A Model for Crisis Management

Abstract

A bad public image has the power to make or break even multibillion-dollar corporations. A crisis can tarnish the most positive of corporate images, even that of an organization with well-established name recognition. Defending an organizational image during crisis requires a great deal of effort and skill. Yet, despite tremendous growth in the field of crisis management, the communication literature is filled with anecdotal evidence of what corporations and public relations professionals, with a limited scope of expertise and relying on their specific crisis experience, have done when faced with a crisis. As a result, what emerges in the literature are numerous “models” or prescriptions successfully applied to a small number of individual cases. This chapter presents a model developed and grounded in a review of the literature on crisis communication. The model’s heuristic value is then demonstrated by application to examples of both successful and unsuccessful crisis management in the context of two corporate crises: the Alcan Chemical Explosion and the Dow Corning Breast Implant Cover-Up.

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