Errors made by Starbucks
Public relations is the practice of managing the spread of information between an organization, stakeholders and customers to protect the image of the business. This means that the organization develops strategies that address exposure of information to the public to ensure that a wrong impression is not created that can hurt organization proceeds (Berger & Reber 2006, p. 25). This is achieved by establishing and maintaining relationships with the target audience of the organization. In most cases, public relations programs are targeted at a specific audience especially during crisis situations. In the case of Starbucks, the crisis entailed the situation where the manager called the police to arrest two black men were asked to leave the police and policemen called to escort them out a situation which lit up social media where people pointed out how the white people were treated differently from black people (Kamnetz 2018, pp. 3-6). Such a crisis can hurt the image of the organization which can trickle down to the sales that the company makes. Therefore, the company developed a crisis management strategy to ensure that the business was not affected by this crisis.
The biggest error that Starbucks did was failing to control its online reputation during the crisis. Social media is a powerful tool that is being used today for people to share information. This means that management needed to develop a public relations plan immediately for dealing with the online challenge that the issue was presenting (Kamnetz 2018, p. 6). Starbucks overlooked the power of social media and did not analyze how this can affect the business image through social media waves. This is because, on social media, people cannot be controlled and whatever circulates can hurt a business badly (Gonzalez-Herrero 2008, p. 149). This means that Starbucks needed to have developed an immediate hashtag strategy to mitigate social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook regarding the issue. However, the manager was more focused on how the sales of the company have been affected the reason why he was quoted saying that sales have not been affected.
Another error that management made was the longer time taken to gather information and respond to the issues that the company was facing. In this case, the CEO took three days to gather information about the incident before responding. When the protestors were calling for action, management did not respond immediately but rather let the crisis continue. When people were gathered outside the Philadelphia and the boycott changed to #BoycottStarbucks it required an immediate response to calm down the situation. The CEO took time to own responsibility for the issue that had happened since the apology that he made was not accepted at all. This is because the power of listening was ignored. In crisis management, situations are supposed to be handled immediately so that they do not escalate and cost the image of the organization (Colley 2009, p. 34). Thus three days were long for the CEO to respond to the issue that he knew could hurt the image of the company.
Conclusion
Lastly, the CEO failed to listen to what the people who were boycotting and responding on social media wanted. The power of listening is an important tool in dealing with the issues that revolve around the image of the organization and their impact. The power of listening allows organizations to analyze the needs of customers by engaging them to assess the challenges that they face and how the company may have hurt them in different ways (Samuel 2017, p. 7). They wanted him to be present in person and take responsibility rather than offer only a Twitter post which did not have any promise that the customers could rely on. This indicates how lacking the power of listening and early crisis management skills can hurt the image of the organization.
Conclusion
The role of public relations is to manage the image of the organization by mitigating any crisis that threatens the success of the organization. This means that the organization has to put strategies in place for responding to crisis situations within the business environment. Although Starbucks has been praised for handling the crisis that it faced recently well, management did not adequately mitigate the situation since it led to over twenty million loses in sales when handling the issues that revolved around the crisis. Therefore, public relations need to be prepared for any situation by being open to the crisis thus doing quick data finding, responding immediately through an apology and then developing a crisis management plan to restore the image of the organization through monitoring social media and other communication channels so that the best strategy can be adopted. Therefore, Starbucks tried in mitigating the situation but management could have done better in managing the crisis.
Gregoire, Salle & Tripp (2015) suggests that social media is a powerful tool that organizations need to understand that it can propel or hurt the business at any time. This means that Starbucks needed to have responded immediately by engaging its customers on the issue to mitigate the situation and maintain its public relations. This entails sharing the concerns with customers and responding to the issues that they raise even if they do not concern the business (Coombs 2007, p. 19). This cools the heat especially in the time when racism is seriously being condemned. Since social media platforms like Facebook are toying with new rating systems that allow people to write reviews about the company or even recommend a business. It means that this can hurt any business that does not take care of its online reputation.
Therefore. Starbucks needed to have responded immediately by containing the online environment. Samuel (2017, pp. 3) suggests that public relations crisis come out of small mistakes that people make and then they glow into something bigger. This means that the company may be racially biased but the small mistake that the manager made could cost the image of the organization. Thus Starbucks needed to have addressed the situation directly and thus in the Twitter apology, negative keywords filters relevant to the crisis needed to have been used to allow filtering the words so that people can feel that management is empathetic. The two asymmetrical model of public relations suggests that feedback can be used to get into the psychology of the audience by tailoring the message to get an effective reaction (Kellerman 2006, p. 79). This means that the responses that management made needed to have been tailored based on the nature of the crisis and should have been keenly crafted to relay the intended message. This could have reduced the reaction and increased acceptance of the message if management had considered how the message will be taken by the public and its relation to restoring the deteriorating image.
Recommendations
According to Mathew (2017), monitoring of social media is an important element of crisis management since it enables the organization to understand the current situation and any upcoming crisis that could hit the organization. This is called the power of listening since, during the crisis, people need human responses and at the same time to hear the corporate voice from the organization itself. This means that the strategy of listening can be used to understand the issue that needs an urgent response from management. This means that the CEO needed to have constituted a crisis management team that will listen to stakeholders across platforms to determine the solutions that can be used to handle the situation. From the situational theory of publics, people can be identified and classified according to the challenges that they present to the organization and information seeking behaviour used to develop the best way for managing the situation (Coombs 2004, p. 470). Thus by understanding how people were reacting to the crisis situation in social media, then Starbucks could have developed the best strategy that handles the issues that were happening in social media to reduce harm to the public image. This means that management needs to monitor every element that can affect the image of the organization like social media and develop ways of ensuring that they can be adequately controlled to avoid escalations. Therefore, the best way that Starbucks could have managed this situation is monitor, plan, and communicate.
Arpan & Roskos-Ewoldsen (2005, p. 429) suggests that communication experts suggest that the initial response for any crisis situation in the organization should be made within the first few hours of the crisis. This means that management needs to acknowledge the crisis that has happened and carry out fact-finding immediately to gather information on the issue and then offer a quick response to the crisis as a way of mitigating the extended effects of the crisis. From the contingency theory of accommodation, management needs to understand that there are different options that can be taken to address a crisis by weighing the communication options and picking the best option that meets the needs of the crisis (Shin, Heath & Lee 2011, p. 173). Thus the CEO needed to have responded immediately after the crisis happened before the rampage on social media. This could have mitigated the situation because people could be responding to the post made by the company rather than what had been posted about the crisis situation by other people. The best way to mitigate such situations is to be the first to offer a statement before the issue reaches to other people. Therefore monitoring social media and responding to issues in time is the best way for mitigating any crisis issues in the organization.
References
Arpan L & Roskos-Ewoldsen D 2005, “Stealing thunder: An analysis of the effects of proactive disclosure of crisis information”, Public Relations Review, 31(3), pp. 425-433.
Berger B & Reber B 2006, Gaining influence in public relations: The role of resistance in practice, Mahwah, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Colley KCA 2009, “An Overlooked Social Media Tool? Making a Case forWikis”, Public Relations Strategist, 5(3), pp. 34-35.
Coombs WT 2004, “Structuring crisis discourse knowledge: The West Pharmaceutics case”, Public Relations Review, Volume 30, pp. 467-474.
Coombs WT 2007, Ongoing crisis communication: Planning, Managing, and responding, 2nd ed, Los Angeles, Sage.
Gonzalez-Herrero ASS 2008, “Crisis Communication Management on the Web: How Internet-Based Technologies are Changing the Way Public Relations Professionals Handle Business Crises”, Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, 16(3), pp. 143-152.
Grégoire Y, Salle A & Tripp TM 2015, “Managing social media crises with your customers: The good, the bad, and the ugly”, Business Horizons, 58(2), pp. 173-182.
Kamnetz, T., 2018. What you can learn from how Starbucks handled PR crisis. Fast Casual, July.
Kellerman B 2006, “When should a leader apologize and when not?”, Harvard Business Review, 84(4), pp. 73-81.
MATHEW CM 2017, “Role of social media in crisis communication in the business context: a study with Indian examples”, International Journal of Research in Commerce, IT & Management, 7(6), pp. 50-53.
Samuel K 2017, “A Social Media Crisis Management Plan All Marketers Can Follow”, Forbes, 12 September.
Shin JH, Heath RL & Lee J 2011, “Explanation of Public Relations Practitioner Leadership Styles: Situation and Culture”, Journal of Public Relations Research, 23(2), pp. 167-190.