Roasting injured Tiger Brands

CORPORATE CRISIS: THE POWER OF SINCERITY Caring for customers must become sincere and trust a given.

Tiger Brands and the listeria crisis are shaping up to becoming a corporate crisis management case study. Tiger has had the deck stacked heavily against it – not the least being the constraints in admitting accountability and by implication, liability at the start.

In such cases, the only mitigating response is sincerity in concern for the community and customers. It ultimately creates authenticity and credibility. This isn’t something you can spin from a PR handbook. It’s fed by genuine empathy, intuition, honesty, humility, integrity and consistently demonstrated as a brand over time. Whether it mitigates the crisis or not isn’t the ultimate point.

In Tiger’s case, sincerity, coupled with honesty about the difficulty it faced in admitting responsibility prior to conclusive tests, may have tempered some hostility.

I say may, because a hostile media is a given these days; lines have become blurred between direct/leading questioning, inquiry/inquisition and investigation/ prosecution.

It led to Tiger’s one empathetic gesture virtually being ignored: withdrawing all Enterprise products – not only the three suspected of contamination. That gesture seems to have taken a leaf from the ’80s Tylenol case: seven people died after consuming capsules that had been injected with cyanide in Chicago. Johnson and Johnson (J&J) immediately warned consumers not to take the capsules and withdrew them all throughout the US. It later stopped producing them completely. It cost J&J about $100 million and Tylenol’s market share dropped. But within months that was regained and J&J’s brand emerged with an enhanced reputation.

Similarly, in 2003, Pick n Pay (PnP) had an extortionist threat in Gauteng, claiming some products in its stores had been poisoned. It immediately told the public and withdrew the products. The threat turned out to be a hoax and PnP’s brand and share price emerged stronger.

The difference between Tiger and the others is that the latter were victims whereas Tiger is accused of being a perpetrator. That somewhat tarnishes CEO Lawrence MacDougall’s emphasis that Tiger went beyond what was expected of it in mitigating the effect of the listeria outbreak.

J&J’s then-CEO James Burke passionately believed in the company’s credo that its first responsibility was to customers, then to employees, management, communities, and stockholders. Similarly, PnP carefully nurtured founder Raymond Ackerman’s customer first passion.

Tiger Brands doesn’t have the same gravitas, or consistent sincerity. Just over 10 years ago, it was involved in the bread price-fixing scandal – one of a number of brand-tarnishing events.

Big business is reaping what it has sown for the past 30-40 years in the form of a particular interpretation of free enterprise, that places exclusive emphasis on capital supremacy, shareholder value, profit maximisation and short-termism. It has been dehumanised.

It has ignored the most important perspective: business isn’t about institutional standing and performance, but personal relationships and individual meaning. This is particularly true of relationships with customers and the community at large. They need a Burke or a MacDougall to convincingly reflect sincerity and individual behaviour to demonstrate it. – Moneyweb