More into Pepsi’s crisi

  

The advertisement of Pepsi featuring Kendall Jenner that was released last year 2017 for the campaign “Live for Now” in YouTube, sparked a lot of conversations in several media and fields. The reaction of the public towards it was rather critical because the ad had references to the Black Lives Matter and the Women’s March movements. The public criticized the use of serious social issues for a brand profit and the trivialization of the struggle of people.

Source: PR Week

Of course, Public Relations professionals paid attention to it and analyzed the whole process of Pepsi’s handling of the crisis for the sake of knowledge and learning, some from a negative perspective, other from a positive one. For instance, in her reflection, Van Loon (2018) points out that Pepsi dealt properly with the crisis because they reacted fast.

The matter of time of reaction is of great importance in crisis communication because the social media have dramatically speed up the way the information is circulates. Social media in general and Twitter in particular are the first channels in which the event disseminates at a very high speed causing the crisis (Sung & Hwang, 2014). (Sung & Hwang, 2014). The biggest problem for the organization with the early spread is that the event is interpreted and framed by the public and this frame is disseminated together with the event information (Van der Meer, 2016). Obviously, when this frame is negatively valenced, there is a crisis.

Therefore, speed and negative framing of the information disseminated via social media are the main reasons for a company to react as fast as possible, because as soon as there is information from the company, the buzz starts to disappear (Sung & Hwang, 2014). Nevertheless, still today there are signs of not full recovery of Pepsi’s damaged reputation because the purchase consideration is at the lowest since 2015, according to study.

On the other hand, Weergang (2018) considered that the reaction was incorrect because Pepsi firstly reacted in a defensive manner and, afterwards, apologized and pulled the ad. Even though the final strategy followed the appropriate steps by Coombs’s Situational Crisis Communication Theory (2007) that Van Loon stated, those came too late. Again, it is a matter of time, but, from this perspective, the problem is a first bad reaction that could have invalidated the crisis communication strategy.

As the expert Ewald van Rooij, director of Lindblom indicates, it is very important for an organization to have a plan of action in place taking into consideration several possible types of crisis and react according to the appropriate strategy as soon as possible. However, the actions and the people must all be aligned with the strategy. Unfortunately, the defensive first step of Pepsi was not aligned with the following response strategy to apologize and it caused more negative reactions that, apparently, further efforts could not totally solve.

In conclusion, the two main threats to take into account for a proper handling of a crisis are the speed of the social media and the framing of the information by the public but if the alignment of all parts under the same strategy is not correct, the crisis will not properly be solved.

About the author:

Carla Navarro is a Social Sciences traveler, from a not finished BA in Sociology to a nearly finished MA in Communication Science passing by a completed BA in Social and Cultural Anthropology and a MA in Visual Anthropology. She feels that this will be her last stop and will finally put her knowledge into a proper job, although she decided to start a music documentary festival in Amsterdam.

References:

Coombs, W. T. (2007). Protecting organization reputations during a crisis- The development and application of situational crisis communication theory. Corporate reputation review, 10(3), 163-176.

Sung, M., & Hwang, J.-S. (2014). Who drives a crisis? The diffusion of an issue through social networks. Computers in Human Behavior, 36, 246–257.

Van der Meer, T.G.L.A. (2016) Public Frame building: the role of source usage in times of crisis. Communication Research 2016.

Van Loon, K. (2018). How Pepsi handled its PR crisis. Public Relations, Media and the Public. Retrieved from: https://publicrelationsmediathepublic1819s1.blogspot.com/2018/09/how-pepsi-handled-its-pr-crisis.html

Van Rooij, E. (2018). Guest lecture crisis communications [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from: https://canvas.uva.nl/courses/3068/modules

Weergang, I. (2018). A controversial Pepsi ad starring Kendall Jenner. . Public Relations, Media and the Public. Retrieved from: https://publicrelationsmediathepublic1819s1.blogspot.com/2018/09/a-controversial-pepsi-ad-starring.html