On the 26th of April, 2018, "boycott of Balenciaga" became a hot topic on the Internet in China and people were very unhappy with the brand. the incident was caused by a fight at the counter of the fashion brand "Balenciaga" (Paris) in the famous Paris Spring department store in France on the 25th. China's state-run Global Times claimed the incident had begun after the man's mother scolded queue jumpers while she was waiting to enter the Balenciaga outlet. The mall and the brand were accused of discriminating against Chinese people, and many people began to call on people not to buy Balenciaga's products.
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The day after the incident, Balenciaga issued a PR release (see below) and said it would investigate the matter thoroughly, suspend the staff involved and review store management, customer handling and other related service processes to ensure that such incidents do not happen again.
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But the existence of the Internet makes the speed of information dissemination and the scope of influence accelerating, the damage caused to the corporate brand image is difficult to recover, when the crisis comes and have to take appropriate measures to quell public opinion. So, how should luxury brands respond to crisis communication to ensure that the impact and damage caused to the company is minimized?
What is crisis management?
Crisis management is the application of strategies designed to help an organization deal with a sudden and significant negative event. A crisis may occur as a result of an unpredictable event or consequence that had been considered as a potential risk. Either way, the company that is facing crisis needs to take immediate precaution and act calmly to deal with the problem. In this regard, international top brands usually have a crisis management team under their PR department.
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How to respond to crisis correctly？
The core of brand crisis management is to maintain the brand, so the first thing you need to do is to prevent a crisis from happening. But when a crisis occurs, what brands need to do is to face it openly.
Pre-crisis PR
First of all, we need to observe and predict the crisis before it happens, that is, "prevention is better than cure", enterprises are aware of prevention, pay attention to strengthen the judgment and handling ability of crisis events, set up a professional observation and prediction team to prevent crisis events before they happen; enterprises do not know the time and place of crisis events, so they cannot take active crisis management in time. Therefore, it is necessary to develop crisis management countermeasures in advance.
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Mid-term crisis communication
When a crisis occurs, public opinion should be guided in a timely manner to reduce the damage caused by the crisis. When a crisis event occurs, companies should adopt a response strategy as soon as possible, strive to accurately release information at the first time, and make timely statements on the official website and social media platforms, so as to eliminate public suspicion, quickly and positively reply to the message, so that stakeholders understand the dynamics of the event in a timely manner, and on the Internet platform, establish a positive communication system.
Later stage of crisis PR
To maintain the image of the enterprise in the minds of consumers, the enterprise also needs to repair the trust relationship with consumers. At this time, the image, products, services and publicity of the enterprise should be synchronized in order to be effectively enhanced and recognized by the public. After the crisis, all the behavior of the enterprise is reflected in the integrity behavior of the enterprise. Being able to identify the crisis in time and take measures is the key to ensure that the impact of the crisis, as well as the damage caused to the enterprise, is reduced to a minimum. To accomplish this, luxury brand owners need to establish a perfect public opinion early warning mechanism, which can detect the first signs of crisis early, judge the direction and scale of the real crisis that may arise early, and take targeted response plans to solve the crisis.
