You Ask, I Answer: Tragedy Response Guidelines for Marketers?

In today's episode, Taryn asks, What do you think of businesses responding or acknowledging a famous sort celebrity uh person's death or some other kind of tragedy? A good idea insensitive, depends on the case. So this is uh a very complicated question in some ways, and in other ways it's incredibly simple. Uh there are five guidelines that I use to decide how should your company or brand respond to uh tragic and unfortunate events. So those are proximity, magnitude, audience impact, brand, and judgment.

Proximity means uh how close is the incident to you physically, right? If something's happening in your company's hometown, do the obvious thing. Make sure that your employees, your loved ones, etc. are safe and accounted for. Uh this is especially true of things like uh active shooter situations, uh terrorist attacks, etc.

Once you've established that there's no threat or harm to your immediate community, then you consider more mundane issues. The more proximate a an incident is to your company or to your market and to your audience, the more you should consider interrupting operations. Um, for example, if something happens in Topeka, Kansas, and I'm in Boston, that's not as high a proximity, which is one of the five factors uh to keep in mind. Second is magnitude, and this is where things like celebrities and stuff do matter. Um the greater the overall magnitude of an event, the bigger the event, the more likely it is you should interrupt operations.

Um really uh an unfortunate reality ex answer is there's a mass shooting in the United States of America almost every day, uh, but there are certain events that are larger than others, and so uh you have to make the decision, you know, how how big is this event, um, should it interrupt our operations? When you have a uh a celebrity that passes away unexpectedly, how big an event is that? And that's something that you have it is definitely gonna be subjective. You have to give some thought to it. The third one, which helps inform the magnitude, is audience impact.

Not all people respond to the same way to incidents, major or minor, right? Um but the people who matter to your business are your customers, and that should dictate a substantial portion of your response. You've got to be monitoring your audience. Real simple example, if you are not already doing this, I strongly recommend that you do. Make a Twitter list of your top, you know, 50 or 100 customers, the people, not the the companies themselves, but the people who work at those companies, and then monitor that list.

When something happens, go to that Twitter list and just get a sense of how many of your top 100 customers are are talking about this thing. If it's if it's a celebrity that's passed away unexpectedly, how many of those 100 top customers, individual humans are talking about the thing. If zero of them are, probably shouldn't interrupt operations, right? If 10 or 20 or 30 or 50 or 75 are are talking about the thing and the sentiment is is appropriately, you know, unhappy or or sad, yeah. Interrupt operations.

Your customers are telling you, hey, this is something that matters to us by virtue of what it is they have to say. Let's let's address it appropriately. The fourth is brand alignment. If an incident of some kind is impactful to your brand, interrupt operations, right? If if, for example, something happens at one of your business locations, activate your crisis communications plan.

It's pretty straightforward. If something is happening that directly impacts your brand, yeah, you need to have some sort of response plan in place to be able to handle the matter with sensitivity and with you know with the appropriate tone that's net that's needed. And the last one, of course, is judgment, sound human judgment. The thing that I the default rule I always go with is if you have to ask, you probably need to stop operations, right? If you have to ask, is this going to offend our audience?

And if you have to ask the question, the answer is probably yes, right? If you never have to think, will this offend our audience, then it's probably not something that's going to be substantially impactful. Basic rule of thumb, there's no harm in erring on the side of caution when it comes to tragic and unfortunate events. No one at a responsible company has ever lost their job for hitting the pause button that day, right? Or acknowledging the human cost of an incident in human terms.

Make those human decisions to say, yes, this feels like it feels like a bad idea to respond to this, or it feels like a good idea to respond to this, or it feels uh appropriate to respond in a certain way. Right? Now, here's the one rule the ironclad rule. The rule that you must not break ever. And if you do break it, you deserve everything that happens to you.

Do not hijack other people's sorrow to sell more stuff. Do not leverage tragic and unfortunate events for marketing benefit. You will get raked over the coals and you will deserve it. Uh you will get your butt handed to you, and most decent people would be very happy to see that. So this is the only hard and fast rule.

All the everything we've talked about to now is judgment and and and basic decision making. This is the rule. Don't market sorrow. Don't do it. Doesn't matter how on brand it is, never take advantage of other people's unhappiness.

Right. So those are the rules that I recommend. Part of these rules is having a crisis plan in place, having a response plan in place, and then practicing it, right? So take half an hour in your next uh communications and marketing team meeting to say, hey, we're gonna simulate, you know, active shooter at uh at a local elementary school. What is our response plan?

How do we deal with it? You know, again, proximity, big it big deal. And these plans don't have to be complex. In fact, they shouldn't be complex. They should they should fit on index cards, right?

Active shooter situation. Immediately stop all social media. Verify you know, families and friends and customers are safe. Stay tuned to the news. Respond only if appropriate.

Uh, if someone asks for some reason, have this in plan. You have uh an incident at your company. Uh what's your plan for that? You know, again, stop all stop the presses, uh, communicate to your legal team, communicate to your audience that you're investigating, that you're aware of something's going on, uh, and then work with local authorities to deal with it. Having index cards of uh these are the basic rules for all these different scenarios, and then just practicing them by asking someone in a meeting, hey, pretend this just happened, what do we do?

Is the best way to make sure that we have prepared responses, that we know what to do, and that no one's gonna go rogue or do something that could be potentially damaging to our brand. Uh making sure that everyone's on board with that. You know, marketing, sales, communications PR, the ad agency, whatever the case may be, uh, making sure that you have plans in place. That's the essential part of this. Knowing it is one thing, doing it is another.

So really good question, important question, and unfortunately a timeless question because there's no shortage of tragic and unfortunate events ever. Um, so just knowing w which ones are going to matter most to the people that matter most to your company. Uh, as always, please leave your follow up comments in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. We'll talk to you soon.

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