Good PR Practices Should Inform Your Marketing (Especially in a Crisis)

Thanks to the internet, and the principles of digital marketing, communications functions are converging like never before.

PR pros are effectively part SEO, part media strategist, part community manager, and part social media marketer, just to name a few.

Marketing and PR are no longer distant cousins that might come together quarterly when a large campaign requires cross-functional collaboration. That’s the good news.

The bad news? If PR and marketing aren’t keeping close tabs on each other’s strategies, the whole family is in for trouble, especially when crisis hits.

Look no further than the COVID-19 pandemic and the concept of “disastertising” for a crash-course in the importance of reputation management informing sound marketing practices.

“...most companies that want to remain solvent through an extended catastrophe will have to master the precarious, high-stakes art of disastertising. To do it, they’ll need to persuade you that giving them your money is an act of solidarity.” (Mull, 2020)

Effective PR pros perform regular “issues management,” noting small organizational or industry problems before they turn into crises that rock the company/client.

But what if the crisis is one that nearly everyone on the planet is facing? Nothing like a global pandemic to tear the top off your crisis playbook.

PR plays a very important role in keeping an organization out of the crosshairs of public scrutiny in order to build brand loyalty. That way, marketing can fulfill its lead generation goals to bring in new customers and build out demand generation practices to effectively retain the ones they have. While PR and marketing are ever-converging communications functions in the digital age, they retain distinct goals and methods.

“Too many companies consider PR as a marketing function and ignore the value of PR professionals as knowledgeable advisers. As a consequence, they fail to take actions that could prevent or mitigate a crisis” (Scudder, 2016)

“If four people complain, one can assume there are 24 others who were dissatisfied and didn’t speak out.” (Fearn-Banks, 2010)

In the case of COVID-19, brands that won at “disastertising” adhered to the principles of risk communication (a strategic public relations function), with mindful marketing creativity.

1. Empathy: In times of crisis, it’s important to demonstrate understanding. In the case of COVID-19, that was relatively easy (unfortunately a little too easy; read on) because we were all forced into the same terrible situation, at approximately the same time. The trope, “we’re all in this together” was used so much by brands looking to demonstrate their solidarity with the consumer that it ended up backfiring, especially for laggards who ran with it to fit in.

“Many of those ads feature the voices of executives insisting that we’re all in this together, while those executives might be self-isolating in sunny vacation compounds. This worst kind of messaging flies beyond the bounds of simple uselessness and lands at full-on smarm; there’s no value except to the company itself, reminding you that it’s still around to accept whatever money you have left.” (Mull, 2020)

2. Action: Empathy bleeds into the next important principle. Yes, companies can talk all they want, but if their action doesn’t match their words, you can bet the public will notice and the brand will feel the effects of this cognitive dissonance.

“For all the goodwill that can be built and maintained through creative advertising, it’s in times like this a company’s actions matter even more. It’s confusing to see Walmart CEO Doug McMillon use an emotional ad to praise his more than 1 million “heroes” working in the company’s stores for their efforts to help serve customers right now, and then read a New York Times op-ed from one of those heroes lamenting how the company’s “punitive paid leave policy fails to protect me, my family, my co-workers or our customers—particularly now.” (Beer, 2020)

3. Hope: There’s a principle in risk communication called 1N=3P, based off of “negative dominance” literature. This theory tells us that when communicating in high stress scenarios, it takes on average three positives to balance one negative word or phrase. This is likely where a few of the wheels fell off on the “we’re all in this together” bandwagon.

Most brands, in the early stages of the pandemic, stopped short of offering much in the way of positivity or hope. It’s one thing to express empathy, it’s quite another to provide helpful information AND hopeful expressions for a brighter tomorrow, especially when that tomorrow is so uncertain. But our ability to inform, persuade and delight our audiences depends on delivering this hope in an authentic and methodical way.

That’s a Wrap

Without these guiding lights from the PR pro’s playbook, and ongoing social listening efforts, marketers and advertisers can fall into the dark trap of tone-deaf tropes.

TLDR? Marketing and PR should sync up on strategy for mutual benefit, especially when the stormy seas of crisis are upon us.