How Skilful PR Can Help To Prepare People For Bad News
No company or organisation wants to be the bringer of bad news, especially when it is your own difficult decision that you are going to be making. However, with the skills of an experienced crisis communications agency, you can find the best way to do it.
A good example of someone who may be lining up bad news is Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves. Amid extensive speculation that her Budget later this month will include increases in income tax (which would break an election manifesto pledge), Ms Reeves began the month with a pre-Budget speech that hinted at the tough decision ahead.
She did not confirm there would be tax rises - that, after all, is an announcement that should be made in Parliament when she opens the famous red box and reveals its contents - but by arguing that the UK economy faced headwinds making tough decisions inevitable, she laid the groundwork.
The Art Of Expectation Management
This technique is known as expectation management. Now, everyone anticipates bad news for their wallets; nobody will be shocked, and any good news, the classic ‘rabbit out of the hat,’ can be a pleasant sweetener.
Similar techniques can be used if a company has to make a tough decision, such as making redundancies or closing a factory. It can make it known that options are being considered or that consultations are taking place with unions. The final decision may be unpopular, but at least it won’t come as a total shock.
Getting help to communicate this well can reflect well on your firm. Failing to do this will not just mean dropping bad news bombshells, but open you up to the accusation that you have been misleading people by hiding your plans.
Kraft And Craftiness
In some cases, the company concerned is clearly guilty of this. For example, Kraft, the American company that took over Cadbury’s in 2010, had initially made promises to the British government that it would not close UK factories and lay off staff, but did exactly that once the merger had gone through.
Luckily for them, after Cadbury had become part of Mondelez, a spin-off from Kraft, in 2012, it went from strength to strength and has brought more jobs and production back to the UK, so in the end, there has been a better story to tell. But this was a risky strategy that could easily have backfired had consumers decided to boycott Cadbury’s products in response.
Kraft took the calculated view that it had to mislead to get the takeover to pass, before making unpopular decisions. That is very different from a situation in which a company is not moving into a new situation, but seeking to deal with an existing one and having to make a very tough decision due to adverse circumstances.
The key difference is the speed at which Kraft acted after the takeover, which made their duplicity so obvious. By contrast, while raising income tax might be a breach of a previous promise by the government, it can at least plausibly argue this was not its intention when it wrote the manifesto, but a decision subsequently forced on it by worsening circumstances.
Given the state of the opinion polls, it may do the government little good. But faced with having to make a tough decision of your own, smart expectation management could lessen the impact on your firm or organisation’s reputation.
