when silence becomes a crisis: what four pr meltdowns teach us about listening

Every organization eventually hits a moment when a comfortable, rehearsed position stops matching reality. What seperates the brands that recover from the ones that don’t isn’t the side of the mistake – it’s whether leadership keeps listening once the ground shifts. Four very different cases make that point with unusual clarity: Adidas’s decade-long partnership with Ye, the Michigan state government’s handling of the Flint water crisis, Susan G. Komen’s funding fight with Planned Parenthood, and Utah Tech University’s name-change campaign.

The cost of clinging to a script

Adidas didn’t fumble because Ye’s behavior surprised anyone – internal staff and outside groups like the Anti-Defamation League were sounding alarms for weeks before the company acted. The company’s real failure was strategic silence, a posture that once passed for prudence but now reads as evasion to stakeholders who expect brands to state a position quickly. Michigan officials made the same mistake at a much higher cost. Nowling and Seeger’s (2020) analysis of the Flint water crisis found that state employees kept repeating “the water is safe” long after outside scientists offered contradicting data, a pattern the authors tie to Weicks concept of commitment– the tendency to defend an earlier public statement rather than update it. In both cases, a stated position hardened into a filter that screened out inconvenient evidence.

stakeholders are the early warning system

Susan G. Komen for the Cure offers a mirror image: after announcing it would defund Planned Parenthood, Komen tried to hold its position through days of backlash before reversing course and apologizing. The reversal worked, but only after real reputation damage. Utah Tech University shows what listening before the crisis can look like. Facing generations of controversy over the “Dixie” name, the university ran more than a dozen research studies and town halls before ever proposing a new name, which is likely why the rebrand succeeded rather than backfired.

the takeaway

Taken together, these cases matter beyond public relations classrooms. As McKinsey’s research on shareholder activism shows, social-related shareholder proposals jumped 37% during the 2021 proxy season, meaning investors themselves are demanding faster, more transparent responses to social issues. PR Week’s coverage of ESG spending backs this up, noting that even cost-conscious consumers say they will pay more for companies with credible ESG practices. The lesson isn’t just “respond quickly.” It’s that organizations need functioning feedback loops – internal and external – before a crisis, not after.

References

McKinsey & Company. See Perez et al. (2022) below.

Nowling, W. D., & Seeger, M. W. (2020). Sensemaking and crisis revisited: The failure of sensemaking during the Flint water crisis. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 48(2), 270–289. https://doi.org/10.1080/00909882.2020.1734224

Perez, L., Hunt, D. V., Samandari, H., Nuttall, R., & Biniek, K. (2022, October 24). Does ESG really matter—and why? McKinsey & Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/sustainability/our-insights/does-esg-really-matter-and-why

Public Relations Society of America. (n.d.). Susan G. Komen for the Cure steps into partisan minefield [Case study excerpt, Conflict Management chapter].

Utah Tech University. (2023). A small school elicits big change heard around the world [PRSA Silver Anvil Award submission, Issues Management category]. Public Relations Society of America.

Wiredu, E. (2022, October 20). Half of consumers would pay more for better ESG despite cost-of-living pressures. PR Week. https://www.prweek.com/article/1802558/half-consumers-pay-better-esg-despite-cost-of-living-pressures