CommCore CEO, Andrew Gilman was quoted in the PR News article, “Walmart, Uber, Home Depot Caught in the Crossfire of a Violent Week.”
Andy Gilman, founder and CEO of CommCore Consulting Group, says that first and foremost brand communicators need to determine how to respond to specific stakeholder groups by monitoring news and social media. That’s not all that has to be monitored: “If your stock dips, you need to make sure you’re talking to investors; they’re human beings as well,” he says.
As with hacking and data breaches, “the public has become aware that these things happen. I do think the outrage and blame is less because of that awareness,” Gilman says. However, if you have a strong brand reputation like The Home Depot does, people tend to give you the benefit of doubt. Uber, however, which has seen more than its share of PR crises, could be in more reputation jeopardy. “Nobody’s suggesting [the suspect] was driving for Uber when this happened, but the mere association could be brand-damaging,” he says, in ways as simple as a customer opening the Lyft app instead. Having a more crisis-resistant reputation is “not a passive thing; you need to have created that in advance,” Gilman says.