A New Way Of Thinking For Crisis Management In Chinese Enterprises

After the occurrence of the crisis, there will inevitably be conflicts of interest, media supervision and attack, public opinion condemnation, emotional confrontation and so on. How to effectively manage these conflicts and how to find the core of the crisis is the key to decide whether or not crisis management can be successful.

In June 19th, 2007, a welder in Jinta County, Gansu, was working on the M brand mobile phone, which burst into the jacket pocket and caused the worker to break his rib and pierce the heart and die. The first cell phone death case that shocked the country happened.

Despite the fact that the cause of the accident quickly proved to be that the mobile phone battery used by the deceased was not original and used in a high temperature environment, the serious accident still dragged the M brand into the abyss of crisis. In the next one or two weeks, almost all the media in the country reported and tracked the occurrence and development of the matter. On the major portals, BBS and blog, there was a public opinion craze for crusade against M brand phones.

From the perspective of corporate crisis classification, there is nothing more serious than product quality accidents that cause death.

After experiencing market position being surpassed by Samsung mobile phones, declining sales performance and global heavy layoffs, and so on, the "explosion door" once again dragged the M brand into many abyss of crisis.

The occurrence, development and evolution of any crisis has its specific social background. As a typical enterprise crisis event, the M brand mobile phone bombing reflects not only the gains and losses of pnational enterprises in handling the crisis of Chinese enterprises, but also profoundly reflects the characteristics of public opinion and the attention of the masses of Chinese media. Through in-depth analysis of this crisis, we will be able to form a deeper understanding and grasp of enterprise crisis management.

How to pform typical events into atypical events, and the severity and impact of accidents on enterprises depend on two aspects: first, the nature of the accident itself.

The two is the media's attention to events and the focus of public opinion.

M brand mobile events cause serious crisis pressure on the M brand. First of all, there is no doubt that the accident caused people to die and belong to the highest level of crisis. Secondly, because of the strong interest of multimedia in this incident -- the first case of cell phone explosion death in China, so the media are around the core to report, dig and even guess: how does M brand deal with this crisis? What kind of impact will this crisis have on M brand?

This is one of the core points of the corporate crisis. Typical crisis events attract more media attention than untypical crisis events, and arouse the enthusiasm of the media. Moreover, the public opinion attacks on the enterprises are stronger.

Before we discuss the impact of typical crisis events, let us return to the incident itself to analyze how much public opinion is concerned about mobile phone explosions.

Is M brand mobile phone explosion really shocking?

In the GOOGLD search engine, the search results of "mobile phone explosion + NOKIA" were 620 thousand reports, and 180 thousand mobile phone explosions and Sony Ericsson search results were entered, and 68 thousand mobile phone explosion + Samsung search results were reported. This shows that every famous brand has had cell phone explosions, and there are tens of thousands of negative news reports and hundreds of thousands of articles.

Therefore, the mobile phone explosion is not an unheard of wonder for the mobile phone industry. Unfortunately, the M brand mobile phone is not just an explosion, but more importantly, it is the first fatal cell phone explosion in China, which makes the event unique. It is also said that this incident is a typical crisis.

The degree of concern from media to events depends on five aspects: typicality, timeliness, importance, proximity and interest.

Because the M brand mobile phone explosion is the first domestic death case to have typical significance, in the media's crazy tracking reports, multi angle analysis and long time focusing, the crisis management of M brand becomes more and more difficult. How to pform typical events into atypical events and solve the excessive focus of media reports is one of the essentials of M brand crisis management.

After the crisis, M brand responded quickly and sent the director of public relations to the accident investigation.

But in the next crisis management, the M brand was obviously wrong. The --M brand denied that the M was the brand of the explosive phone, and then the blame for the original battery was not on the mobile phone.

Then, in the Guangzhou market sampling inspection, M brand four mobile phone batteries are not qualified, M brand immediately issued clarification statement that all sampling batteries are counterfeit products, and said the M brand product line quality is reliable, there will be no quality defects.

The logical thinking of M brand crisis management is as follows: cell phone explosion - denial - is called battery disaster - battery failure - denial / clarification - claims product quality is reliable.

This logical thinking has obviously made the media and the public's attention focused on the M brand, making the handling of crisis events become a guilt / innocence argument. The typical demonstration of the event has been increasing. The enthusiasm of the media has been lengthened with every M brand's justification, and the negative impact of the crisis has been increasing.

One of the essentials of successful crisis management is to dissolve the media's excessive attention to the typical nature of crisis events, and gradually lead the media to other aspects, so that negative reports will gradually subside, or create new focus of attention and turn media opinion.

In the Sudan red crisis in 2005, when Heinz struggled in the quagmire of crisis, Kentucky took the initiative to convince the media that its two products contained Sudan red.

In a sincere apology to consumers, Kentucky's more important initiatives are to announce the source of Sudan's products, which is the source of their products, and the focus of public attention is immediately focused on the unnamed "Sudan red culprit" company.

A very typical crisis case, which is very explosive, has become an atypical crisis under the ingenious handling of KFC. The division of crisis responsibility has made KFC avoid the prolonged bombardment of the media.

Similarly, in dealing with the crisis of mobile phone bombing, the most important point of M brand is to distinguish the typical event from the atypical event, and pform the typical events from the media's long focused criticism to the media's attention less or scattered atypical events.

The logical thinking of crisis management can be as follows: sincerity shows the attitude -- affirming the harm of counterfeiting batteries -- acknowledging mistakes in the management of battery circulation channels -- strongly condemning the harm of counterfeit batteries -- firm determination to strictly control channels and safeguard consumers' rights and interests.

When a company has a crisis, when it is confirmed that the crisis is really the responsibility of the enterprise, the enterprise must conceded an apology and win the understanding of the people on the one hand.

Secondly, it is clever to avoid evasions, and from the many accusations, take the initiative to recognize the lighter part of responsibility, thus effectively draw the attention of the media. From this perspective, the logical end of M brand mobile phone explosion crisis management should be the failure of channel management, and the crisis events caused by channel management mistakes are caused by many factors: both the reasons for the failure of the government's market supervision, the reasons for the interests of the channels, the reasons why the illegal battery manufacturers are shoddy, and the reasons why consumers choose the wrong way to make a mistake.

From this point of view, the media's attention to the M brand mobile phone explosion will soon exceed the M brand itself, and rise to the multi angle thinking of the government, channel manufacturers, counterfeit battery manufacturers, consumer choice and so on. The dispersion of public concern will help the M brand quickly reduce the negative impact of the long term crisis report.

It is one of the key points to handle the crisis in China.

In the face of media attacks, how can we start the anti communication strategy? "We are concerned about the life deprived by the inferior products and their accessories. We are also concerned about the grief of the deceased relatives. We pay more attention to the life rights of billions of mobile phone users and potential users.

We are trying to analyze the brand of M. Why did the past industry leaders become embarrassed recently?

When a man goes to heaven, he will never return to the ground.

And a M brand disappeared, and there are NOKIA, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, and even our domestic brand waveguides, Lenovo.

This highly sensational and offensive text is the first issue of a famous portals in China, the theme of M brand war. After three days of the M brand mobile phone bombing, the website has produced a very detailed topic, which is divided into several sections, namely, "house leakage and rainy night", "sunset sunset, heartbroken people on the horizon", "sick and desperate", and so on. The M brand's crisis events in recent decades are reviewed in detail.

As the market environment in China is changing constantly, China's media environment has undergone tremendous changes. The media communication mode, the competition among media, and the operation of the media market pose a new challenge to the function of the media's public opinion supervision. A fair, objective and truthful news reporting position is often biased by interest. Some media are not only reporting the enterprise's crisis events with strong bias and subjectivity, but sometimes they even take the initiative to collect false news and fabricate negative news to coerce the enterprises.

Therefore, studying the propagation characteristics of media and dealing with attacks from media has become an important part of enterprise crisis management.

After the explosion of the M brand mobile phone, the mainstream media reported that most of the reports were objective, but many media (especially the Internet media) were reporting with a strong offensive. But by the traction of these media reports, the online public opinion was more and more noisy, and the reputation of M was hit hard.

In the face of the media's dark arrow from all sides, M brand can start the anti media communication strategy through two hard and soft control methods.

From the perspective of hard control, we can control the media crazy attacks by means of law and technology.

For example, after being attacked by the 315 complaint network of Guangdong, Dr. Bai carried out detailed plans. After obtaining relevant evidence, he took the court and decided to win the case.

What is even more special is that the environment of Chinese media is becoming more and more open, but the government departments such as the propaganda department or the media have the highest control power. When the enterprises are attacked by the media and the negative public opinion reports are completely out of control, the highest strategy is to start the high-level government public relations, to the government's Chen Ming incident, to urge the government to lend a helping hand, to issue a document from the government's point of view to stop the media from continuing to follow up, the Mengniu milk has been poisoned in --2004, and the negative reports of the media are coming from the mountain.

The second is to shield negative reports by means of technology.

More and more readers get information through search engine keyword search.

Therefore, when an enterprise is in crisis and has been widely reported, it is necessary to quickly and effectively eliminate the persistent impact of negative reports. The effective way is to shield the key words. For example, enterprises can cooperate with search engine giant Baidu through advertising and direct payment, and ask them to shield certain words by means of technology. For example, the M brand can shield "M brand + mobile phone explosion" or "cell phone explosion death" and other keywords. When users search these keywords, the results can no longer be 1 million 300 thousand, but zero.

This is a typical Chinese style crisis management. GOOGLE can not be shielded in this way.

Contrary to hard control, the containment strategy of soft control is mainly guided by public opinion through the way of catering, persuasion and pfer.

The way of public opinion guidance is based on the media and the public's attention and emotional changes.

For example, when the M brand just exploded, the antagonism of the public is bound to rise because of the seriousness of the accident. M brand should adopt a strategy of cater for the company, convey the information of the enterprise in an apology and cooperation way, cater to the expectations of the media and the public, and eliminate the more intense antagonism of the public.

In the second stage of crisis development, the M brand can conduct public opinion guidance through persuasion, such as pointing the finger at the harm of poor mobile phone batteries, placing oneself skillfully into the victim of a poor battery, guiding the media to pay close attention to the seriousness of this problem and finding the outlet for emotion for the media and the public.

At the end of the crisis, we can create some new changes in the enterprise, such as the establishment of new battery technology research departments, the opening of the consumer support hotline, the start of major projects, and so on.