A Study on Public Relations to Manage Corporate Crisis

Lee, Yoon-Shim(Major in Mass Communications, The Graduate School of Public Adminstration, Yonsei University)

The role of public relations in crisis has wrongly emphasized a janitorial approach It has led practitioners to be obsessed with acquiring expertise in cleaning up messes. This janitorial or fire-fighter response is short-sighted. There is a lager, on-going role for public relations that is often ignored by management until a crisis occurs. This expanded role must be recognized and untilized by management on a continuous basis if effective relations are to be achieved with the public.

This thesis offers a general model of crisis management PR, which has 4 dimensions; The1st dimension is the mitigating stage, in which PR practitioners make alist of possible crisis and go through a potential problem analysis. The 2nd dimension is the preparing stage, where the PR activities are focused on gathring all the vital records concerning to the corporate on formulating a crisis management plan, and on updating the crisis management plan perriodically. And mock drills should be conducted under the outlines of the plan to evaluate weaknesses. The 3rd dimension is the responding stage. When a crisis actually breaks. PR practitioner should carry out a comprehensive communication management plan" The information-flow should be controlled. The company's key messages should be conveyed to the target audiences in a orgarnized way. And the good media-relation is the critical part of the crisis communication plan. The last dimension is recovery stage. In this stage, getting a crisis under control and evaluating the crisis management plan are important. This general model of crisis management PR is applied to 4 classes of crisis. The results are as follows: First, in case of the internally generated immediate crisis, it is relatively predictable and the result is more devastating. The preventive(or mitigating) and preparing function of the crisis management are important in this category of crisis. Second, in case of the internally generated building crisis, the signs of crisis tend to be disguised. The PR practitioner should keep an eye on the underlying issues and try to prevent similar or related crisis. The third category is the immediate crisis which is caused by the change in the environment. Such a crisis is hardly predicted and prepared in advance.

The most effective way of dealing the situation is seizing early initiatives by establishing the proper responding strategy at the very beginning. Finally, in case of building crisis caused by the change in the environment, most of all, it is important to determine what the real cause of the crisis is and to get rid of it as soon as possible.