Tom Mueller 0:07

Hi everyone and welcome to the Leading in a Crisis podcast. On this podcast, we talk about all things crisis management with a focus on crisis leadership, and we deliver that through interviews, storytelling and lessons learned from experienced crisis leaders. I'm Tom Mueller. With me is my trusty co-host, Marc Mullin, who joins us from the beautiful Bellingham, Washington. Marc, hi again.

Marc Mullen 0:34

Hello Tom, happy to be here.

Tom Mueller 0:37

So our guest today is Kathy Leach. Kathy is the principal of a brand and marketing consulting firm called Brand Insights LLC, and Kathy and I have known each other for probably 20 or 25 years. Kathy, I've quit counting on that, but it was so awesome to reconnect with you to talk about some of the issues happening in the country and in the world today around brand and marketing, so welcome.

Kathy Leech 1:07

Thank you, tom. I do want to point out that when you and I first met, I was five.

Tom Mueller 1:15

Well, Kathy, as we do on this podcast, we like our guests to introduce themselves, so do you mind take a moment? Just tell our audience a little bit about yourself.

Kathy Leech 1:24

Sure. Thanks, tom. So my name is Kathy Leach. I'm a marketer who specializes in corporate brand reputation management. I was at BP before, during and after the Gulf oil spill. I've also worked at Comcast managing its corporate brand reputation and, as you mentioned, my partner and I have a marketing consulting firm called Brand Insights. We work with companies to uncover consumer insights and turn them into actionable activities.

Tom Mueller 1:54

Awesome. Well, let's start off and talk about sort of one of the big brand issues that the country's been focused on this year, and that was the whole issue with Bud Light and the sort of branding misstep that those guys went through. You know, as I've looked at that, it just feels like there were some miscommunications and missteps kind of along the way that just escalated into something that nobody foresaw coming. As you look at that issue, kathy, what's what's your take on it?

Kathy Leech 2:31

I think that this is a case study in both marketing and PR, and what can go wrong, and a cautionary tale for all of us. I think the learning here is this was a very small promotion with a $15,000 prize, that was run by Bud Light and was a sponsorship of an influencer, Dylan Mulvaney and Dylan is known as a transgender woman and an advocate and I look at this the Bud Light situation really from two lenses from a marketing lens and a PR lens. And when you look at it from a marketing lens, what Bud Light was trying to do was very rational, which is to try and expand the usage of beer among the younger target, and that's a real problem for the entire beer category, so not a wrong thing for them to do. The interesting part, though, was when they went with Ms Mulvaney. They also paired her with a March Madness promotion, and in her TikTok video, she very clearly said well, I don't know anything about March Madness, so, but here I am, I'm doing this, and so you know, just from a connection perspective I look at that promotion go huh, that's not, that's probably not the most effective use of her or of March Madness.

Kathy Leech 3:59

The second issue in that is, while marketers do go out and try and find new audiences. Typically what they do is make sure that they don't alienate their current audience, particularly their heavy users, who tend to account for the majority of their sales. And I suspect had Bud Light gone and spoken with some of their heavy users, they might have had a lot less enthusiasm for the promotion. So on the marketing perspective, I think there were a couple of misses.

Tom Mueller 4:33

So, kathy, would that be a normal thing for folks to do a little bit of polling and survey work before launching a major initiative?

Kathy Leech 4:43

The trouble is, I think, in the scope of all of the marketing that Bud Light does, this was so small they probably never thought it would be even noticed. And that brings in the second issue, which is Tom, you know how completely polarized the political environment is right now, and there are some hot button issues, transgender rights being one of them, and so even a small promotion like this, when it touches on one of these hot button issues, you really need to go to executive leadership and say, okay, are you willing to not only put the brand behind this promotion, but potentially the company behind this promotion? And in this case, I don't believe management knew about this. And then that leads to the third issue, which is when you are playing around with popular topics that are controversial, your pure team needs to be ready, and that means, from the very beginning of the promotion, they are providing advice and when the promotion drops that they have a full response plan.

Kathy Leech 5:49

And in this case, it seemed to me that the PR team was as surprised as executive management were, and the response to the PR crisis actually made it worse. So now, not only were people who were sort of anti transgender rights upset because of the promotion that the response was so tepid that the people who are pro transgender rights were also upset and, frankly, just from a human perspective, they basically dropped Dylan, so that she had to handle the response herself, which doesn't feel good either from a PR, marketing or from a human perspective. So the lesson I take from this is no matter how small the promotion, you need to make sure your marketing strategy is spot on. You need to make sure that you understand the cultural context that you're working in and you need to make sure that you have the resources lined up, whether it be executive leadership or the PR team, in case things go sideways.

Tom Mueller 6:53

Yeah and go sideways th ey did. I mean, it was amazing how quickly Customers reacted to this and to your point, Kathy, given the polarized society that we're in right now, everybody's looking for something to grab on to and to blow up into something big. It's a tit for tat society now that we're living in, and boy, what a a minefield for marketers.

Kathy Leech 7:22

It's very true, and what that really says to me is now more than ever, the marketing teams and the PR teams need to be working together, and there needs to be a clear understanding among both for what the brand stands for and what the brand is going to stand with, because my perspective is not Every issue is the right issue for a brand to stand with. You need to have some connection between the issue and the brand itself, and I think you need a clear articulation of the brand, brand strategy, the brand positioning, consistent messages that are being used from both the brand side and the PR side, and then a really thoughtful, intuitive understanding of the external environment. And even when all of that is right, you still need a response plan in case things go sideways.

Tom Mueller 8:16

Well, in a, in a situation like this, where you've got a brand in crisis now, how do you, how do you go about Rebuilding that brand? You know if you're but light or if you're, you know, a giant energy company dealing with the major oil spill. How do you dig yourself out of that, kathy?

Kathy Leech 8:38

The core for me is you cannot use advertising to fix a crisis.

Kathy Leech 8:45

The only way to fix a crisis is with actions. And so, when I go back to the Gulf oil spill, Chris Graves who was the former CEO of Ogilvy PR said something very wise to us at the very beginning, as we were trying to think through what our brand response would be. He said you know, sometimes you have a brand in a PR crisis and sometimes you have a brand in crisis. A nd while the oil is still continuing to flow into the Gulf, you are a brand in crisis and until that oil stops, you really cannot fix the PR crisis. And he was exactly right. And so, again coming back to actions, the Communications we did during the the oil spill were about providing Gulf residents with information on things like claims or or cleaning up the beaches, and Also telling the BP side of the story, because you'll remember, Tom, during that time BP was the topic in one of five news stories nationwide, which is an extraordinary level of news coverage, and you'll recall that no one was telling our side of the story.

Tom Mueller 9:53

So the communications we did were really to say here's what we're doing, here's what we're trying to stop, here's the the technology we're putting in place - j ust so that there was a more balanced perspective. Tom Mueller (Host) well, let me just jump in for a second Kathy, because, to your point about telling our story - we had teams of communicators out there telling the story but it just didn't seem to penetrate, you know, the sort of news wall that was out there and, as much as we talked and communicated with media and different markets every day, there was just so much negative press happening there that we really didn't make a dent in it and, to your point, we weren't able to really tell the story.

Kathy Leech 10:39

Well, that's right and that's why we actually actually had to pay to tell the story. So using advertising, tv, print, digital and social media to actually tell our side of the story.

Marc Mullen 10:52

It's, for a moment, just real quick on that, because in a sense, you had all the media in the world that had decided what BP was and what they were going to say about BP, and now you have BP coming is saying our best strategy at this point is to start buying advertising so we can say what BP is. Did that work? It seems there were 12 of you and 12,000 of them. How did how did that land and was there effectiveness in that?

Rebuilding a Brand After a Crisis

Kathy Leech 11:20

Well, I will say that, according to Tony Hayward, the CEO at the time, had we not been able to get our story out, the company itself would have failed, and so it was a big investment for us to do that, but it was necessary for the survival of the company. This was really about corporate survival, about telling our story, for instance in DC, where the DC lawmakers had the power to throw us out. It was an interesting time because just 10 years before that, in 2000, the BP the brand was created, which was the combination of the old British Petroleum plus Amoco, the American oil company, plus Castrol, and in that 10 years there had been a lot of time and attention put towards who BP was, our values, our beliefs. And 10 years later, which isn't a long time in the lifespan of a brand, president Obama rebranded us back to British Petroleum. We remember he used to refer to us all the time as British Petroleum.

Kathy Leech 12:31

The communications we did, really showing the actions and again, this was communications, showing the actions we were taking were really a starting point for reestablishing the trust in the brand once the oil spill had stopped. I mean, I think about a brand as a relationship between a product or a service and a person and if you hurt somebody, a close personal friend, you take responsibility, you apologize and you change. And that's the same journey that the brand had to go through, which is to say, we took immediate responsibility, we apologized, we created an ad where Tony Haywood was there, apologizing very sincerely and humbly, and he apologized in front of Congress, and then you have to fix the damage and in all of those stages, the communications, the advertising was really just telling what we were doing, not doing it by itself. It was really bringing awareness of the steps that we had, the real actions that we had taken.

Tom Mueller 13:35

Yeah, part of the challenge prior to that, Kathy was a bit of downplaying the significance of the spill early on, when Tony Haywood's comment about "hey, it's a small spill in a big ocean kind of just left the impression that we're downplaying the significance of it, and of course that led to a media firestorm and probably appropriately so that the company wasn't taking this as seriously as it probably should have. So that creates even a more negative climate, against which now you're trying to advertise and rebuild the brand. I noticed one of the things that I thought was really impressive in that program was the focus on people in some of the later advertising programs. Can you talk a little bit about that and what inspired that?

Kathy Leech 14:31

We all know it's easy to hate big corporations and it's even easier to hate big oil companies, and so our idea was then to really take the response and the work that BP was doing from a corporate level and really showcase some of the amazing employees that were actually doing the work, and this would help us to humanize the company.

Kathy Leech 14:53

And so there were real people in charge of community relations or in charge of looking for oil and on the beaches, and so what we did is we just highlighted those people and featured them in the advertising. And I look back and I think of some people like Iris Cross, who was one of our early speakers, took a huge amount of courage at that time, when BP was so hated for our employees to step up and say, no, I believe in what I'm doing and I believe in what BP is doing and I'm willing to put my name and my reputation on the line for that. And I think that speaks to again the real actions we were taking, because there's no way that the employees would have come across as so authentic and so real if they didn't deeply believe in what they were doing at the time.

Tom Mueller 15:48

And, as I recall, looking back on those ads, highly impactful and, again, as you said, courageous for the folks who were featured in those ads, but also very inspiring for those of us who were out there in the trenches fighting that crisis and dealing with that spill every day for month after month after month. To see that type of advertising program and the real human approach to it was reassuring for all of us, I think, in the company, as tough a time as it was.

Kathy Leech 16:27

Well, that was not the intent but I am sure, glad to hear that it was the effect. You know, and I just, it was such a privilege for me to work with each one of these individuals. Everyone we asked stepped up and said yes and gave us of their time and energy. And I just, you know, looking back, I just I'm still in awe of the courage and the commitment it took for them to do that.

Marc Mullen 16:56

I saw that too, as we were talking about the state websites that ran for three years afterward, where residents were letting their business and their name be up on that webpage too, and I think that really helped to again to humanize it. But let's turn this around and say how would it work today? Is this a universal strategy? Is it a one-off because of the specific circumstances? And or would something like this apply if you were trying to recover from Bud Light now?

Kathy Leech 17:32

I think there's again a difference between a PR crisis and a crisis crisis, and I would say Bud Light has not injured anybody and has not hurt people's livelihoods and has not damaged the environment.

College Football, PR Crisis, and Beer

Kathy Leech 17:46

I think the cases are not necessarily the same. I do think when you have employees like we did and they are doing actual activities to undo the harm that the incident has caused. I would certainly go back and do something like that again. I think what Bud Light has chosen to do is to go back into their roots, into where their heavy users are comfortable, and so there's a lot of advertising. I'm seeing college football, for instance, where they're in bars, they're enjoying each other, and so they've gone way, way back into their roots. What's also interesting, though, in the Bud Light situation is one of the downsides of a crisis like that is that people who are boycotting the brand - they don't stop drinking beer. They will go to another beer, and I noticed last week that Modelo overtaken Bud Light as the number one beer in the country, and I would worry if I were Bud Light, if that is now the new order of things and that this PR crisis actually was a wonderful tasting experiment

Tom Mueller 18:59

So thanks for joining us for this episode of the Leading in a Crisis podcast. If you like what you're hearing here, please like and subscribe to the podcast and give us a five star rating, and please tell your friends and colleagues about us as well. We'll see you again for another episode of the Leading in a Crisis podcast.