What opportunities are available to a firm that successfully handles an MPR crisis? Provide specific examples to illustrate your answer
What will be an ideal response?
The Tylenol case is a testament to the fact that good planning and decision-making that puts the customer and public first during a crisis can, in the long run, serve the firm, its image, and its bottom line. When a company handles a crisis well, it has an opportunity to use its adept recovery for additional publicity that reinforces its positioning with customers and other stakeholders. People can be suspicious of business and cynically expect firms to put their own interests before the consumers'. When the reverse happens, it can have a positive impact on the way the public sees the firm and its brands. The marketer's responsibility is to help ensure that the business makes the customer its priority, and to demonstrate to customers how this is so.
A situation that involved the fast-food chain Jack-in-the-Box demonstrates a classic example of communicating the use of a good business solution to help a company recover from a devastating crisis and regain its position as market leader. In 1993 E. coli poisoning killed three toddlers who had eaten at a Jack-in-the-Box, nearly closing down the country's fifth-largest hamburger chain. But, rather than let the business go under, Jack-in-the-Box took a pro active and public approach to remedying customers' concerns. Within days of the outbreak, the firm hired a microbiologist as the vice president of quality assurance and product safety. It revamped the chain's entire food-cooking process to include the testing of products arriving from suppliers, store inspections, and employee training. While it took some time for this new "customer safety first" philosophy to take hold, the combination of operational changes and the communication of the company's new position through public relations and other elements of the marketing mix enabled the company to move from a $25 million loss in 2001 to a record $4.8 billion profit in 2008.