Every brand eventually faces a crisis. Learn how to handle crisis communication correctly. Elizabeth Edwards, president of Volume Public Relations, shares what to do when you’re faced with a crisis in your business.
Elizabeth Edwards is president and founder of Volume Public Relations, she leads the nations premier communications agency delivering marketing, PR and corporate communication programs rooted in the principles of human sciences. Creating “More Awareness, More Customers, and More Results” is Volume Public Relation’s mantra, and Elizabeth and her team achieve this by implementing PR campaigns developed with scientific precision rather than just a marketing expert’s conjecture.
Think Like A Journalist Quote
“The secret of crisis management is not good vs. bad, it’s preventing the bad from getting worse.” –Andy Gilman of Comm Core Consulting Group
Success Quote
We use science—respecting how the human mind works and then communicating, strategizing and working in concert with those forces rather than against them.
Career Highlight
Elizabeth was invited to ring the NASDAQ opening bell, because of a significant increase of sales for her client. It was a proud moment because their campaign’s budget was 1/4 of those of others, but we developed media coverage from NYT to WSJ to 60 minutes; and made the workplace better for countless businesses, managers, and new graduates
When It Didn’t Work!
Requiring too much perfection from my team, which led to them burning out. So now her company and team work smarter, not just harder, with science as their fuel—not just their hard work and years of experience.
How To Handle Crisis Communication Correctly: Using The Science Of The Mind
Use contrast: Use contrast to drive home your points. People respond positively when you can use contrast to compare your product benefits to your competitors’ products.
Social proofs: The use of social proof is good. “Other people are doing this” is incredibly powerful, as proposed by Cialdini decades ago and documented many times since, including his most recent book, The Small Big.The social proofs can be rendered even more effective with greater precision. At least in the case of prices, more precise values have been demonstrated to be more credible. For example, one study found that homes with more precise listing prices sold for a higher value than those with round prices.The precision effect goes to the credibility of a number. An interesting study at the University of Florida showed that precise prices like $498.32 were assigned a higher perceived value by subjects when compared to round prices like $500.
Address the Ego “You”: The word “you” is incredibly powerful. People, unsurprisingly, are most interested in themselves. They pay attention to messages that seem to involve them. Background: The choice of pronouns in marketing and advertising can impact the ability of the audience to engage with the material. By using the pronoun “you,” an organization can create ads engage the target audience more successfully. Scientific Rationale: The use of pronouns in advertising is a tool for implementing the concept of interactivity: “the facility for persons and organizations to communicate directly with one another regardless of distance or time.” By increasing interactivity, certain pronouns will reduce the distance between the message and audience, making the message more relatable and engaging to the audience.
Validation / Reasoning “Because”: Offering a “because” justification to a request increases POSITIVe response rate by by 34%. Printer study — when people were asked if they could cut in line with a 60% response rate. When they asked if they could cut in line with a because reasoning, acceptance jumped to 94%. When they asked if they could cut “because they needed to make copies” they still had a 93% positive response rate.
Multimedia Resource
iPhone
Book
“YES” book by Maldini
Business should be a human-to-human connection. #BrandingTips
Mentioned In This Episode
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