When you have a situation like this one (where two employees completely taint the reputation of an entire brand) strong public relations skills are going to be needed. Dominos is a national chain and the actions of the two employees reflect poorly on the brand and effect them hugely. Social media has played a huge role in this scandal. The video was spread widely and very quickly through Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. Therefore, it is going to be much harder to remove the video and to control the comments, groups, Tweets and blogs about the subject. As the article says, Dominos is dealing with a “digital crisis”.
I think that Dominos has done a good PR job of dealing with the situation and the employees. If I was the PR consultant I would have fired both of the employees and filed lawsuits against them, not only because what they did was wrong but to make a point that we do not tolerate things of that nature. Next, I would have advised Dominos to make a public apology on behave of the employees that screwed up and to explain the steps they are going to take to fix the situation. They would have mandatory health inspections of all of their stores and screenings of all of their employees. Yes, this would be very expensive, but it would be worth keeping their valued customers. Dominos would also need to make a statement that they will do a more thorough job of hiring new employees. This would hopefully prevent a situation like this from happening again.
The smartest step that Dominos has taken to deal with the situation is join social media networks like Twitter. This is extremely important and smart because this is how the video was spread so fast. They have started a Twitter account to address questions and concerns from customers. I would advise any company in a crisis communication situation to do this. Dominos is utilizing the Internet and social media and that will help them recover from this.
No comments:
Post a Comment