Crisis communications in-depth: Success is all about the limeade

Posted by Justin Goldsborough | 0 comments

Photo courtesy of mister i via Flickr.

Crisis communications in-depth is Justin Case You Were Wondering’s five-day deep dive into different aspects of the crisis communications discipline in a PR 2.0 world.

It used to be you’d say limeade and I’d think of the local Sonic. And not a regular limeade, but one of those cherry limeades with extra cherry flavor and two maraschino cherries on the top. Mmm, so good.

But  our #FHKC office GM, Betsey Solberg, changed all that this week. Here’s what happened.

Betsey and I were teaming up for a crisis communications presentation to the UMKC executive MBA program. Our POV was that crisis communications hasn’t changed, but the platforms have. And I put together a presentation I thought drove that point home.

But when I walked through the presentation with Betsey, we realized we needed to go a different direction. Every time I get the opportunity to work with Betsey, I learn something new and this time was no different.

This time, our conversation revolved around storytelling. After all, that was the approach we wanted to take. People really do respond to stories. And as Betsey said, they remember them. Stats, not so much. Stories, yes.

Now we had the stories in the deck from the start. Several actually – we decided to focus on United Breaks Guitars and Dominos Pizza Turnaround (side note: these are two case studies you think everyone has heard before, but usually they haven’t). But what we were missing, Betsey explained to me, was the limeade.

So what the heck is the limeade? Well, according to Betsey, it’s the positive resolution to a crisis or issue from the brand’s perspective. How are we as PR pros able to help take limes – we were actually going to do the lemons to lemonade analogy first, but the yellow font didn’t show up well on the slides   – and create limeade out of a negative situation. Some crises stories have a limeade ending and some don’t.

From there, we wove the limeade philosophy into the two case studies we presented. You’re getting thirsty at this point, aren’t you? Here’s how we told the story:

United Breaks Guitars

United wasn’t able to make limeade out of United Breaks Guitars. The company tried by 1) firing the employee who didn’t offer to fix Dave Carroll’s guitar (who btw, was just doing her job as she’d been told), 2) offering to buy Dave a new guitar (he asked they jointly give the money to charity instead) and 3) United bought the rights to the video and began using it as an internal training tool so employees could learn from Dave’s story.

Maybe a small limeade there off the kiddie menu for No.3. But Betsey offered a way United could have really made some limeade that I thought was interesting. What if the airline had donated guitars to underprivileged kids or a charity of Dave’s choice that focused on music education and the arts? Make that decision, involve Dave from the start, film a video about the kids getting the guitars and share that along with an apology and a “we’re going to do better” proclamation. Betsey thought that would have really made limeade. And I think she’s right.

Dominos Pizza Turnaround

A lot of people have seen the “gross” Dominos video where the employees did things with food I won’t mention in this post because you may have just eaten recently. But not everyone knows the whole story. Do you know about Ramon DeLeon, a Dominos franchisee in Chicago who had already been actively using social media and sort of let the public know Dominos was listening and discussing a resolution when the video first came to light and the company had no online social presence? Do you about the integrated turnaround campaign Dominos launched as an indirect result of the “gross” video, announcing the brand was changing its pizza based on customer feedback online and in focus groups? Did you know that Dominos sales went up 14 percent in the first quarter of 2010 just about a year after the “gross” video surfaced?

Dominos COO Patrick Doyle has a quote in the pizza turnaround video that always catches my attention and shows this is a brand determined to make limeade out of a bad situation: “You can either use negative comments to get you down or you can use them to excite you and energize your process of making a better pizza. We did the latter.”

Today Dominos is listening and responding to customers. They seem to be a brand that realizes even if you run campaigns, the listening and conversation never stops in the social media world we live in. And before last week, that’s how I would have told the story. But thanks to Betsey, now I’d say Dominos turned its sour limes into limeade.

Sounds like an insignificant change. But yesterday I saw people respond  and nod their heads to the limeade analogy more than I’ve ever seen when I’ve told the story the other way. Maybe the class was just thirsty. But I think it’s more than that. It’s all in how you tell the story. And all the little things – especially those maraschino cherries – make the drink.