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, mark Mullin, who joins us from the beautiful Bellingham, W ashington. Mark hi again. Marc Mullen: Hello, tom, happy to be here. Tom Mueller: On our episode today. We're continuing our conversation with Kathy Leach, a brand and marketing expert and a longtime colleague. As we pick up this episode, we've been discussing the challenges of managing a brand in crisis and we're focusing right now on the recent Bud Light incident, as well as more historical Gulf of Mexico oil spill from 2010, b oth of which have lessons to offer us around how to manage a brand going through crisis. Let's rejoin the conversation with Kathy now.

Kathy Leech: 1:10

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. 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: 1:38

Kathy, you talked earlier just a bit about, you know, having a coordination between your brand team, your PR team, advertising when you're launching a new program. How about when you're in the middle of a crisis situation like this, you know, and when you get into these larger ones, like the big oil spill? It's so complex. How do you sort of get everybody on the same page and find a cohesive path forward?

Kathy Leech: 2:07

We ended up managing the communications the integrated communications for the Gulf oil spill from a war room in Houston and, I freely admit, initially I was not a fan. I had a 10 month old at home in Chicago, which is a long way from Houston. The first time I walked into the room and there was a table of for you guys from the press. There was a table for advertising and research, there was a table for social media and for digital and we were all, you know, within arms length of each other and I just looked at it and I thought you know what? This is exactly the way it needs to be. And so there's incredible coordination that's required in the midst of an event like that and putting everyone together where they can feel like a team, create messages from the same place, coordinate their responses. I don't think you can respond to a crisis in any other way. At this point. I just think the benefits are so enormous in both the coordination and in the teamwork and fellowship that makes it work even better.

Tom Mueller: 3:23

One of the challenges that you have in situations like this is you're pulling in third party contractors to help with manpower needs or just you know sort of higher order thinking needs, right, and oftentimes there's a lot of value in bringing in a third party to help just get your mind out of the crisis zone and into broader thinking about your stakeholders and their concerns, their issues. So how did, how does that work in your view, kathy, and is there any downside to that?

Kathy Leech: 3:57

Well, we certainly did that at scale scale and during the oil spill, we we at one point, I think we had 50,000 people working on the response in the Gulf, and we pulled people from all over the world, employees all over the world, but that was still not enough. So we had to bring in contractors and firms and I can really only speak to the advertising response and we actually brought in an additional advertising agency to help. And the initial period is challenging because, a you're in the middle of a crisis already, but these folks were completely new, didn't understand the brand, didn't understand BP's values. You know, we're all working at 1000 miles an hour trying to respond to things that are happening every minute, and so it takes a while for everything to settle down, for people to begin to act in a team- like manner, for people to feel like they're on the same team.

Kathy Leech: 4:58

And one of the things we did early on was to be clear about roles and responsibilities, and so our existing agency we had them start thinking long term and strategically, and the new agency was then focused on the rapid response, which was their real ability. And once we clarified roles and responsibilities and once we'd spent weeks and weeks and weeks with each other, ours upon ours. I think it became easier, and I think the other watch out for me, though, is when you have a crisis with that magnitude, there are some individuals and some companies that come in and see the dollar signs and get very excited, and if I were to ever be in that situation again, I would ramp up our procurement team much more quickly and set them in with the rest of the response and have them review contracts, and at speed, of course, but I do think that some of the some of the compensation was well out of line with what it should have been.

Tom Mueller: 6:00

Yeah, that's always a challenge in a crisis situation because you know companies will throw a lot of money out there to respond and to get things happening quickly, but it's not the most efficient use of resources and when you're scaling up a response for a large incident, you're bringing people on or you get far ahead of your procurement people and that and it can be a huge, a huge challenge.

Tom Mueller: 6:28

And there's there's similar related issues around scaling up that I saw during that time period, Kathy, outside of what you've described, and that's where we were taking on, you know, lots of new people regularly. We didn't have our known trusted staff to put in management positions so that we had our team sort of leading and all those contractors filling in beneath our trusted staff. We just didn't have enough people to fill all those positions. So we ended up with many contractors in those leadership positions and even if you get one large agency in there, you can actually get parallel lines of communication happening within the same response and there then becomes a bit of a competition between the company channel and the PR agency channel for information, and that's that's something that we saw during that big spill and it's something that companies need to be mindful of if they have to scale up for a large incident.

Kathy Leech: 7:33

I completely agree. As I think back, the brand itself was only 10 years old, but, perhaps because it was so new, all of our people were really operating from the same culture, from the same beliefs series, and it's the reason that we could send folks for instance, you had absolutely no experience with running a community center, because that's not what all companies do, but they could go out into the Gulf and run a community center in a way that felt very BP like. The issue, when you bring in all these contractors, is that they don't have that DNA, they don't have that brand, they don't have a sense of - well, this is how BP would operate there, and that is you're right. It's a real challenge for people to manage and also to make sure that their actions are consistent with the way that the BP culture would would want it to be.

Marc Mullen: 8:29

You were talking about how one of the core issues with Bud Light was that there was never an analysis upfront about are we touching any hot buttons here we should stay away from, and so on. A typical response at bp, for example, is first we have a crisis, then we have recovery, then we have the ongoing rebuilding our corporate brand. It sounds like with Bud Light it almost had to go the other way that they were busy trying to build a corporate brand, had a misstep and suddenly fell back on to crisis response communications. Does that work gracefully or is that just sort of it's still so much against the normal way of doing things?

Kathy Leech: 9:12

You know, I think where their mistake was was in the response. And so you know the cat was out of the bag, the promotion was out there. This is when you then lean on your corporate values and you have to act in act consistently with those corporate values. And I think the response back was so wishy washy it was, you know, you couldn't tell where they actually stood and rather than people going, oh OK, I'm not sure if that's bad or good, people were like, well, that's clearly not good, so it must be bad on both sides of the issue. And I think that's where having really clear brand values from even from a corporate perspective are is important. It's a lot easier when you're BP and you're not a house of brands t he way that Anheiser Busch is. BP's corporate brand was very much similar to their retail brand and you know it was all the same set of values. When it's a house of brands and Anheiser Busch probably has a hundred brands, it's a bit more challenging.

Kathy Leech: 10:23

The antidote to that really is something that we did during the response, which is research, research, research, and so we had focus groups every week in the Gulf and in DC. We were running tracking every week. We did go Google searches. We looked at Facebook. We knew pretty much what the hot button issues were and we were able to feed those back to the PR team to say, like everyone's asking about you know, xyz, can you make sure in the next press release that that is addressed? I wonder if Bud had, or if Ann Haslubush had, done that level of search to say here's what people are saying and here's the issues you're going to have to address. And I don't know. I have no, you know, obviously no internal knowledge of that. But certainly one of the ways to help to have an appropriate response is information. I mean, information is part of that in that circumstance.

Marc Mullen: 11:21

How quickly would you bring a marketer into a response and how quickly would you bring a response communicator into a marketing review?

Kathy Leech: 11:31

I've been lucky enough to be a marketer working with PR folks and a marketer working within a PR department, and I would say that there is an artificial and unnecessary distance between those two disciplines and that there is enormous learning that both can take from each other. I would posit that CMOs these days really need to be thinking about having both together, maybe not in the same department, but ideally they should be in the same department. They have different skills, they have different knowledge bases that are hugely complementary and so, to answer your question, I would have them both from the very beginning.

Tom Mueller: 12:15

In an ideal world. That would work, wouldn't it?

Kathy Leech: 12:18

Yes, but I think it's more so than it used to be. You know, I think about when I started in marketing the PR team. We would just bring in you know, I'm doing a promotion, get me some press, and similarly, the PR team would be equally dismissive of the marketing folks and just think they're all about products and they don't know about strategic communications. But the reality is that it's really a one plus one equals five situation, and if it's not one plus one, then you're really getting into some issues where each discipline has blind spots that the other compensates for.

Tom Mueller: 13:02

To touch back briefly, Kathy, on the research issue that you mentioned before, because research really does sort of underpin a lot of what happens in brand and advertising and in a situation like this, where you've got a red hot issue company in crisis, what's the trick to getting good data, good research, when you're in that situation. What have you learned through your experience?

Kathy Leech: 13:34

Well, we had the ability to invest in research and we had a lot of research tracking already in place so that we were able to just increase the frequency of that. But I would say, even just doing desk research on Google, what are the key search terms that are coming up for a particular issue? Checking social media, watching what's happening on YouTube - all of that will give you information. That's absolutely critical. But I would say for any, any corporation, any brand, if you're doing promotions or communications, you better be doing research as well, because otherwise you don't know if what you're doing is helping or hurting.

Marc Mullen: 14:18

Sounds like you need to have a political analyst out there somewhere too to catch those just completely unforeseen hot buttons that have nothing to do with your brand.

Kathy Leech: 14:27

I think that's where having trusted advisors, where you can sort of chat with them. But I honestly believe that you can prepare and you can certainly mitigate many of these issues, but there is going to be something that catches you at some point. There is going to be something that comes so far out of left field that you're going to be left going - w hat the heck? I could never have predicted that. And then it's all about how do you respond. And I go back to if you're really clear on your brand and your company and what it stands for, then that response has to be consistent with that. Otherwise you're inauthentic and that's, at the end of the day, I think what has hurt and has Anheuser Busch the most.

Tom Mueller: 15:09

Kathy, we talk a lot about crisis exercises and the value of that. Should we be conducting brand crisis exercises as well, just to sort of prepare for incidents like we're talking about?

Kathy Leech: 15:24

This is another one where brand and PR should be playing together and I think, game playing this, as you've done many times in your career where you could use, for instance, the Bud Light situation as an exercise and try and role play how that would work, how you would respond as a company. I think that would be enormously valuable.

Marc Mullen: 15:48

Well, it goes back to what you suggested, Kathy, when PR and marketing need to know each other, exist and respect each other. A nd so Tom, ICS will never include that, but certainly an organ company who's doing an exercise. That may be a great opportunity to let the PR people meet the marketers. And when you get to recovery communications plan, you also they develop a recovery marketing plan, or whatever you call it, and they learn how they have to work together.

Tom Mueller: 16:18

I think that's a really good point because in most of the exercises I've been involved with over my career, I remember once or twice maybe when the brand team was involved with those. It's just not a natural connection we make across the corporate structure, but it is something that would be there be a lot of value for all the teams to do that.

Kathy Leech: 16:42

I think the other thing that that would do is bring to light the organizational barriers. You know it really, the Gulf response showed how widely apart the PR teams and the brand teams were organizationally and how far up the organizational change you had to go in order for them to connect. And I think that might be a cautionary tale. And, you know, maybe it's not. You change your reporting structure, but maybe there's a council of communicators that meets once a quarter and exchanges news and views. It's not an if, it's a when crisis hits, that people know each other and are comfortable responding together and that there's trust.

Marc Mullen: 17:27

And maybe you could just have a late afternoon, get togethers over Bud Li ght - or Modelo!

Tom Mueller: 17:36

Kathy. Hey, it's been just a joy catching up with you again and really, really appreciate your insights into these issues and how companies can deal with a crisis and leverage their brand and marketing teams in order to respond well. Thank you very much for joining us and I hope you'll come back and join us again soon.

Kathy Leech: 18:01

Thank you so much, Tom, and Mark as well. It's been a wonderful experience connecting back with you too as well, and I've thoroughly enjoyed our conversation.

Marc Mullen: 18:11

Thank you, Kathy.

Tom Mueller: 18:12

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.