Crisis communication is a sub-specialty of the public relations profession that is designed to protect and defend an individual, company, or organization facing a public challenge to its reputation. Crisis communication is aimed at raising awareness of a specific type of threat, the magnitude, outcomes, and specific behaviors to adopt to reduce the threat. The communication scholar Timothy Coombs defines crisis as "the perception of an unpredictable event that threatens important expectancies of stakeholders and can seriously impact an organization's performance and generate negative outcomes" and crisis communication as "the collection, processing, and dissemination of information required to address a crisis situation."
Meaning can be socially constructed; because of this, the way that the stakeholders of an organization perceive an event (positively, neutrally, or negatively) is a major contributing factor to whether the event will become a crisis. Additionally, it is important to separate a true crisis situation from an incident. The term crisis "should be reserved for serious events that require careful attention from management."
Crisis management has been defined as "a set of factors designed to combat crises and to lessen the actual damages inflicted." Crisis management should not merely be reactionary; it should also consist of preventative measures and preparation in anticipation of potential crises. Effective crisis management has the potential to greatly reduce the amount of damage the organization receives as a result of the crisis, and may even prevent an incident from ever developing into a crisis.
Theories in crisis communication research In crisis communication literature, several streams of research exist at the same time. Different theories demonstrate certain ways to look at and explain crisis situations.
Apologia Theory "It is, as one would assume, an effort to defend and protect image. But it is not necessarily an apology." This theory would be used by an organization to deny public discourse and address a crisis.
Image repair theory (IRT) William Benoit established image repair theory (IRT) based on apologia studies. IRT assumes that image is an asset that a person or an organization attempts to protect during a crisis. When the person or the organization is attacked, the accused should draft messages to repair its image. Benoit further introduced 5 general and 14 specific response strategies the accused could harness during a crisis. General categories include deny, evading responsibility, reducing offensiveness, corrective action, and mortification.
Situational crisis communication theory (SCCT) Timothy Coombs started working on situational crisis communication theory (SCCT) in 1995. Originated from attribution theory, SCCT assumes that crises are negative events that stakeholders attempt to attribute responsibility. Coombs believes crisis managers can employ different crisis strategies according to different crisis types. Different from IRT, SCCT is an audience-oriented theory which focuses on stakeholders' perceptions of crisis situations. This idea is in line with Benoit's argument that crisis management concerns perception more so than reality.
Social-mediated crisis communication (SMCC) model As social networks and blogs become popular, people spend more time online during crises. Social-mediated crisis communication (SMCC) model is introduced to investigate crisis management in online context. The model first explains how the source and form of information affect response selections and then proposes crisis response strategies. The model argues that five factors influence an organizations' communication during a crisis: crisis origin, crisis type, infrastructure, message strategy, and message form.
The SMCC model can examine how organizations use specific social media platforms during crisis. Organizations can leverage social media analytics to better understand and respond to the public concerns during a crisis. "By monitoring topic and sentiment evolution in real time, authorities can anticipate public reactions, detect misinformation early, and adjust outreach strategies proactively". For example, Twitter can evaluate audiences concerns and needs about specific risks. Furthermore, research indicates that organizations use twitter for response strategies such as "stealing thunder" and "filling the silence"(to post information about updates to avoid rumors). This involves the release of early information and constant updates to limit rumors. This aligns with the SMCC models emphasis on monitoring the public and managing the information flow in online environments.
Additionally, apart from Twitter, another commonly used platform is Instagram. While Twitter focuses on timing and information updates Instagram requires a different approach focused on visual communication and policy guidelines. Instagram requires organizations to prepare platform guidelines in case of a crisis. "Developing social media polices that include guidelines for using Instagram and other social media platforms will be the key".This reflects the SMCC models focus on the need for organizations to establish communication procedures in advance to match each platform.
In addition, the emphasis on how the source and form of information affect the audience's response correlates back to the SMCC model . Audiences interpret crisis messages differently depending on message credibility. Furthermore, "public sentiment toward government communicators plays a crucial role during crisis, influencing societal resilience and potentially contributing to broader trust in government". The research also shows that experts tend to receive more favorable reactions because they are viewed as providing "objective and evidence based information". However research showed that politicians are often viewed as untrustworthy and strategic. Research within the SMCC framework shows that audience interpretation of crisis messages is also shaped by the communicator identity including gender. Thus, gender also produces a significant difference in the publics reactions. Therefore, "posts referencing women communicators are 1.5 times more likely to be positively referenced on social media than men communicators. Similarly, it has been founded based on research that in the beginning of crisis men received more positive expressions than women by the public. Whereas women received an increase in positive expressions as crisis's worsen. These finding illustrate how communicators identity and gender shapes the audiences interpretations to online crisis communication using SMCC models.
Integrated crisis mapping (ICM) model Another line of crisis communication research focuses on stakeholders' emotional changes in times of crises. Jin, Pang, and Cameron introduces integrated crisis mapping (ICM) model to understand stakeholders' varied emotion during a crisis. ICM assumes that people keep interpreting their emotions during a crisis. Through Jin, Pang, and Cameron's analyzation of fourteen real-life crisis case studies, they found that "anxiety was the default emotion in most, if not all, crisis posited in the model." However, common dominant emotions expressed during a crisis also include anger, fright and sadness; these vary depending on the nature of the crisis.
Covariation-based approach to crisis communication As an extension of SCCT, Andreas Schwarz suggested to apply Kelley's covariation principle (attribution theory) more consistently in crisis communication to better explain the emergence and perception of causal attributions in crisis situations and deduce certain information strategies from this model and/or according findings. In this approach the three informational dimensions of consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency are conceptualized for situations of organizational crises (or other types of crisis) to predict the likelihood of stakeholders to make organizational attributions, entity attributions, or circumstance attributions and subsequently influence responsibility perceptions and evaluations of organizational reputation.
Discourse of renewal The discourse of renewal theory examines the components an organization can employ when navigating a crisis in order to mitigate significant issues within the organization when entering the post-crisis stage. It is a theory assessed by Gregory Ulmer, Timothy Sellnow, and Matthew Seeger as a framework that "emphasizes learning from the crisis, ethical communication, communication that is prospective in nature, and effective organizational rhetoric".
Rhetorical Arena Theory (RAT) Developed by Frandsen and Johansen (2010; 2017), RAT distinguishes itself from other crisis communication research due to its multi-vocal approach. RAT assumes that there are various voices which all communicate with one another inside a 'rhetorical arena' to co-construct the crisis dialogue. Therefore, RAT focuses on understanding the patterns of interaction between said various voices. For the purpose of their theory, the term 'rhetorical arena' is used to denote a space that opens during a crisis where different actors, including other corporations, political actors, activists, experts, and the media, talk to and about each other.
Categories of crisis management
Coombs identifies three phases of crisis management.
Pre-crisis: preparing ahead of time for crisis management in an effort to prevent a future crisis from occurring. This category is also sometimes called the prodromal crisis stage. Crisis: the response to an actual crisis event. Post-crisis: occurs after the crisis has been resolved; the efforts by the crisis management team to understand why the crisis occurred and to learn from the event.
Inside the management step, Bodeau-Ostermann identifies 6 successive phases: - reaction, where the group behaves on first sight, - extension, because the crisis dilutes itself and touches neighbours, - means (material and human), which constitutes an overview of success/failures of emergency reaction, - focus, stands as a concrete action or event on which the team leaders concentrate to fight crisis, - retraction, is the moment where the group diminishes means involved, in accordance with its aims, - rehabilitation, where, as a last step, result is, for the group, emergence of new values, stronger than the older.
Auer (2020), challenges the three phases approach to crisis communication, arguing that a crisis communicator can mistakenly assume that the post-crisis stage is underway, when in fact, there is merely a "lull" in the crisis. The risk is heightened for crises that are long-lasting or that have "waves" – like Covid-19.
Crisis response strategy Both situational crisis communication theory and image repair theory assume organizations should protect their reputation and image through appropriate responses to the crisis. As a result, crisis communication research often focuses on how organization craft effective response messages. Image repair theory identifies several response strategies commonly used by organizations, including denial, evasion of responsibility, reduction of offensiveness, corrective action, and mortification. Specifically, denial strategy contains two sub-strategies, simple denial and shift blame. Evade responsibility strategy includes provocation, defeasibility, accident, good intention. Reduce offensiveness strategy garners bolstering, minimization, differentiation, transcendence, attack accuser, and compensation.
SCCT also offers a handful of strategies: denial, scapegoat, attack the accuser, excuse, justification, ingratiation, concern, compassion, regret, apology. According to Combs, the effectiveness of a response strategy depends on the nature of the crisis and the degree of responsibility attributed to the organization.