Robyn Sefiani is the founder and president of ANZ of Sefiani, part of the Clarity Group Worldwide. She is one of the most seasoned pioneers in the world of Corporate PR, has been PR leader of the year, won PR agency of the year, and has spent 12 years before setting up Sefiani at Edelman.
In this episode, she discusses how reputation management has changed over the years and what’s involved in building a good reputation in today’s environment—for both corporates and executives—and shares lessons from both good and bad reputation management that she’s seen as a result of crises.
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The biggest and the worst crises now are typically from within organizations, and it’s based on bad culture, and bad behaviour by organizations.
Transcription:
Anton:
Hi, I’m Anton Buchner, Senior Consultant at TrinityP3 Marketing Management consultancy. Welcome to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketers, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners.
Today, I’m talking PR and reputation management. My guest, she’s built a career out of advising some of Australia’s and the world’s leading companies in strategic comms, issues and crisis management.
Please welcome to the Managing Marketing Podcast, one of the most seasoned pioneers in the world of PR and corporate PR, founder and president, ANZ of Sefiani, part of the Clarity Group worldwide, Robyn Sefiani.
Robyn:
Hello, Anton. Lovely to join you.
Anton:
Hi, Robyn. Great to have you on. I’ve been delving into your past and of course, know of you a little bit, but you’ve been PR leader of the year. Your agency has won PR agency of the year, and you spent 12 years prior to setting up Sefiani at Edelman. So, lots of experience there.
Robyn:
Yes. And it’s all been fun, and I think I’ve pretty much loved every day of my career in communications. It’s a role that’s different every day. It’s challenging. It’s not always easy but every day is intellectually stimulating, and I think that’s what I love about my role the most.
Anton:
Well, that’s why I want to delve into that brain of yours. So, for the listeners, let’s take them back. Why did you want to set up your own firm? What was the catalyst?
Robyn:
So, it wasn’t by choice initially. I was a senior executive at Edelman Worldwide and co-president of Edelman Asia-Pacific, and a member of the Edelman Global Board. And I was asked by Richard Edelman to relocate to Hong Kong and run all of Edelman Asia-Pacific.
I declined and said, “I’ve got a young child who I want to grow up in Sydney.” And he said, “Well, Robyn, that could be a career limiting decision.” My role was made redundant some months later, and the other co-president of Asia-Pacific, who was living in Taiwan, was given the full region to manage.
So, I was encouraged by clients and friends to set up my own agency, which is what I did almost 25 years ago, Anton.
Anton:
That’s almost happy birthday, I’ll leave that for someone else to sing. But wow, two and a half decades. Well, maybe serendipitous, going out on your own and what you’ve done since is fantastic.
Robyn:
Thank you.
Anton:
You’ve seen a lot of change. So, let’s get into it. I’m wondering what’s been the biggest change most recently, maybe over the last few years, or even the last 5 to 10 years, but what have you seen that’s been the major change around reputation?
Robyn:
Definitely the biggest change has been the impact of social media on how companies have to respond to a crisis situation. So, the timeliness of response is now critically important.
I remember years ago before social media, you had half a day or at sometimes a day based on print deadlines to get back to a journalist with an answer as to what had happened in your organization. Now it’s minutes or at the most half an hour.
So, that timeliness of response has been definitely the biggest change. And then more recently, I would say the need for transparency of a response. The community just expects and demands companies to be truthful, and if they’re not, they’re found out pretty quickly.
And the third thing I’m noticing that is really interesting is the humanity of a response in a crisis. And perhaps we can delve into that a little more later.
But I consider myself both a practitioner of crisis and reputation management and as a student of crisis management, because I’m so fascinated in the practice of reputation management that I keep a close eye on crisis that I’m not handling.
And whether that’s in Australia or elsewhere in the world, just to be aware of how companies are handling a crisis well or badly, and what the learnings are from that.
Anton:
I think that is interesting around the humanity of it. I mean, of course we’re dealing with people, executives but also corporate risks. So, there’s a real balance there. How do you approach that balance in a good reputation for both corporate and executives in today’s climate?
Robyn:
And it’s really interesting because I think the focus on chief executives during a crisis has become far more pointed. And I think even if we just look at some examples that have played out in Australia in the last 6 to 12 months, it’s very evident what the role of the chief executive is, or even the chair.
If we think of Brad Banducci, for example, at Woolworth’s, I was only reading in the financial review a couple of days ago, Rear Window ran a story and it’s titled, Woolworth’s Trash Reputation Will Cost Banducci.
Now, what’s behind that story is that Woolworth’s, a couple of years ago, decided to link reputation to executive bonuses as a key performance indicator. So, if a company does not have a good reputation, its executives don’t get the benefit of their bonuses.
And the reason that’s happening is that boards realize that good reputation equals good brand value and good corporate value.
Because shareholders want to invest in a company that’s performing well and has a good reputation. People want to work for companies that they like and trust. And customers want to buy products and services from companies that have good reputations.
So, if you think about companies that have poor reputations people don’t really want to deal with them and their value is diminished.
So, then where does the humanity come in? If an organization does the wrong thing, people expect the leader of that organization to apologize, to say, “Sorry, we stuffed up. We did badly. We let you down. This is what we are doing to fix it so it won’t happen again.”
Now, interestingly you might be aware that Toyota has just been found out as have three other Japanese automakers for fudging safety records in vehicle tests. I mean, it’s shocking. Absolutely shocking.
So, the chairman of Toyota, whose surname Mr. Toyoda apologized in a very Japanese way, which was to stand in front of a camera with his head bowed for minutes. So, it is the most profound form of apology in the Japanese culture.
That’s it. So, that image has gone global in news media and on social media. So, that single action by the head of Toyota to demonstrate his sorrow, his deep remorse is a very powerful form of apology by a chief executive. And then if we look at-
Anton:
I think Robyn, up to that point, you’ve got that delicate balance though, don’t you, where you have the push from the corporate and the shareholders, obviously on one level, we don’t want to get this story out, we don’t want to leak this information out yet, we don’t quite know what’s happening. So, there must be a huge demand for finding out the information first internally.
And as you said earlier, you’ve got that pressure from either consumers generally, or society or customers in social media or wherever pushing a bit of a fire back at the corporate to share more information. And once the media gets hold of it, as you know, that suddenly stirred up a hornet’s nest.
So, I wonder about the whole balance. I mean, we’ve read about Boeing recently as well, you know what’s going on there? And that they probably didn’t do the Toyota example, and they’ve let a culture of safety really just be issue after issue. And what we’ve got a few people up in space at the moment, so the Boeing name is almost mud.
Robyn:
Yes. But I follow Boeing closely because Airbus is a client of Sefiani and has been for four years. So, we’re working within the aviation sector closely. And I guess like anyone I fly and so I care about the safety of the aircraft that I’m in.
I mean, Boeing’s reputation is just a case study of the worst proportions, isn’t it? Where it used to be such a fine company with a culture of quality engineering, and then new owners came in, and the culture changed from an engineering quality focus to a profit driven focus. And according to insiders, that has caused the demise of Boeing safety.
And it was interesting because it was only last week, Boeing pleaded guilty to two court cases over the crash of their maxi aircraft that caused so many loss of lives, sadly. And according to reporters, they decided to plead guilty to minimize reputation damage through what would’ve been very, very long, and painful court processes.
Anton:
So, there’s obviously a science behind that. As an outsider looking in, I’m wondering a little bit more if you can share with listeners, what is that delicate balance or how does that play out? How does the executive or the board or chair decide when and how much information to share?
And like the Toyota example, do you stand up and fully graciously apologize, or do you slowly leak? We’ve seen with telcos, terrible ways of managing. We’ve seen with Qantas terrible ways of managing stories.
Robyn:
Do you know there’s probably no perfect science to crisis management, because every crisis is different, it’s nuanced, and every chief executive and board is different with a different appetite for what they’ll say when.
So, people like me who are advisors to boards and the C-suite during a crisis and sometimes we’re brought in before a crisis has occurred. So, it’s in that issues management or crisis preparedness stage where a company might know that some very bad news is about to go public or something is going to break.
And you have the benefit of preparing your messaging and your plan. But when a crisis comes out of nowhere then the communications and the corporate affairs people provide advice to the senior level of the company but we can’t guarantee that our advice will be taken.
Robyn:
Usually it is, but sometimes it’s not, because the CEO might say, “I don’t want to say that yet. Let’s just give it a day or two days to see what happens. Because I don’t want to say that unless I really have to.”
And we might say, “Well, you’re better off to come out on the front foot and be honest and open and authentic because you will get found out.” Well, the reason I say that is there are whistleblowers everywhere, inside organizations.
And if someone in an organization becomes aware of something their company has done that is bad or illegal or fraudulent, and they are offended by that, it’s very easy for them to send an email with a copy of a document to a journalist.
Now it’s just happened to ANZ Bank. ANZ has been found out in its markets division for being dishonest about the value of bonds that it’s transacting in treasury. And that’s given it advantage in getting much more government trading work, apparently.
And it’s clearly someone inside the organization sent an email to a journalist at the financial review. And so, the story has come out, and now the chief executive, Shayne Elliot is a bit on the back foot and …
Anton:
Well, I do want to talk about the good and the bad, but I think let’s keep on going on the bad for our listeners, first. We have a — media headline, that’s a train wreck. Bringing back the humanity that some of the people you’ve seen where it’s been poor reputation management, what else have you explored or seen?
Robyn:
Oh, look, I think Peter Costello’s actions in Canberra Airport were just shocking. And there’s another example of he said something after the event, but others who witnessed the event said exactly the opposite.
So, and this is on the back of the Nine Entertainment Group already being in crisis mode with a former executive allegedly bullying, harassing female presenters and staff members of the Nine Group.
And then questions leveled at the chief executive Michael Sneesby, be about how much he knew or didn’t know. And then questions being elevated, how much did the board know?
So, on the back of all these investigative reports that have been coming out in the Sydney Morning Herald, which itself is part of the Nine Group, there you have the chairman of the company in Canberra Airport on his way to Parliament House, to open the New Press Gallery office of the Nine Group, and a journalist from the Australian in front of him asking him questions, obviously with a camera and a microphone.
And then all of a sudden, the journalist falls backwards on the floor and Costello disappears, and you hear him giggling. And then the next thing we know, he’s doing a press conference in the corridors of Parliament House saying, “I did not push that journalist.” He used a word very particularly or shove the jour … he used a particular word.
But then what was happening at the same time as he’s having the press conference, the journalist that fell over is interviewing passengers in Canberra Airport who saw the incident and that’s all playing out on social media.
I’m watching it on X all these interviews, people, “Yeah. We saw him. He pushed him with his shoulder, and then he walked off laughing.” So, the very next morning Costello is totally under fire. It’s the headline news.
He leads a media organization that’s already under fire for disrespecting journalists. And there he goes, as the chairman of the company, shoving a journalist and not helping him up from the floor.
So, he had to resign that very next day and leave in disgrace after an eminent career as the country’s deputy Prime Minister, chair of the Future Fund, chair of the Nine Group, he’s now a nobody. And all we’re ever going to remember about Costello is how he treated a journalist with such disrespect.
Anton:
It’s a pity, isn’t it? What could he have done? Flip it a little bit. What do you think he could have done or should have done instantly?
Robyn:
So, let’s say we role play that he was coming out of the airport, a journalist is standing in front of him with a microphone, in his way trying to interrogate him. He doesn’t want to speak to the journalist. So, it looks as though what he did was he shoulder barged the journalist.
Now, he may not have meant to make the guy fall on his back. But what he should have done when the fellow fell backwards, he should have stopped and helped him up. That’s what he should have done.
No matter how you feel about a journalist in your face, if you cause him to fall over, you don’t walk off laughing, which is what he did.
Anton:
It’s basic humanity, isn’t it? That’s your point.
Robyn:
That’s it. That’s it. It’s just common decency. So, that’s the first thing he should have done. Now, then, okay, he didn’t do that. So, then he decided to speak or answer some questions when he was at Parliament House because there were journalists everywhere there for this event.
So, he was trying to be too clever by half by saying, “I didn’t shove that journalist,” what he should have said, “Look, the journalist was in front of me. Look, I may have knocked him. I was focused on getting out to get to … in hindsight, I should have stopped and helped him up. I’m sorry that I didn’t.”
Anton:
Yeah, there you go, sorry.
Robyn:
That’s what he should have said, and it would’ve all blown over.
Anton:
It’s basic principles. And look, we can all understand the frustrations. I’m sure very important people get the media in their face. You expect that it’s part of the job. There’s frustrations, I’m sure, abound, but yeah, you’re right, the way you respond, whether it was intended to knock him over or not it’s some basic decency and some common morals.
What I’m thinking in the back of my head, you’ve touched on Peter Costello, Nine Culture, Brad Banducci and Woolworths. We touched on Alan Joyce without saying Alan Joyce, but Qantas and Boeing and Toyota all males.
Robyn:
Isn’t that interesting, Anton?
Anton:
Common thread?
Robyn:
I think so. And look, what I’ve been observing, and I don’t have a clear view on it yet, but it’s something that I’m watching with great interest in all these cases, Qantas, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Woolworths, and Nine, all companies that have been through very public crisis situations where the company’s reputations have been trashed, they’ve all replaced the CEO at fault with a female CEO and an internal appointment.
So, usually when a CEO of a public company is leaving either resigning or retiring, generally there’s an international search conducted for the next CEO and that can take 6 months, 12 months. But in a crisis situation, you don’t have the benefit of time.
And the board has to make a decision very quickly as to who’s going to be the best person to help lead that company through the depths of despair and out through a rehabilitation and rebuild process.
Now, what’s really fascinating is that all these companies selected female CEOs and, in each case, so at Qantas, Vanessa Hudson had been with the organization, I think for 30 years.
Anton:
Long time. Yeah.
Robyn:
A long time. At Woolworths the incoming CEO, I think she’s been with Woolworths for 20 years. PwC was a very interesting situation. They appointed Kristin Stubbins, who’d been Chief Operating Officer, she’d been with the company for 30 years, but she only lasted for three months in the role.
And she was pushed of off the glass cliff, as we call it, and a male CEO was flown in from Singapore and appointed by PwC Global because the situation was so dire here for PwC. And then at Nine the new chair of the Nine Group is a woman, Catherine West.
And interestingly Prime Minister Albanese has chosen a woman as our new governor General, the wonderful Sam Mostyn, who I just think the world of. She is just a superlative human being, a very talented business leader, non-executive director.
Anton:
Now I don’t want to turn this into mansplaining or completely man dashing, so don’t be careful on me, but anyone listening, but I think it’s a really interesting insight that I particularly, and Darren with TrinityP3, Darren Woolley, we are very much into this gender equality and in advertising the bias towards putting females down, et cetera.
So, trying to drive equality and we’ll always believe it’s the right person for a job versus a male or female. But yeah, from an outsider looking in, it feels either the timing is right that a male has been there, and it does need a different angle.
But I think it’s deeper than that from the perspective of, we understand women have much more emotional intelligence. There probably is a softening of language. There’s probably an agreement of, I don’t know. So, I’m happy to share a little bit of information.
I’ll get back to you when I find all the information out, which is a much more female driven way of managing communication. Males and particularly male CEOs typically quite closed, not going to communicate, or I’ll let you know when I’ve got all the details, which I’m sure what you’ve been talking about in a crisis situation is possibly the worst thing to do.
Because the social media and media networks are just lighting a fire under that person, or the corporate.
Robyn:
Yes, exactly. Look, I think in a lot of these cases where things have gone off the rails spectacularly, the male CEOs have been extremely competent. They’ve driven great value for their businesses, and they’ve been focused on profits probably before people.
And I think maybe women, female leaders might be more focused on the people as well as the profits. So, it’s going to be very interesting. And it’s just going to be so fascinating to watch this all play out over the next, say, three years.
Anton:
Yep. Well, I’ll have to get you back in three years and we’ll have another assessment.
Robyn:
Evaluated.
Anton:
What about the good side? We’re touching on the good side with the replacements, but who have you seen with the opposite. There’s been good reputation and good management.
Robyn:
So, I think that Michele Bullock the new governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia is performing extremely well in her role. So, if we think why she came into the job, Philip Lowe had been the governor for an extended period.
Unfortunately, for many Australians, he made a dire, a very wrong prediction that interest rates would not increase. So, a lot of people went out and bought houses and apartments and exposed themselves to big mortgages.
And since Philip Lowe made that statement, we’ve had 11 interest rate rises in Australia in quick succession which has contributed to the cost-of-living crisis and the pain that so many of us are feeling.
So, Michele Bullock was appointed the governor. She’d been with the Reserve Bank; I think for three decades. She was in a very senior role there and I’m a great admirer of the way she’s conducting herself. She’s very considered, she’s not being drawn to make any wild statements.
In her first press conference, of course, the journalists were saying, “Well, what’s going to happen to interest rates? Are they going to go up? Are they going to go down? When are they going to go down?”
And she was very considered, “I can’t rule anything in, and I can’t rule anything out.” And she just kept repeating that. So, look, unfortunately, the way inflation’s going, it’s looking increasingly likely that there will be another interest rate rise. And she’s not going to be popular when she makes that announcement.
But I think because she’s been so considered and it’s like a very calm approach, a safe pair of hands, I think she’s building trust among the community, respect among government and journalists and yes, I do admire the way she’s conducting herself.
Anton:
I really like that example. I heard her speak as well, had exactly the same opinion, I just thought very measured. That point earlier, males can be quite dogmatic or have to answer or get quite a strong answer back, whether she was just measured and pragmatic.
And it certainly comes across as, yeah, there’s no crystal ball. So, as consumers, as society, we can go along with that and believe it, believe that person, as long as she or he is taking us in the right direction of being open and transparent. So, yeah that’s a good one.
What are the key insights here? What do the listeners need to glean from this in terms of good and bad? What would you say are the most important areas to focus on?
Robyn:
Well, look, I really think that the key learning is the importance of reputation, and that reputation management really matters. And it matters a lot because it directly impacts the value of your brand, whether people are going to want to buy your brand or your product or your service.
It impacts whether investors want to invest in your company and make you a more valuable company and have more money to do things with, to grow and to expand. And it matters because it’s going to impact whether people want to work with you. And so, reputation matters for all of these reasons.
And then thinking about what impacts reputation and acting as a good corporate citizen, doing things that you say you’ll do, acting with integrity for society and the planet, just doing the right thing, really.
And then if something happens that’s bad, then own up to it quickly and tell people what you’re going to do to fix it and then follow through with those words. So, it’s not science, it’s basic common sense, but unfortunately people are fearful of sometimes being honest about what’s occurred.
They’re very fearful of it, and they’ll try and skirt around it and then by doing that the situation gets a whole lot worse. And look, if we look at Woolworths, so where did they start to come unstuck? It was in January.
So, it was really interesting, Anton. I went back onto my LinkedIn because in the middle of January, I wrote a blog, and I did an interview with Mediaweek on the back of brand Finance’s Australia 100 survey on the most valuable brands in Australia.
And at that point, Woolworth’s was deemed by that survey to be the most valuable brand and Bunnings was deemed to be the strongest brand and Qantas had really fallen. So, I wrote a blog with my opinion of why all that had happened.
Within days, the Australia Day merchandise issue blew up for Woolworths. And they tried to come out and say, “Look, the reason we haven’t stopped Australia Day merchandise is last year nobody bought, it just sat on the shelf. And our focus is on providing fresh fruit and vegetables.”
So, okay that sounded common sense, but that didn’t wash, people didn’t buy it. And so, the crisis escalated on social media and in mainstream media to the point where the head of corporate communications at Woolworths must have said to the CEO, Brad Banducci, “Hey, Brad, we need you to go and do some TV breakfast interviews. We need to take out full-page ads in the print media to say, “Sorry, we got it wrong.”
And so, they did this big mea culpa, but the damage was already done. And then not long after that Four Corners did its big investigation into the duopoly of supermarkets and had the two CEOs on the program, the head of Kohl’s, the head of Woolworths, and we all know what happened.
Brad Bucci got a question he didn’t like; he gave an answer. He realized it was a very bad answer. He said to Angus Grigg, the journalist, “Oh, sorry. Can we just cut that out? Can you ask me that again? I shouldn’t have said that.”
Angus just looked at him calmly and said, “You agreed to the interview, this is all on the record.” So, Brad has a hissy fit, gets up, walks off the set, you can hear the head of corporate comms advising him, trying to calm him down on the side.
He then comes back but he’s very flustered. Well, then of course, the next day it’s all over. He’s had to indicate he’s resigning early, and the new CEO was named. And she takes over in September, but it’s not finished there.
So, now there’s been senate inquiries into the behavior of supermarkets and the way they’re treating suppliers, the price gouging of consumers. And then, was it only earlier this week Woollies did a public announcement that they’re stocking Australian flags for the Olympic games. Did you see that?
Anton:
Yes, I did. Felt like a back flip.
Robyn:
Yeah. So, actually, they’ve gone on the front foot. And they’re going to stock flags all year round. So, they’ve gone from now to every day of the year. So, it’d be funny …
Anton:
I mean, this says to me, you said something earlier, it’s not scientific, but I feel it’s more and more behavioral psychology.
So, I wonder how well both areas, the industry on the corporate PR side and on your agency and others side, and then on the C-suite and probably board side, how much are both of those trained in behavioral psychology and psychology? It feels like that’s a more important area to be really skilled in in other functional areas.
Robyn:
Look, that’s true. I did the psychology as a sub-major in my communications degree. And I think as you said earlier, I don’t know whether as a gender, women are naturally higher in their IQ, perhaps. I mean, there’s a lot talked about that I think everybody’s different with their individual strengths and weaknesses.
But there are other methods of tracking reputation, monitoring stakeholder sentiment. And I know that the big organizations, the ASX 20 companies, I’m sure would be all investing in ongoing reputation tracking and sentiment tracking of how people are feeling about their brands.
I mean, net promoter scores, would you recommend this company to a friend? They’re all doing that work. It’s all there. Whether they’re looking at it or not, I would imagine the marketers would absolutely be all over that.
And then during a crisis, it’s very important to be tracking sentiment and monitoring sentiment. And you can do that by monitoring social media commentary. It’s obviously very clear in published media articles but also checking within, I mean, you can see how investors feel because they vote with their money.
I advised a company about a year ago where the CEO had made a horrendous misogynist racist comment in an interview with a journalist in a publication in New Zealand and it was just horrendous.
I actually was called by the chairman of the board to assist, and I said, “I’ll work with you and the board, but I will not work with that CEO because you should be firing him.” And for various reasons, they didn’t feel that they were in a position to fire the CEO.
And I’m getting off track now Anton, but being able to monitor what shareholders are feeling, the shareholders were ringing the chairman of the board saying, “We’re selling our stock. We don’t want to be associated with a company where your CEO speaks about women in that way.”
And they were selling their shares in large tranches. So, the value of the company share price was rock bottom. So, looking at sentiment and being aware of the impact, what you say and do is having on your stakeholders is really critical.
Anton:
It’s paramount. So, that feels to me as an event is happening or as sentiments changing, dealing with the crisis. You touched on, I think right up front in the conversation, what about getting proactive and preventing?
Have you worked any examples with your client base or people you’ve worked with, or companies you’ve worked with in how to prevent or train or get up to speed of how to manage these situations, which I guess got to that behavioral psychology thought, how do you train or prepare for this sort of incidents?
Robyn:
Yes. So, we do a lot of what we call crisis preparedness and there is a process to that. And we suggested to most of our new clients so the first thing to do is we do a risk assessment workshop with the executive team of the company.
They might already have prepared a risk register, but we need to know what are the things that are keeping them awake at night that they would hope never happened because they’re going to cause reputation damage or financial loss or death and injury to people. So, what are the big risks that are facing their organization?
So, once we map those risks and we map the stakeholders we can then prepare a crisis response and management plan for the company and that includes the escalation process. Like who’s on their crisis management team? Do they have a team? If the calls come in, how do they get escalated? How do they get dealt with?
And we can also do a whole lot of scenario planning and prepare what we call holding statements for every scenario.
And you can do that calmly when there’s not a crisis in play and get all those statements pre-prepared and approved so that if a crisis happens in a particular scenario, you’ve already done the thinking about how you’re going to respond to that particular situation.
We also put executives through media training, and we start with the soft, easy interviews, and then we put them through the really tough interviews where let’s say a crisis has occurred, this is what you’re going to be asked, this is what you have to be ready for. And then once we’ve done that, we do what we call a crisis drill, and we craft a scenario. It’s a bit like out writing, choreographing a play.
And you sort of think of worst-case scenarios, what do they hope will not happen? And we do that in conjunction usually with someone within the organization. And then we have live injections into the drill, which is a half day.
And they have to be thinking on their feet, and they’ve got to be figuring out, “Okay, this is coming up on social media, or a regulator has called, the ACCC has called us about something, what are we going to say to them? And then how are we going to say it? And who in the company says it?”
So, you do all that testing. So, then if a crisis occurs, they’re much more ready to deal with it. So, that’s what we would call crisis preparedness. And then when there’s an incident, that’s when you then leap into crisis response mode.
Anton:
You’ve got a framework at least to hopefully work to male or female or any other gender.
Robyn:
Yeah, because it really gets down to the messaging. What do you know? So, what’s happened? What can you say based on what’s happened? And then as more information comes to hand, generally, you would need to keep informing people of how it’s playing out.
Sometimes, like in a cybersecurity breach, which is one of the big crisis scenarios that all companies now have to plan for and expect you’ve got to get out very quickly and let people know what’s happened and who’s impacted, and how much information has been lost.
And then as more information comes to hand, you’re able to have call centers with hotline numbers for people to call or keep informing people of what’s happened. So, the nature of crisis is really interesting to evaluate.
But I think the biggest and the worst crisis now are typically from within organizations, and it’s based on bad culture, bad behavior by organizations. And in fact, if you think of Qantas, selling tickets on flights that didn’t exist.
PwC breaching confidentiality of the Australian Tax Office and selling information to American clients so they could avoid paying tax in Australia when other people in PwC were writing the new policies for the tax regime, Toyota making up false safety records, they’re making the crisis themselves.
Anton:
Yeah. But that’s the challenge, isn’t it? Which is why I do think it’s back to human nature. Whistle blowing is not easy in some places, there’s threats of being ousted, there’s threats beyond the person itself, themself, so we understand that’s not easy.
But I think for anybody listening whether you have a crisis at the moment or whether there’s something that you should be preparing for, or you feel there’s a need to reach out we’ve run out of time, but I would urge you to contact Robyn Sefiani. You might be able to help, pick her brain. Really appreciate you sharing your wisdom today, Robyn.
Robyn:
Thanks Anton. It’s been a pleasure.
Anton:
So, thanks again for joining us. If you’re listening and enjoying this episode of Managing Marketing Podcast with Robyn, please like, review or share her words of wisdom, and tune in for the next one. Thanks again, Robyn. Appreciate your time.
Robyn:
Thanks, Anton.
