CEO,
Paine Publishing
I know “complicit” is dictionary.com’s word of the year. In my mind, “unprecedented” captured the top spot and should now probably be retired.
In 2017, a precedent was created for everything, no matter how bad, strange or bizarre.
Want more evidence? “Unprecedented” has been rising steadily, especially in the past year, according to Google Trends [please see chart]. It helps, of course, to have the media calling virtually everything that happened on any given day “unprecedented.”
And precedents weren’t only political. Corporations shattered precedent. We had an unprecedented fine slapped by the EU against Google ($2.7 billion) for manipulating search results to promote its price-comparison shopping service over those of others.
We also saw unprecedented venality from Wells Fargo when it announced that it “missed” another 1.4 million fake accounts that its employees created, boosting the total of bogus accounts to an estimated 3.5 million.
And, of course, 2017 brought the unprecedented incompetence on the part of credit-reporting firm Equifax, which failed to prevent a breach of consumers’ credit information and then sat on the story for nearly two months.
There were other crises unmentioned in this column and the charts to follow. They deserve to be listed here, at least. They include President Trump’s announcement of a travel ban. It resulted in chaos in many of the nation’s airports, not to mention the havoc it created for immigrants here and elsewhere.
Another crisis, which was handled far better than the travel ban, was Tiki Brand’s response to white supremacists carrying its torches during protests in Charlottesville, VA. Tiki distanced itself from the supremacists to great applause on social media. Also a nod to Chobani for its crisis work.
But how to determine what truly was “The Crisis of the Year”? I went back to a valuable lesson Southwest Airlines taught me years ago. It assigns any unexpected news event into one of three buckets:
- A media crisis: Pretty much anything that blows up on
- Twitter falls into this bucket.
- A reputational crisis: Something that will have a long-term impact on your brand and/or reputation.
- A business crisis: Anything that will seriously damage or touch your bottom line.
So, in looking at the worst of 2017, I assigned crises that had long-term negative impact on the bottom line or the stock price an automatic #Fail. Media crises for the most part received a B average and reputational crises generally received a C. In cases of a tie, the results of a company’s effort to mitigate a crisis were considered tiebreakers. Here are my nominees for Worst Crises of the Year.
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