Managing Organizational Crisis and Brand Trauma

An organization’s health and its capacity to perform are critical for its survival. As a research subject, an organization’s health is a state or condition potentially affecting its ability to meet stakeholder needs, to handle adversity or to adapt to changing situations. But for the organization’s stakeholders, it is more than a representation or portrayal of the organization’s fitness or well-being. Stakeholders use an organization’s health as a personally meaningful standard for judging how well their needs will be met.

Promoting development and growth while maintaining the organization’s brand and well-being is a fundamental management responsibility. Yet as we’ll see in this and subsequent chapters, the development of strategies to build or maintain an organization can be compromised in the face of threatening emerging events. The mishandling of routine or day-to-day operations often triggers the emergence of extreme events.

Sometimes searches for conditions leading to an organization’s crisis stop with the human factor. But while people are almost always involved, they may not be the reasons why an organization finds itself in trouble or distress. In fact, often trauma or risk can be tracked back to factors associated with the nature of the organizations involved.

A crisis always triggers some measure of trauma. At moderate levels, the trauma may be associated with little more than a memory of the event triggering the crisis. Think of the first time you were in a car accident. In short, even with moderate, non-extreme trauma, the mere fact that you remember the triggering event illustrates the “trauma tag” you’re left with to this day.

Next consider the trauma you experienced that related to some organization. You may have been treated rudely at a restaurant, discriminated against, overlooked when looking for a job or worked in a harassing environment. The memories you have associated with these events are yet more trauma tags, and the ways you’ve made sense of them (or not) are the effects of both the events and the trauma you experienced.

An organization’s brand is one way, sometimes the only way, stakeholders like you and me can “know” the organization for us. The brand is our way to digest the organization, to see it in terms of our personal wants and needs. This chapter’s focus is the special relationship between an organization’s brand, its image and people. Naturally, organizations view their brand as their most important feature. They may define their brand in terms of transportation, building products, entertainment and the beverage industry. But people don’t look at brands and organizations that way. People do not buy laundry detergent, they buy Tide^®; they don’t drink soda, they drink Coke^®; and they don’t join a military unit, they join ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or just Islamic State), Al Qaeda or the US Army.

In this chapter, we explore a very unique personal phenomenon, brand trauma. Brand trauma is the result of stakeholders, again like you and me, feeling that they’ve been betrayed, lied to or simply misled by an organization or professional. Brand trauma is what we feel, what we experience in these types of situations. It is a time when our once-good feelings or sentiments are replaced by “trauma tracers.” “Trauma tracers” a type of social stigmata associated with the crisis. Remember the feelings you had when a friend treated you unfairly or perhaps the trauma you experienced after being in an accident? Those are your “trauma tracers.” That’s why you vote for one candidate and not another, why you no longer believe what an organization promotes or, sometimes in the worst case, why people no longer trust the police or other authority figures.

But while trauma may be a real, observable phenomenon, does it have any effects beyond the obvious? Should organizations be concerned with trauma incidents and, if so, to what extent? In fact, it’s often difficult to say to what extent the brand trauma contributes to an organization’s possible demise, and we often wonder why the guilty seem to go unpunished. Indeed, a major theme explored in this chapter is designed to answer a question that troubles some: “Why, in the face of an evident crisis or event do some stakeholders not abandon the organization?” Well, even when it seems an organization or professional who violated our trust won’t experience any trauma of their own, that’s not the case. Even if the organization doesn’t appear to be affected, for example, there’s no loss of sales, membership doesn’t decline or the stock doesn’t fall, other effects will surface.

Brand trauma is a critical risk factor for organizations; it can be potentially destabilizing for an organization, its social network or individuals. To be understood, brand trauma needs to be measured. But brand trauma is a complicated matter in a complicated environment. Approaching the measurement of the trauma experienced and its effects requires quick action. But it’s not action without perspective. We need to begin with a complete picture of a brand’s health; its profile fits within broader organizational contexts—the organization’s social network.

There’s always a level of tension-based trauma in organizations. We operate from an assumption that there is no level that’s good, lowest is best. We take this position because trauma is an unpredictable phenomenon at best; it can transform into a number of different conditions and migrate throughout an organization. At its worst, it can rest innocuously with some other condition(s) and then erupt into an emerging crisis.

There are more than a few consequences associated with a crisis-causing event. There is the crisis. We may have an idea about what event triggered the crisis and its role in the crisis. These are the obvious characteristics, the evident distinctiveness associated with our crisis in our organization. We also know something of the nature of the trauma. We can see the crisis and its damaging effects. We can even measure its impact on the organization. These observations are useful and long as we don’t become complacent and let the crisis and its effects obscure the nature of the trauma emerging. No crisis impacts only one person. People are part of social networks, families, workplaces, schools, clubs and religions. We belong to these networks because we believe they meet our needs, and when a crisis impacts someone in the network, all feel some effects to some extent. The types and levels of trauma are not always obvious. But wherever it occurs, trauma must be managed; it cannot be ignored. Hoping doesn’t make it go away.

Brand trauma emerges with a crisis for a number of reasons. You reacted. You put plans in place to address the organizational and brand trauma that emerged. You targeted these efforts to deal with the strengths, weaknesses and vulnerabilities of the organization and, importantly, to help those stakeholders whose trust and faith in the organization is jeopardized. Those who suffered “brand trauma.”

But trauma is a difficult beast. It can’t be expected to heal like a cut or bruise. This trauma, brand trauma, affects human values, emotions and psyche. There are no “silver bullets” or “turnkey” approaches for brand trauma. Those treating brand trauma are crafting solutions for the stakeholders who are affected. Think about it. When will the trauma associated with United Airlines, the war in Iraq, a terrorist bombing, a home invasion, police brutality, a politician’s stupidity, a priest’s disgraceful behavior end? You may not have been the target of these types of incidents, so when will your “trauma tags” disappear? In this chapter, we explore the ways we think about our treatment plans as long-term events while, at the same time, understanding that some people will never forget.