into the state of crisis after each organization’s respective misconduct was exposed as deliberate withholding of essential information from the stakeholders, which resulted in immense negative outburst among the public and extensive media coverage; second, both cases are of relatively recent occurrence and allow us to evaluate how successful the post-crisis state of each organization is. In the course of analysis we have discerned six factors that affect stakeholders’ perception of a crisis: preventability, blame, trust, proactive effort, scope, and media exposure. We have also discovered failure to re-establish sustainable organization-stakeholders relationship to be a plausible outcome of a crisis in the example of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. We propose future research in the field of crisis communication to focus on identifying the degree of influence each of the identified mediating factors have on a crisis outcome, as well as making more specific crisis response recommendations based on the differences in those factors.