FOREWORD: this blog would have been more topical last week, when the Center Parcs PR crisis arose, but I had decided on the news of the death of Her Majesty The Queen that I would pause self-promotional activity until the official Period of Mourning was over.
For anyone who wasn’t following the news in the UK last week, Center Parcs got itself into a very public PR crisis by deciding to close its UK holiday parks on the day of The Queen’s funeral so staff could watch it from home.
The first consequential decision it took was telling guests who would be on-site then that they’d have to leave for 24 hours because staff wouldn’t be on-site to serve them. Or they could go home early. They also told those due to check-in that day they’d have to delay their arrival by 24 hours.
Furore
A very public furore ensured on social media. The company quickly U-turned and said guests already on-site could stay but would have to stay in their lodges. Cue Furore #2.
Then they said those on-site could stay and walk around the holiday villages.
Result? A PR crisis that lasted longer than necessary, significant reputational and brand damage (would you now pay the amounts it asks to stay there knowing it’s happy to turf you out unexpectedly if a major external event occurs?) and the brand quickly becoming the topic of derision, criticism and critical analysis.
Roots of the errors
As Stephen Waddington points out, one of the roots of the crisis was in a corporate governance structure which doesn’t include any public relations professionals at Board level.
Public relations is, in the strategic view, about managing relationships with stakeholders. What Center Parcs faced was a decision in which it had to balance the competing interests of several key stakeholder groups – customers, staff and its owners (because closing would have revenue and profit consequences).
It chose to make a decision which would benefit one group while negatively impacting others by putting staff over customers – assuming the game was Zero-Sum – and, entirely predictably, faced a backlash from customers. Many commentators have since pointed out it could have made the game Non-Zero-Sum by looking at options to allow staff to stay on-site but watch the funeral on TV there.
How to avoid the same mistakes
Center Parcs’ mistakes seem so obvious in hindsight, but the relationship management failings which led to them are, sadly, repeated across many organisations – leaving them at risk of getting into a similar crisis and facing the same loss of reputation, revenue and profit.
How then to avoid that?
1. Know how important each stakeholder is to your organisation and write it down. This is the public relations discipline called Stakeholder Mapping and is the first part of Stakeholder Management – where, in summary, you identify all your organisation’s stakeholders and rank them in importance to achieving your organisation’s Objectives (there are several matrices which can be used, the most common being Power v Interest).
Once done, this allows you to start a programme of Stakeholder Management – where you engage with each group, find how it feels about your organisation, what it wants and decide if you want its relationship with you to be better and, if so, how you’ll go about doing that.
In a crisis situation where the interests of two or more stakeholder groups appear to be competing, having their respective priority to your organisation already mapped allows you to decide what to do in line with that established priority and consistent with existing policies and programmes.
It also allows you to consider the consequences of each option for the relationships with each stakeholder group and what effects each option will likely have on your ability to achieve your Objectives and KPIs.
2. Decide on your Purpose and Values and act consistent with them. Center Parcs has a section titled “Purpose and leadership” on its corporate website but while it talks about how it does Corporate Governance, its Aims, Vision, Mission, Brand Essence and People Framework and Culture it doesn’t state its Purpose – how the organisation will make the world better. You need to agree on and write down yours so you can make decisions consistent with it.
The same is true for Values.
Rhetoric without congruent decisions and actions are empty and will quickly be shown to be so if what you do doesn’t match what you say you will.
Imagine how empty Center Parcs’ statements about its Brand Essence – “family togetherness” – and Value of respect – “We are respectful – we think before we act and empathise with others” – seem to affected, past and potential future customers now.
3. Have a Public Relations professional either on your Board or at each meeting – to offer strategic stakeholder management counsel. Of course I’m going to say this, but here’s why – because it’s about managing key relationships, public relations is a strategic discipline and therefore needs to have a voice at the top table. Whatever your good intentions, a decision taken without hearing the public relations view may go badly wrong, as this did.
4. Ensure your Board is diverse in background and neurodiversity. This will avoid groupthink by offering a range of perspectives to each decision, enabling optimum analysis and decision-making.
5. Where possible, consult the relevant stakeholder groups. This isn’t always possible with highly time-constrained decisions, but even if it’s only possible to consult a small number of representatives of each group, it will help you avoid making decisions based on false assumptions and likely make you aware of views from the groups you may not have considered.
6. Include PR considerations in your emergency and contingency planning. It’s clear Center Parcs hadn’t planned for this foreseeable event. You need to be have public relations considerations included in your Emergency Planning and have your PR team be part of any exercises.
How to do all this? Get in touch and I can tell you.