This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Melissa Agnes. She’s also the author of a book we’re going to talk about today, Crisis Ready: Building an Invisible Brand in an Uncertain World. John Jantsch: What does a brand crisis look like? Melissa Agnes: Brand crisis is any type of negative event that threatens longterm material impact on one to all of the following five things. Melissa Agnes: A brand crisis, yeah. Once you become crisis ready, you go through the motions of putting your team in a position where you don’t just have a plan that’s sitting on a shelf that’s says, “In a crisis we’re going to grab this plan.” But you actually have a team that is able to do what Crock-Pot did and assess, think like the material … Or the emotional relatability of the situation to assess its material impact and ultimately you want to be in a position where whether it’s an issue or a crisis, your team instinctively is able and empowered to respond in a way that actually fosters increased trust and credibility in the brand. Melissa Agnes: You look at what are your risks. That’s the only way to be able to understand, to use your example, that why no comment doesn’t work. Melissa Agnes: Not with me, because I would never waste my client’s time. John Jantsch: Melissa, where can people find out more about crisis ready and the work that you do?
Transcript
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John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Melissa Agnes. She is a leading authority on crisis preparedness, reputation management, and brand protection. She’s also the author of a book we’re going to talk about today, Crisis Ready: Building an Invisible Brand in an Uncertain World. Melissa, thanks for joining me.
Melissa Agnes: Thanks for having me, John.
John Jantsch: What does a brand crisis look like?
Melissa Agnes: Brand crisis is any type of negative event that threatens longterm material impact on one to all of the following five things. Here we’re looking at people, so stakeholders and the relationships you share with those people for your business. Business operations. The environment. The organization’s reputation and/or the organization’s bottom line. Any type of negative event that threatens longterm material impact on any to all of those five things.
John Jantsch: Yeah. We can probably all conjure up an example of where a company really got in trouble. A lot of times it probably has to do with negative press, or certainly stock price falling. Can you give me a couple examples that would help us kind of frame a brand crisis for an organization?
Melissa Agnes: A brand crisis, yeah. One thing that’s worth noting is there’s a difference between an issue and a crisis and businesses suffer through issues … I mean, that’s a part of business is suffering through issues. The difference though is that they’re both negative events. One of the doesn’t threaten that longterm material impact, versus another one that does. An example that I love to give is, because it’s just so random and so out of anything that anybody could’ve ever imagined, is do you remember what happened to Crock-Pot last year and [inaudible 00:02:25]?
John Jantsch: I must admit, I do not.
Melissa Agnes: No, that’s okay. Last year around … Actually, around this time last year, this is us. One of the leading primetime television shows that airs today. The show has over 15 million viewers every single week that tune in as a family primarily to watch this show. Over the course of two years or so they had been leading up to revealing the story of how one of the most beloved characters on the show, so Jack Pearson, the patriarch of the family, how he dies. The story of how he dies. Finally, on this … Whatever day it airs, they revealed that story. The story was that Jack is cleaning the kitchen one evening and it’s this beautiful scene, very creatively crafted and you see moments of the family, and flashbacks, and all of these wonderful moments, and at the end of it, he turns on a … Not a Crock-Pot. He turns on a slow cooker, a very ancient slow cooker that came with a story, along with a segment, and he goes to bed.
Melissa Agnes: That slow cooker short circuits and sets fire to the house and Jack dies of smoke inhalation. The completely random part to this is the next day … Again, this is a slow cooker, a generic slow cooker. It was not a Crock-Pot machine. Yet, the next day Crock-Pot woke up to thousands upon thousands of longstanding generational customers taking to social media and saying, “Oh my goodness, we’re going to throw out our Crock-Pot machine and we’re never buying from this brand again.” It wasn’t just on social. It made it to … Morning talk shows we’re talking about it. It made … It was across the continent news. Stephen Colbert talked about it in his monologue that evening. The reason being was that the show was so beautifully crafted that everybody who watched it sat there and felt emotionally compelled by the storyline. Then, they went to their brains and they went, “Oh my goodness, we have a Crock-Pot machine. I don’t want my family to die.”
Melissa Agnes: It started this very real, very social, right? Relatable so therefore shareable story, narrative online that people started banning together and fearful together and their solution was Crock-Pot is bad, we will never use the brand again. If we look at this, any organization … When I said there’s difference between issue and crisis, organizations could easily have looked at this scenario and been like, “Yo, this is so irrational. This has never happened in the history … This is a fictitious television show. It just makes no sense.” Yet, Crock-Pot was smart enough to say, “Okay, but what is real here? What’s real here is that people are profoundly fearful for the lives and safety of their families, the most important thing to them. If we don’t do something about it, we risk losing them. And at the very least, we risk having this negative emotional sentiment attached to our brand, whether it’s conscious or subconscious to people moving forward.”
Melissa Agnes: That is a potential material impact. What I help organizations do and what every single business, whether you’re a solopreneur, or a brand that has tens of thousands of employees around the world, is every single business is at risk or vulnerable to a series of high-risk, high-impact, or most likely high-impact issues and most likely high-impact crises. Once you become crisis ready, you go through the motions of putting your team in a position where you don’t just have a plan that’s sitting on a shelf that’s says, “In a crisis we’re going to grab this plan.” But you actually have a team that is able to do what Crock-Pot did and assess, think like the material … Or the emotional relatability of the situation to assess its material impact and ultimately you want to be in a position where whether it’s an issue or a crisis, your team instinctively is able and empowered to respond in a way that actually fosters increased trust and credibility in the brand.
John Jantsch: I think it would be safe to say that there’s a lot more exposure with … I mean, people leapt to Crock-Pot because that was the well known brand of that type of appliance. What about an organization that they don’t really have a brand that’s going to find itself in that kind of situation? I mean, how do they strategically look at this idea of being prepared?
Melissa Agnes: You look at what are your risks. What is it that matters to your business and what are the negative events that you are prone to? That can be something like a supply chain disaster, catastrophe. It could be a natural disaster that wipes your operations out for a significant period of time that’s going to have a massive impact on your bottom line and potentially your reputation, your relationship with your stakeholders, because they may need to go elsewhere, right? You might lose them. You might lose those clients. It can be anything from having one of your key … People are a risk, because that’s human nature.
Melissa Agnes: A prominent member of your team being arrested on some kind of allegation, right? That’s a risk. At what point in that scenario would … Where’s the risk there and at what point would you support that person and stand behind that person? At what point would you need to disassociate your brand from that person and why and what’s the best way to do that? Risk is all around us and it’s … Becoming crisis ready is just being very in tuned with what that means to your business and what’s expected of you by those who matter most to your business when something does go wrong and being in a position to meet, if not exceed those expectations.
John Jantsch: I know that in the title, subtitle, you have “Uncertain World,” and I agree. We are in an uncertain world. But this sort of feels like a downer to be sitting around thinking about all the things that could go wrong.
Melissa Agnes: Well, yeah. Sure. I didn’t say that it was going to be jolly, but it’s very necessary. Here’s the thing, when you become … I really believe … Throughout my book I have these crisis ready rules and I strongly, strongly believe … The work that I do with my clients is very…
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