Category Archives: crisis

SXSW “homeless hotspot” concept goes tragically (and predictably) wrong

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What was BBH Labs thinking? Michael Sebastien at PR Daily is on the money in saying that “it might go down as one of the biggest PR disasters of the year.”

New York-based marketing firm BBH Labs equipped homeless people on the streets of Austin with devices that made them wireless hot spots. Internet seekers then paid what they wanted—in cash or via PayPal—to access the Web. The homeless men and women kept all of the money.

The media wasn’t amused, and now BBH Labs is licking its wounds.

ReadWriteWeb slammed BBH Labs, pointing out that these are people, “not helpless pieces of privilege-extending human infrastructure.”

The T-shirts that the people participating in the campaign wear say:

I’M [FIRST NAME],
A 4G HOTSPOT
SMS HH [FIRST NAME]
TO 25827 FOR ACCESS
http://www.homelesshotspots.org

Wired referred to it as something out of a “darkly satirical science-fiction dystopia.”

It seems like the idea was ultimately about benefiting the homeless. I’m a huge fan of that, and anybody familiar with me and my work knows I have no aversion to risky and edgy, either. So I suppose I applaud to core concept.

But I’m also a big fan of thinking things through. “Risky” comes, you know, with risk. If you’re going to take chances, you have an obligation to game the potential scenarios, to anticipate where things might go wrong and to plan your way around the minefields.

It doesn’t look like BBH did a very good job on this front and now they’ve garnered lots and lots of exposure. Contrary to what you may have heard, all publicity is not good publicity, especially when the end result is that you may have actually damaged your cause.

Komen hires the wrong PR firm, missing the boat once again (and a quibble with PR Daily’s coverage of the story)

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The Susan G. Komen Foundation has hired a big-hitter PR firm. And not just any PR firm, either.

Now, Komen is assessing the damage, and it’s using a consulting firm founded by two former Democratic strategists. Penn Schoen Berland (PSB), the firm Komen hired to help determine how badly the crisis hurt its reputation, is founded by former Democratic strategists Mark Penn and Doug Schoen.

The goal here seems obvious. Komen’s recent bout of ballistic podiatry cost it massive amounts of support among people who believe that women’s health shouldn’t be held captive to a partisan agenda. The foundation has accurately understood that this means it needs people from the center and points left in order to thrive. Or, at this point, survive. So they go out and hire … Mark Penn.

Wait, what? Continue reading →

Hey PR professionals – thinking of representing a distressed brand? Six important things to consider before signing that retainer

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Yesterday I offered some thoughts on the sociopathic nature of some public relations agencies. Once we learn that American firms are lipsticking brutal despots and states that support terrorism it’s legitimate to wonder if there is anyone on Earth that they wouldn’t represent. I just heard a story this morning about a flak who went so far as to take on the remnants of the Khmer Rouge. So if Syria, Libya, Bahrain and the most notorious purveyors of genocide since World War 2 aren’t out of bounds, you have to figure somebody in the industry would gladly sign up Kim Jong-Il, Hitler, Stalin and the Khan boys (Genghis and Agha) for the right amount of money. Continue reading →

Double-reverse brand whiplash hits Arizona Iced Tea: a lesson in crisis

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Our consumer landscape is dotted by brands that invite us to immerse ourselves in the tastes, sights, sounds, smells and cultures of particular locations, which I suppose are deemed romantic or in some way aspirational. Like the exotic Australian adventure of Outback Steakhouse. A big favorite here in Colorado, of course, is Old Chicago. And a slew of Texas-themed restaurants, like Lone Star, suggests that consumers associate that state with an authentic steak experience.

As you probably know, though, Old Chicago isn’t from Chicago. Continue reading →

Desperate times call for … measured thinking

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As the poet Robert Burns put it, “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men / Gang aft agley.” The common military iteration of the sentiment says that no plan, however well devised, survives contact with the enemy. And former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson explained, in the least poetic fashion possible, that everybody’s got a plan until you bust him in the mouth.

There’s a lesson in here for businesses, even those that aren’t involved in actual combat: Nothing wreaks havoc with strategic planning quite like hard times. We’ve all got a plan, a vision, a dream, but these plans have to navigate whatever reality throws at us, and the more adverse the conditions the harder it is to stick to the course.

One of the biggest problems is that when things aren’t going well, any temptation becomes more alluring. Continue reading →

New report notices that Boomers are retiring; offers band-aid for sucking chest wound…

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Lately I’ve been talking a lot about the looming macro-succession crisis, and it’s felt like I’m the only one who sees the issue coming. This morning, though, a MediaPost item addressing a piece of the issue came across the desk, and while it’s only partially aware of the whole problem and the solution it points to is a half-measure at best, it’s at least nice to see a little validation on the subject.

Thursday July 12, 2007
Retiring Boomers Important in Hand-off to Younger Employees

A recent survey of 28,000 employers in 25 countries, by Manpower, revealed that only 21 percent have implemented retention strategies to keep their senior employees participating in the workforce. Continue reading →

How the macro-succession crisis is going to hit the entrepreneurial sector

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I’ve written recently about some generational issues facing companies – most notably the “macro-succession crisis” that I suspect very few corporations have even thought about in meaningful detail. In that post I examine how the coming Baby Boomer retirement explosion is going to engender all kinds of crisis, especially in larger legacy corporations that are so top-heavy with Boomer leaders that their Gen X successors are ill-prepared for the transition that must begin taking place in the next five years.

But if you’re a different kind of company – say an entrepreneurial outfit started and run by front-edge Xers (people now in their early to mid-40s) – you’re in good shape, right? You aren’t facing a retirement wave. You aren’t facing the need for a painful adjustment from Boomer-style leadership to the far different style of Xer execs. And this means there’s going to be no leadership vacuum at the top sucking everybody higher in the organization and creating trainwrecks at the Xer-to-Millennial lower management level, either. Life is good.

Except that you’re wrong – the macro-succession crisis is coming for you, too. Continue reading →

Pet food contamination crisis: this was preventable

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Imagine. It’s 6:28 am. You slowly rise through the many-layered fog of sleep, edging toward wakening, toward daylight, your body’s clock instinctively anticipating the impending blare of the alarm. As consciousness fans away the haze, realization hits like a drum of icewater and you bolt up in bed screaming. It wasn’t a dream. Oh, gods…

You really are the head of branding and PR for a major pet food company.

42 cat food brands and 53 dog food brands are under recall. It’s bad enough if you’re a bargain or store brand, but it’s positively hell if you’re riding herd on one of the industry’s premium brands – Eukanuba, Nutro, etc.

These last few days, your world has been engulfed by The Suck. Continue reading →