Marketing in a crisis

One of my favourite case studies in Marketing: An Introduction is “The boycott of Arla Foods in the Middle East” by Dr Ibrahim Abosag of Manchester Business School. I can’t remember how many times I have used it as an example in the classroom, or just in everyday conversation. It is an example of how things can go badly wrong for a good company through no fault of its own. In the case study, Arla Foods gets caught in the cross-fire after a Danish newspaper publishes satirical cartoons featuring images considered offensive by many Muslims. It turns out that Arla, a Danish dairy products company, is very big in the Middle East, and loses out dramatically when Muslim customers decide to boycott Danish products. The case study then explains the processes that Arla went through to re-build their brand and their sales in these important markets.

As the second edition of Marketing: An Introduction hit the bookshops, another company was suffering a major hit to its brand name—G4S. Oddly enough, G4S also has a considerable amount of Danish in its past, tracing its roots to a Danish company founded in 1901 (http://www.g4s.com/en/Who%20we%20are/History/). Well-known brand names like Securicor and Group 4 have been incorporated into what is now G4S: “the world’s leading provider of security solutions” (http://www.g4s.com/en/Who%20we%20are/Our%20Business/). The G4S brand has run into difficulties because the company has been unable to fulfil commitments that it made as the provider of private security services to the London Olympic Games 2012. This has resulted in the G4S name being dragged through the mud across a wide range of media, with videos at YouTube, blogs, online and traditional news channels all sticking the boot in.

My question is: does the Arla Foods case study have any lessons that could help with the G4S situation? At first sight the answer seems to be “no”, because the crisis at Arla was clearly no fault of its own, and Arla is a marketer of consumer branded products (such as Lurpak, Anchor and Cravendale). The G4S crisis is perceived by the public as the company’s own fault, and G4S is a marketer of B2B security services. Totally different, right? Well, maybe.

The key lesson from the Arla case study is that a company dealing with this kind of crisis has to put in place a carefully planned process to restore the credibility of the brand. What not to do is simply to respond with a communications campaign designed to tell everyone how great you are. Just getting out there and selling the message is something that marketers might reasonably be accused of, on occasion. But when you are facing this kind of crisis it is definitely the wrong thing to do. Sure, a communications campaign is going to happen, later on in the process. Before that happens, however, all of the stakeholders affected have to be researched, consulted and involved in the planning process, and the problem needs to be resolved. As we keep emphasising in Marketing: An Introduction, marketing is about more than telling people how great you are and selling your message. Never more so than when you are dealing with a crisis that has turned customers against you.