In Case of Emergency: What Not to Do

WHOEVER suggested that all publicity is good publicity clearly never envisioned the wave of catastrophe engulfing high-profile corporations over the last year, laying waste to some of the most meticulously tailored reputations on earth.

Toyota, celebrated for engineering cars so utterly reliable that they seemed boring, endured revelations that its most popular models sometimes accelerated for mysterious reasons. The energy giant BP, which once packaged itself as an environmental visionary, now confronts the future with a new identity: progenitor of the worst oil spill in American history. And the Wall Street icon Goldman Sachs, an elite player in the white-collar-and-suspenders set, found itself derided in Rolling Stone as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Last month, Goldman agreed to pay $550 million to settle federal securities fraud charges.

“These were real reputational implosions,” says Howard Rubinstein, the public relations luminary who represents the New York Yankees and the News Corporation. “In all three cases, the companies found themselves under attack over the very traits that were central to their strong global brands and corporate identities.”

Image implosions, of course, haven’t been confined to the business world. The basketball wizard LeBron James found himself scorned as a narcissist after his nationally televised abandonment of Cleveland. Taped conversations of the Hollywood star Mel Gibson with his former girlfriend have secured him seemingly permanent billing as The Worst Guy Ever.

But for members of the protective tribe known as the crisis management industry, the scandals capturing headlines in the corporate realm involve far higher stakes, threatening the lifeblood of global behemoths worth hundreds of billions of dollars. The calamities have served up a lifetime supply of case studies to be mined for lessons on best practices, as well as pitfalls to avoid when disaster arrives.

As conventional wisdom has it, the three companies at the center of these fiascos worsened their problems by failing to heed established protocol: When the story is bad, disclose it immediately — awful parts included — lest you be forced to backtrack and slide into the death spiral of lost credibility.

Exhibit A in the lesson book on forthright crisis management is the mass recall of Tylenol in 1982, after the deaths of seven people who ingested tainted painkillers. Johnson & Johnson promptly acknowledged that some of its product had been poisoned and pulled bottles off store shelves.

In the view of many who are paid to extract corporations from terrible situations, Toyota, BP and Goldman exacerbated their woes by either declining to fess up promptly, casting blame elsewhere or striking adversarial postures with the public, the government and the news media.

“Companies that typically handle crises well, you never hear about them,” says James Donnelly, senior vice president for crisis management at the public relations colossus Ketchum, who — like many practitioners contacted for this article — required elaborate promises that he would not be portrayed as speaking about any particular company. “There’s not a lot of news when the company takes responsibility and moves on. The good crisis-management examples rarely end waving the flag of victory. They end with a whisper, and it’s over in a day or two.”

Alas, recent months have featured little whispering and a good deal of high-decibel theatrics: sirens headed to another Toyota accident; recriminations over how birds in the Gulf of Mexico became covered in black goo; debate over the propriety of Goldman selling investments engineered to fail. The basic facts were so unpalatable that they subdued the cleansing power of the American industrial additive known as spin.

Which raises a question: Are some crises so dire that public relations victory is simply not on the menu? And, if so, what’s an embattled company to do?

Eric Dezenhall, a communications strategist in Washington who worked in the White House for President Ronald Reagan, argues that the standard playbook is useless when the facts are sufficiently distasteful. (He would know. He once represented Michael Jackson after allegations of child molestation.)

Mr. Dezenhall is particularly scornful of the classic imperative to “get out in front of the story,” as if swift disclosure provides inoculation against all ugly realities. When the facts are horrible, he argues, the best P.R. fix may simply be to absorb the pounding and get back to business, while eschewing the sort of foolish communications gimmicks that can make things worse.

Consider Tiger Woods. His now-infamous fondness for women other than his wife enthralled the nation, all the while torturing corporate sponsors who paid gargantuan sums to associate their brands with his winning image.

“What was Woods supposed to do?” Mr. Dezenhall asks in an essay in the publication Ethical Corporation. “Call an immediate press conference and rattle through a list of lady friends declaring, ‘Tiffany, yes; Trixy, no, Amber, don’t remember ...’? And if Woods had pre-empted with a confession, would this have caused the news media, bloggers, pundits, Hooters waitresses and everyone else to collectively reward him with their silence? Not a chance.”