Introduction
Mattel, Inc was one of the best companies that had been ranked among the best in the way they handled several issues. As a company, it even published its Corporate Social Responsibility reports for the customers to see its proceedings. Unlike most of the corporations that had been criticized for saying one thing and end up doing the other, Mattel received universal praise for its CSR efforts which included recognition by the US Fund for UNICEF Corporation Responsibility Award. However, just after such numerous recognition, there was a crisis in the company’s products (Coombs & Holladay, 2012). There was a recall of almost 21 million Chinese-made toys that had been produced by the company. Just after the next 3 months, 3 million toys produced by Mattel were recalled mainly because of its toxic levels of lead paint and about 18 million toys were recalled because of design flaws (Coombs & Holladay, 2012). Despite this, there was effective communication of this crisis by the company thus being recognized for the 2008 best crisis communication award.
Crisis communication is a very important step for any company. In such a complex situation, there was a need to effectively address such a crisis through a well-planned crisis communication. One key importance of crisis communication is the save the brand name in the market. For instance, Mattel was a well-established company that had a very strong brand name in the market (Fronz, 2011). When there as a global crisis resulting from its products, the company sought to come up with a well-organized way for crisis communication so as to save its well established brand name in the market. After effective crisis communication, the company was even able to safeguard its net income. The net income of the company was not affected following the crisis in its products that were recalled due to high toxic levels of lead paint and design flaw.
Global crisis communication differs from regional crisis response. A global crisis is the one that has got its effect in the entire global market. This is mostly common in international corporations that sells their products to the international market. Mattel is one of the international corporations whose products are sold to the international market (Coombs & Holladay, 2012). The difference in crisis response is that with regional crisis, the response is targeted to the next consumers or customers and this does not involve a complex process. On the other hand, global crisis is very complex to hand and it needs proper planning for effective addressing of such like issue. To address global crisis, all international stakeholders are also involved in the process thus being very complex.
The key communication elements that should be considered are proper preparation and timing of crisis communication. When it comes to preparation of the crisis communication, an organization is supposed to determine all the possible scenarios and come up with possible responses ready to deliver to the public as well as the stakeholders and customers. This will enable the management to come up with the best response for the crisis (Fronz, 2011). Timing is also an important element of crisis communication. The affected company is supposed to communicate as soon as possible when it comes to responding to a crisis. The response should be a quick as possible before the crisis hits global media as it might be hard to convince the public.
The crisis has got great effect to the company as well as the society. To the company, this might result to decline in profits. Customers are likely to stop using the products when they get information about the crisis (Fronz, 2011). On the other hand, crisis also have serious consequences to the society. For example, lead toxins are very poisonous and thus such products can result to death of many.
- Coombs, W. T., & Holladay, S. J. (2012). The handbook of crisis communication. Chichester, U.K: Wiley-Blackwell.
- Fronz, C. (2011). Strategic management in crisis communication: A multinational approach. Hamburg: Diplomica-Verl.
