What ‘masters of disaster’ would do about United Airlines
You know United Airlines has a serious public relations problem when Sam Singer calls it “the Hindenburg of airline customer service episodes.”
Singer is the San Francisco damage-control specialist you call when your predicament is so dire that you not only don’t know what to say or do ... you’re ashamed to even show your face in public. He is the go-to face for defending the seemingly indefensible, whether it’s a fast-food chain serving burgers tainted with E. coli, a refinery blowing up or a tiger leaping from its grotto to fatally attack a 17-year-old kid at the city zoo.
So naturally Singer was one of the crisis communications pros I contacted to get an expert take on the uproar created by video of a passenger being bloodied as he was dragged off a flight in Chicago, having refused to vacate the seat for a United employee.
“When something goes wrong, and it’s visually and viscerally enraging to the public ... do what any righteous human being would do: apologize and don’t mince words,” Singer said. “No ifs, no ands, no buts.”
As Chris Lehane, a former spokesman and key strategist in the ClintonGore inner circle, said, “You have one chance” to make an apology.
“The best apologies are short and sweet where one takes full responsibility and makes no excuses — and makes it quickly,” said Lehane, one of the best story-framers in the business, who now serves as head of global policy and public affairs for Airbnb. United surely missed that moment. Let’s fast forward past the question of whether the ejection was eminently avoidable (by upping the compensation offer for volunteers beyond United’s final offer of $800) or whether the use of force was excessive (of course it was).
“To anybody with two eyes, it’s clear that United is in the wrong,” said Nate Ballard, a PR pro who has been called one of San Francisco’s “preeminent media whisperers.”
The issue here is how tone-deaf United executives made an untenable situation worse. Much worse.
“You can’t parse words, nor can you deny what people see with their own eyes, like United CEO Oscar Muñoz attempted to do,” Singer said. “Denying someone else’s emotional response to a situation only makes customers, the public and the media even angrier and more outraged.”
Did it ever. A fellow passenger’s video of the episode quickly went viral, creating furor around the globe, and leading to wicked memes, calls for boycotts and demands for the CEO’s ouster.
Muñoz “violated the first rule of crisis communications: When you’re in a hole, stop digging,” Ballard said. “Instead he dug himself deeper. Not a smart move.”
Indeed, the United CEO’s letter to employees Monday commended the crew on the Louisville-bound flight for following “established procedures for dealing with situations like this” and included more than a touch of blamethe-victim innuendo against the evicted “disruptive and belligerent” passenger, Dr. David Dao.
Social media lit up again, in Hindenburg magnitude.
Yes, Muñoz had violated yet another rule of public relations. When you mess up — and this is what Singer called a “monumental, world-class” mess-up — you immediately apologize and attempt to make things right.
The United CEO waited another full day before expressing “my deepest apologies” for the episode generally, and the evicted passenger specifically, and promising to review and revise the airline’s policy on oversold flights by the end of the month.
“It’s never too late to do the right thing,” Muñoz wrote Tuesday.
Wrong again. The point from the PR pros is that it is never too early to do the right thing, especially when Facebook and Twitter are blowing up with vitriol about your airline. As Ballard put it, the right-thinking forces in the company need to act fast even if it means fighting their way “through a thicket of lawyers and naysayers telling them ‘no’ .”
Ever so predictably, then came the harsh focus on the background of Dao, an Elizabethtown, Ky., doctor. The doctor’s professional troubles, cataloged by the Louisville Courier Journal, included a suspension of his medical license. TMZ, among others, filled in more sordid details about Dao’s prescription-writing misdeeds and his gambling prowess.
Fair game? No way. The reason for the ejection, and the force that was applied, were indefensible no matter if the passenger were Mother Teresa or El Chapo.
“Anyone who knows anything about anything knows that it’s no coincidence that this guy’s past has come up,” said Lee Houskeeper, a prominent San Francisco publicist. “It’s the same kind of thing that happens when you have a police shooting. They look at the victim’s past and see that he once sold pot or whatever.”
Houskeeper insisted he would never use the tactic, and while there is no evidence that United was behind the examination of Dao’s past, he wondered if it might be a classic “no fingerprints job.”
United would have been wise to quickly dissociate itself from the revelations about Dao’s history.
“It reinforces the David versus Goliath narrative, and it’s not helping United,” Ballard said.
No one said crisis management was easy in 2017.
“Given the proliferation of outlets, how quickly information moves, and the role of social media — the degree of difficulty in managing these situations — especially when one is in the middle of the fog of a crisis where people are banging on you to put out an answer and respond to incoming before you have all the facts — is harder than ever,” Lehane said.
It’s also more important than ever for a company’s bottom line, as United experienced with its instant stock drop after the rough-exit video of a passenger whose only sin was to be randomly displaced from a seat he purchased. In a bizarre footnote, PR Week saluted Muñoz last month as its Communicator of the Year for 2017 at a New York gala, for the way he “transformed the fortunes of the beleaguered airline, galvanized staff and set the business on a smoother course — all in the context of a tremendously difficult time personally.”
If anyone on the planet still thinks of him as a worthy recipient at year’s end, he will have have earned the distinction of the Communicator of the Century. At the moment, the question is whether he will still be United’s CEO by the end of spring.