When Dow Corning's silicone gel breast implant crisis escalated in 1991, the implants constituted less than 1% of the company's total revenue. But the issue had stamina, and
remained the subject of hot debate even after Dow Corning took its product off the market in 1992 and filed for Chapter 11 protection in 1995.
PR NEWS caught up with Barie Carmichael, VP and chief communications officer at Dow Corning, to ask about the insights she gained during this crisis that lasted seven years.
PRN: For a long time, the Tylenol crisis has been considered the ultimate model of effective crisis communication. And yet you've said that the Tylenol model didn't work in
Dow Corning's case. Can you explain?
Carmichael: Tylenol did not have an organized opposition. There were not people saying to Johnson & Johnson, "You need to keep this product on the market and kill some
more people." When you have an oppositional crisis, you usually have two legitimate advocacy positions, and it's not a case in which one is absolutely right and the other is
absolutely wrong.
PRN: What other lessons have you learned about the intrinsic nature of oppositional crises?
Carmichael: First, if you're in an oppositional crisis, you're in it for the long haul. Second, it's not as though a corporation is going into a level playing field. Like it
or not, the corporation is viewed as the Goliath - just by the nature of its resources and implied greed and all those other stereotypes that come into play. [Meanwhile], the
"David" comes to the table without the same preconceived bias. They [activists] are inevitably viewed as "the wronged" and as powerless - or at least as less powerful than the
Goliath. That's the paradigm you're entering into. And the implications are that if you act in a way that's typical of a company, you reinforce the Goliath stereotype.
PRN: For example?
Carmichael: In the beginning of our crisis, we must have held seven press conferences. We put all of our documents that were supposedly "secret" in the public domain and set
up an 800 number so that people could access them. But the Goliath stereotype overshadowed the fact that we were cooperating and sharing all of our information. The very fact
that a company holds a press conference (and an individual doesn't) plays into Goliath stereotype.
PRN: I suppose the press conferences also helped fuel the media frenzy?
Carmichael: The huge media swell that really framed [our] debate was set in about four months' time. I did media tracking in early 1992, and I think we had 5,000 articles per
month. By then, the script had been written on who were the villains and who were the good guys - even though we were being accused of things we hadn't done, like withholding
information.
PRN: So how does a company avoid acting like a Goliath?
Carmichael: That's the counterintuitive part of all this. Sometimes you refuse to fight in public. We realized [in April 1992] that we didn't need to access everybody through
the news media exclusively. Every time you take a proactive action in an oppositional crisis, it provides a platform for your critics. After all, the media will do their jobs and
present both sides of the story.
PRN: So how did you bypass the media to reach your stakeholders ? And who were they exactly?
Carmichael: Of course, women with breast implants constituted a key group. The problem in reaching them is they are very private. And if they have an attorney, we can't
directly communicate with them. So we continued the 800 number where they could reach us, and publicized the number. At one point we were getting 30,000 calls a month and the
average length of each phone call was an hour and a half. We had 60 trained employees [fielding calls].
We also set up direct channels with breast cancer support groups (our issue swamped their phone banks)...Customers were another key audience. At the executive level, we had
executive "owners" of key accounts, and our executives were proactively going and talking to customers. [On the community front, we had town hall meetings in high school
gymnasiums. This is not to say we didn't go through media at all. We maintained a lot of contact with the local press, for example.
PRN: But you became more selective with the press. How so?
Carmichael: We evaluated media opportunities in terms of, was it a story that would legitimately advance the issues? When the [story] hit the talk show circuit, as in Geraldo
and Sally Jesse, we were flooded with requests. Every one of those shows is designed to increase controversy - not to set up a venue where questions are asked and answered.
Participating in them would only make the issue worse for women with implants. There were also a couple of made-for-TV movies on Lifetime and [HBO]. The fact base of these movies
was just outrageous. [In one scene] they actually had us going through the garbage of one of the breast implant activists.
PRN: So how did you handle those hits...without looking like a Goliath? Suing would have been the worst thing you could do.
Carmichael: We worked with Lifetime television and they produced a half-hour [program] chaired by Linda Ellerbee, who is a breast cancer survivor herself. She produced a fact-
based discussion of the issue.
PRN: What changes in strategic direction did you make mid-course?
Carmichael: Corrective action [included] talking to our critics. I set up one-on-one meetings between the chairman of the board and the leaders of the women's groups who were
our most vocal critics. When we set up a program that funded the removal of implants from women who could not afford it, we went over that program before it was announced with
some of our most vicious critics. And we changed some of the terms of that program based on their input.
PRN: Your final advice for corporations that find themselves in similar kinds of crises?
Carmichael: When you get into an oppositional crisis, the worst thing you can do is demonize your critics. You have to believe that reasonable people can disagree and start
from that premise. When people start criticizing our science, the first thing I ask myself is, "What's the legitimate basis for this concern?" If we can't answer that, shame on
us.
Barie Carmichael is VP and Chief Communications Officer at Dow Corning Corp. She will be a featured speaker at the PR NEWS Advanced Crisis Management
Seminar on June 20 in Washington, DC. 517/496-6470 [email protected]