It was a classic case. More than 40 children in a Belgian town became ill, followed by dozens more throughout that country. They blamed their sickness on Coca-Cola. Belgian news media, which had recently feasted on a major domestic food scandal involving tainted meat, jumped on the story. The Belgian government, widely blamed in the tainted meat scandal, was in no mood for another drubbing in the press.Belgians demanded answers from both the company and their battered national government, which immediately ordered Coca-Cola to close its production plants.
Panic spilled into France, which followed Belgium’s lead and banned production of the drink. Coca-Cola was forced into the biggest product recall in its 113-year history.
As PR disasters go, this was the Real Thing - one destined for the textbooks. Some critics charged that the Atlanta-based soft drink company was slow to react. The potential fragility of even the world’s most potent corporate symbol offers chilling reminders for the PR community. In the aftermath of the scandal, Coke has launched a fresh, aggressive "Coke’s Back" advertising campaign with an upbeat, let-the-good-times-roll-again message. They sent representatives into hundreds of Belgian grocery stores to speak with consumers in an effort to regain their faith. They even bought everyone in Belgium a drink (of Coke), which is a customary appeasement in that country after you have offended someone.
Signs are that the post-crisis campaign is working nicely and people in the tiny European nation have regained their taste for the bubbly brown liquid.
Following A Proven PR StrategySure, Coca-Cola, subsequently proven to have been blameless in the Belgium scare, may have been a little slow off the mark, but their executives followed a well-proven public relations/damage control strategy to handle the situation. They even volunteered that bottling plant hygiene may have, indeed, been substandard.
"Quite honestly, we let the people of Belgium down," M. Douglas Ivester, Coca-Cola’s chief executive, said during a June press conference after the crisis was past its worst. A nice mea culpa, but not strictly true. Coca-Cola was dealing with a classic outbreak of mass hysteria, says psychiatrist Marc Feldman of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. "These situations create a terrible dilemma for implicated manufacturers," says Feldman, author of "Stranger Than Fiction," a book on mass hysteria. "The sheer force of anxiety, mixed with media bombardment, creates an illusion of truth."
Feldman says Coca-Cola did the best it could because calling the situation for what it was at the outset wasn’t an option. "If they had come out and said 'this is just mass hysteria' they would have been vilified 10 times as much as they were," says Feldman. "People don’t want to hear that it’s all in their head, especially when it is."
"Coke recognized it wouldn’t win by presenting science," he says. "So they pacified people, told them their concerns were valid and said they were correcting the problem."
Like most observers, Feldman criticizes Coke’s Ivester for his lack of visibility during the Belgian scare. "It allowed the situation to spiral," says Feldman. "Mass hysteria is like a virus, if you leave it untreated it spreads. You have to intervene early with information and with assurances."
The company says it kept a low profile early on because the Belgian government asked it to. Ivester said the Belgian health minister told him not to manage the crisis in the media. (Coca-Cola PR executives did not return calls to Tactics for comment.)
Was It The Correct Textbook?Coca-Cola handled the Belgian difficulty with textbook solutions, says Katharine Delahaye Paine, whose international communications research company Delahaye Medialink measures corporate image and assesses the effectiveness of marketing and PR campaigns. The problem, she says, was that the textbook solution was North American, but the problem wasn’t. "An American solution to a European problem isn’t going to work," she says. "Just because it looks and feels like a familiar crisis, does not mean that the rules we use in America will work elsewhere."
Paine says her "when in Rome" approach makes good sense if you consider that every country has its own ingrained cultural ways of reacting, especially in crisis, and news media have different prejudices and ideas than North American journalists. "What they failed to do was understand the local environment and that’s a major problem with American business. We are myopic and incredibly parochial. Coca-Cola got caught up in something that was really none of their doing, but their local people should have been more attuned."
Succeeding Where Others Have FailedPaine may have a point, says crisis management specialist Richard Levick, but there are worse examples than Coca-Cola. "I don’t think it’s fair to say it’s an issue only with American corporations, " says Levick, whose Washington-area company Levick Strategic Communications works mainly with law firms. "Being sensitive to differences is not always easy and it takes time. But look: Coke has a 70 percent market share worldwide. They have succeeded where others have failed miserably. They do it right, likely better than anyone." Levick says he is loathe to be too critical of Coca-Cola because after a false start, they did it right. But Ivester’s lack of presence was a mistake.
"When 100 children say they have some illness because of your product, the company had to send the message that this was important to them. They had to say to the Belgian people 'we don’t know whether there is anything wrong here but we are sending our top guy to make sure it’s handled right.' That is such a powerful image."
Few seem to doubt that Coke will emerge healthy from its Belgian experience. "It will blow over and be forgotten," says Feldman. Levick, meanwhile, is more philosophical. "Sometimes in this business you just have to suffer a bad news day," he says. "From a public relations point of view, Coke has learned a lot. Let’s see what happens to their market share in Belgium. I bet it grows."
By Chris Cobb
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