Do you know what your colleagues in the Productivity Prevention Department (IT) are doing right now? They’re probably sitting a room with too little air and too many dry erase markers planning for something dreadful like a big power failure or a space rock coming through the roof of the data centre at noon on a Wednesday. They all got up early and put on their XKCD shirts just for the occasion.
Over in your HR department, there may be a similar discussion about strikes, succession planning and staffing during an epidemic of gerbil flu or head lice.
The Hand Wringers really never stop thinking about what could happen, and they, along with the Keebler Elves, have strategies around currency fluctuations, regulatory whims, deadbeat customers, supply-chain disruptions and hostile takeovers.
Even your sales team is running an exercise around what to do if a prospect has some tough questions or a key client is looking for a discount.
In other words, Lords and Ladies of the Spin Cycle, our colleagues are doing scenario plans, which is something most marketers and many communicators don’t do and really should.
If you’ve ever had your carefully constructed campaign blown out of the water by an aggressive competitor, or if your product hasn’t been quite ready to go when you sort of promised the world it would be, then you can probably appreciate the value of a little preparation.
Scenario plans don’t have to be complicated, but they should be thoughtful. A great place to start is to have your team make a list of worst case scenario horribleness. Let me get you started:
- Your competitor drops their prices by 25%
- A new, larger competitor enters your market
- A nimble low-cost competitor enters your market
- Two of your least favourite competitors merge
- Your product fails spectacularly in some way, and everyone knows
- Your CEO is forced to make a sudden and embarrassing departure
- Your biggest customer publicly announces they are leaving you
- Your much-touted expansion tanks worse than Target in Canada
- You are caught lying about your product’s compliance with respect to, say, carbon emissions
- There is an angry backlash on social media to something dumb your Overlords have said
- You change your logo and your customers yell at you about it on social media
- Your customer service is so legendarily poor, there are websites calling for your demise
- Your production facility fails to get enough product to market
- You are being sued. Reason doesn’t matter.
- A competitor ties up a key product launch with a patent claim
- Your product is incorrectly linked by Dr. Oz to spontaneous human combustion
I could go on and on but you get the picture. Bad sh*t happens and we need to have a game plan for when it does.
For PR folks, if you haven’t got a solid crisis communications plan, I think a good place to start on the dark side is with your friends in HR and Productivity Prevention to see what’s on their scenario planning list. There is always going to be a communications angle, either internal or external. It will fall to you to make sure that on the same day your product is linked to an outbreak of salmonella that your marketing buddies haven’t queued up a bunch of swell recipes for the Twitter feed.
For marketers, it’s probably a good idea to have a quarterly stab at some scenario plans, either by assigning them out to some work groups to do on the side, or by having a fun facilitated session with yummy pastries.
Being startled by something sudden is fine, but we should never be surprised that it actually happened.
Next week we’ll talk about the scenario plans that don’t involve zombies but need some attention.
Related Posts
Don’t Let Your Campaign Sneak Up on Your Sales Teams
Why We Need to Stop Writing Plans and Start Making Them
BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
I help companies have better conversations
Drop me a line at ewilliams@candlerchase.com
Or follow me @bizmkter
Great post, Elizabeth. As a PR guy, I often urge clients to expect the unexpected, and this definitely involves scenario planning. In some cases, it’s not overly difficult to predict the kinds of things that can go wrong. If you’re a company that stores a lot of data, for example, you need to plan how you would handle a breach. If you run a hotel, how would you deal with a bedbug outbreak,or even a terrorist attack. However, it’s impossible to plan for everything, and even the most predictable crisis has its own nuances that make it unique. That’s why I believe this type of planning needs to begin with absolute agreement across the senior management team on a set of guiding principles about what the organization believes and how it will behave. Johnson & Johnson did not anticipate the Tylenol crisis where 7 people died after taking Tylenol bottles that had been opened and laced with cyanide. They had no game plan for this situation. But what they had was the famous J&J Credo. One of its guidelines is to protect people first and property second. This set the course for their response, unequivocally. They conducted an immediate product recall from the entire country which amounted to about 31 million bottles and a loss of more than $100 million dollars. Costly? Yes! But 34 years later, Tylenol brand remains the world’s leading pain reliever, and J&J remains a highly respected company.