Sticky Situations

Think viral marketing is hard? Try “antidote marketing,” applying a tourniquet-or a full-body cast — to a brand injured by toxic public relations hits.

Plenty of companies have had to run for the emergency kit in the last year and a half. Some have recovered well, healed their wounds and gone on to live full corporate lives. Others may never be the same again. Just look at a partial list of the disabled:

• Bags of spinach from Dole, Trader Joe's and more than 30 other brands are recalled in September 2006 for possible E. coli contamination.

• Taco Bell outlets in three North-eastern states are closed temporarily in December 2006 after an E. coli bacterial outbreak sent five dozen patrons to hospitals.

• On Valentine's Day 2007, JetBlue airlines passengers are stuck on the tarmac at New York's LaGuardia Airport — without food and with overflowing sanitary facilities — for up to 10 hours due to ice conditions.

• On the same day, ConAgra announces a recall of all Peter Pan peanut butter and jars of Great Value peanut butter made at a single facility in Georgia after the Center for Disease Control said a salmonella outbreak sickened more than 625 people across the nation.

• Menu Foods and other manufacturers recall 60 million cans of dog and cat food of various brands in March after 16 pets die from consuming melamine, an industrial compound illegally added to ingredients imported from China.

• Between Aug. 1 and Sept. 4 Mattel does a product recall hat trick, with a string of three global recalls of toys made in China — 21 million units — mostly for suspected contamination with paints containing lead.

That's a lot of bad news in need of a fix.

A fix, not a “spin,” says Gene Grabowski, senior vice president at Levick Strategic Communications, a crisis-management firm that has won kudos for handling such cases as the California spinach growers' E. coli problem last year. He says that companies too often let the survival instinct take over in an emergency.

“When disaster strikes, the first instinct of leadership is often to worry about the company, or the stock price, or the management team, the production line, their own jobs or bonuses,” he says. “The last thing they think about is, ‘What is that mom with two kids in the shopping cart thinking about my product right now?’”

GET THE FACTS OUT, STAT

He adds: “If companies could just do that one thing — put themselves in the consumer's place, and work backwards from that — 80% of crises could be managed and end up favorably.”

Without doubt, putting consumers first means offering a sincere apology and as full an explanation as you can possibly give of how the problems occurred and what's being done to resolve them and keep them from happening again.

And today's news cycles call for a quick response, as quick as you can manage it. “Before the Web, when a problem happened, you could write a letter to the newspaper, introduce your PR and plan how you were going to address the issue,” says Allen Adamson, managing director with brand-management firm Landor Associates and the author of “Brand Simple.” “Today, if you don't respond quickly and in real time, you can make the problem much worse.”

In the case of the serial Mattel recalls, the apology and the remedy came very quickly, at least once the company realized it faced the possibility of future bad news. Within hours of the Aug. 14 recall decision, CEO Robert Eckert was in front of the cameras at all the cable news outlets extending an “I'm sorry” to consumers in the U.S. and abroad who bought the toys.

Mattel's speedy apology was necessary in part because the problem involved children. Consumers are quick to pick up on threats to beings who can't protect themselves, and companies who cater to those markets need to be fast with a full response to a PR emergency. “There's no greater problem for a toy company than product safety,” Adamson says. “Mattel couldn't afford to wait for all the facts to come out before handling the issue.”