In the year 2000, the US government began investigating a report which indicated that more than 300 car accidents that had occurred in the country were directly linked to Firestone’s tyre problems. In the meantime the company had made assurances that ‘nothing is more important to us than safety of our customers’ and maintained that they were working closely with the relevant bodies to try and identify the problem. Three months into the government’s investigation the company was forced to recall 6.5 million tyres. Public Relations experts blamed the company for being too slow in acknowledging the problem in the first place because there was evidence on complaints and lawsuits as early as 1994. Firestone then committed another blunder where they blamed the consumer saying the tyres shredded and peeled because the consumers didn’t maintain proper inflation and drove on poor roads. This case raised ethical questions about a company’s failure to take action until the glare of publicity forced them to admit there was a problem. It led to the public concluding that the company was more interested in preserving their image than in saving lives. Consequently this damaged Firestone's reputation and saw a drastic loss of revenue due to reduced sales and lawsuits which amounted to a tune of $50 million.
Withholding information is common amongst PR professionals and is perhaps one of the greatest malpractice of the industry. The question as to how long you can withhold information from the public arises here. It took Firestone 6 years to admit that there was indeed something wrong witht their tyres and it is only when the government intervened that the company recalled the batch of tyres that were reported to have a problem. In the meantime hundreds of lives were lost and livelihoods destroyed.
True sometimes PR professionals withhold information in order for them to investigate and clarify certain issues but how long they withhold information and the damage that will be caused in the meantime is what will determine the outcome of that crisis. The longer you withhold information the more people start speculating and guessing and the more you lose credibility.
2 comments:
I think withholding information for PR professionals is inevitable sometimes and it's not because they don't want the truth to be told. It's because sometimes giving information does more damage than good. This especially applies for Political PR where the government may refuse to release information on grounds of national security concerns. In the case of Firestone the PR profesionals should have been more prompt in handling the crisis. It was irresponsible of them to put a matter that involved people's lives on hold for six years.
Anonymous, withholding information on grounds of national security is the oldest trick in the book. There is very little that actually needs to be withheld and this quickly ages to the point where it is irrelevant, from a strategic point of view. The point is that information can be dangerous to powerful individuals and groups (such as political parties) and that is why it is withheld.
You can't expect Firestone to come running out with damning evidence at the first suspicion of something going wrong, engineering firms would cease to exist if that were the case. However, 6 years is leaving it a bit too long.
I have worked in a major auto maker and attended their course on ethics. The lawyer told us that these matters were often settled by cost. If the cost of the litigation was lower than the cost of engineering the fix of the problem, they just paid for the litigation.
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