Crisis Management Series: Image Restoration and the Effect of Past Crises toward Reputation by: Darius I. Cordova

Crisis management series: Image restoration and effect of past crises towards current crisis

Past will affect the present

The discussion of crisis in every corporation in the world is inevitable, because crisis will always happen for every situation, ranged from the smallest amount of crisis to the much wider area of crisis such as what is explained in the first journal by Coombs. During the crises happened in the 1989 & 1999 in the Philiips Petroleum Company facilities, the media linked the event to the current situation of crisis happened at the time of March 27, 2000 in Pasadena Texas. Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT) argues that whether people know about past crises is an important consideration for crisis managers. Indeed, SCCT suggests that to adequately protect an organization’s reputation, management must adjust their communication to account for possible past crises about which relevant publics are aware. (Coombs, 2004)

The journal argues that every crises situation experienced by an organization increase the reputational threat of the organization itself, thus (Coombs, 2004) the crisis manager according to the SCCT should use response strategies that demonstrate acceptance of responsibility for the crisis and that address victim concerns.

The study generally, methods and literature review examined the extent to which reputational threat of a victimization or accidental crisis increased when the organization had a history of similar crises. The results of the study (Coombs, 2004) revealed a weak link between crisis history and perceptions of crisis responsibility and a strong link between crisis history and organisational reputation in the victim and accident clusters. 

The study result showed that if no past crises occurred in the organization, there are no significant effect impacting the current crisis situation, and amplifies when the media provides no information due to the absence of past crises, stakeholders are likely to assume there were no past crises. The effect of the occurrences of past crises will have aggravating effect on the complication of the crisis. “A history of past crises alters the reputational threat by affecting perceptions of crisis responsibility and organisational reputation” (Coombs, 2004) when Ford Motor Company’s Rouge facility had an
explosion in 1999, the explosions of 1989 and 1986 were noted and the crisis moved to a severe reputational threat (Maynard, quoted in Coombs, 2004).

The correlations in this study indicate that the reputational threat of a crisis increases as attributions of crisis responsibility intensify. 

The results of this study demonstrated the important effect of crisis history on organizational reputation in victim and accident crises. The results showed a direct, negative relationship between crisis history and organizational reputation. A history of similar crises lowered perceptions of an organization’s reputation. The results support an indirect relationship between crisis history and organization reputation, too.

Most of the image restoration studies rarely incorporated the stakeholder theory, this limits the growth of the field. This article, as highlighting the significance of stakeholders in designing image restoration message, should extend the body of knowledge of the image restoration. That is, the article goes beyond describing general strategies as, in particular, the content management of the image restoration strategy tailoring different group of stakeholders effectively will be discussed. Realizing of the situation, it is hoped that new insights into both theoretical and practical level regarding studying image restoration in Thai context should be obtained.

“Crisis communication is regarded as an important area in the study of corporate communication. It is possible to say that every public and private organization has been encountered with a crisis. Crisis is typically viewed as a threat to an organizational image and an organization attempts to find ways to respond to the crisis and to regain public trust. Corporate communication, therefore, is considered as a significant means to communicate organizational crisis response strategies to its various publics” (kessadayurat, 2011)

In applying the Benoit’s five step of image restoration in repairing image after the crisis, the journal also shows how communication is used to create and alter reality, thus in implication can be used to alter people’s mind for the purpose of the company, in this case to restore its image. Also in studying how communication can benefit in producing the image and reputation of one’s company, the practitioner can also use the study to apply some strategies in operational level at daily basis. “Therefore, practitioners should be strategically design the restoration message based upon the framework of socially construction of reality and the multi interpretations to successfully communicate with its stakeholders.” (Kessadayurat, 2011)

References

Coombs, T. W. (2004). Impact of past crises on current crisis communication. Journal of Business Communication, 41(3), 265-289. DOI: 10.1177/0021943604265607

Kessadayurat, C. (2011). Understanding image restoration strategies from a stakeholder approach. BU Academic Review, 10(1), 282-287.