23/08/2024
A bit of a rant.
One of the features of LinkedIn is something called Expert Answers, where AI-generated questions or scenarios are thrown open to responses and advice from “expert” LinkedIn users. It provides many good examples of why not to place any faith in the “wisdom of crowds”, its content is unfiltered in quality, and frankly the feature is so hard to navigate that it has virtually zero utility as a source of professional advice. And lately, the basics having been presumably well covered already, the scenarios are getting increasingly absurd, as in this one, which landed in my inbox yesterday in the category of Strategic Communications.
“Your brand’s messaging is at odds with your corporate values. How can you realign them during a crisis?”
There is a lot to unpack here, not least the fundamental point that Strategic Communications is, or should be, about creating alignment between an organisation’s brand values and its messaging, and ensuring that it is robustly kept in place throughout every subsequent piece of Tactical Communications activity. A scenario in which messaging is “at odds with” (whatever that means) corporate values means that Communications has failed at a Strategic level. Either the strategy is unfit for purpose/circumstances or tactical messaging has gone off-piste – not uncommon. So review realignment certainly does need to take place, but….
Look at the last three words of the question “..during a crisis”. Words which seemed to have escaped the notice of all but a few “expert” respondents.
A crisis is by (at least my) definition a state of affairs so unusual, extreme and with sufficient potential risk or harm to the organisation and its stakeholders that normal business must be suspended until it is dealt with. In strategy terms it is one of the very few occasions where the urgent overrides the important, because in a crisis things must be dealt with fast – a news-hungry outside world is impatient to be fed.
Since the precise form and timing of any crisis is impossible to predict, the role of Strategic Communications is to prepare the organisation for A crisis, rather than anticipate anything too specific. There will be a Crisis Comms Plan. Institutional principles and values will be embedded in the overall approach, roles and responsibilities will be defined, core on-brand messages (eg always put people first) agreed and templated, spokespeople identified and trained, key media contacts listed, call-out hierarchy put in place, and so on. And Strategic Comms will routinely rehearse and trial whether the system works. Then, if ever a real crisis does hit, the comms team should go into full implementation mode, trusting in the system they’ve built and tested.
What they absolutely should NOT do in a crisis is decide to spend time “realigning brand messaging with corporate values”. The time for that is before the crisis or when it is over, not in the midst of it. All strategic navel-gazing – sorry, soul-searching – will do at that point is confuse the general audience, convey the impression of a uncertain, shambolic organisation (so very possibly to blame for the crisis), and undermine the entire Crisis Communications Plan from top to bottom.
So. Misalignment should not have happened in the first place, and Strategic Comms should take a long hard look at how they allowed it to happen. Realign by all means, but NOT, NEVER, NO WAY in the middle of a crisis.
