Well, either Nationwide's owners are admitting that it didn't have much of a reputation to start with or else they have what must amount to the most unbelievably warped idea of what reputation management is all about.
You do not protect reputations by muttering and mumbling about something flying into an engine to make it fall of a plane and then retracting the statement without a word of apology, then just clamming up completely and not saying anything to anyone.
That's not protecting a reputation, that is stuffing it up.
And on the rare occasion that anyone at Nationwide did say anything, it was painfully defensive and completely lacking in credibility.
All of which means that when someone from Nationwide puts his hand on his heart and says, as he did in the media last week, "The safety of customers, staff and equipment was always [Nationwide's] top priority," it's a safe bet that the response from customers, staff and even the equipment, if it could talk, would be, "Yeah, right, pull the other one."
The Nationwide PR example is typical of a lot of South African companies today. Companies that don't give any thought to a crisis communications plan until they are in the thick of a crisis and by which time there is no time.
It is also typical of so many executives in top management who believe that PR is really not all that important and in any case PR is dead easy because human beings are natural born communicators.
However, as Nationwide proved conclusively, human beings are probably nature's worst communicators. That's why we have so many wars, divorces, broken friendships, business cock-ups and rebellious teenagers. It's an accepted fact that even brain-dead amoeba are better communicators than humans. And even completely dead amoeba were better than Nationwide.
By relegating their PR consultants and staff to simply getting the bosses' names in the media as often as possible and organising cocktails parties and golf days, many of our captains of industry are shooting themselves in the foot and staring career suicide in the eye by allowing themselves to go into a crisis situation so completely unprepared.
Like Nationwide, they cannot accept that the mindset of the consumer has moved on from the 1950s, when potential and existing customers were as gullible as hell and turned their backs on companies that appeared to have made mistakes.
Today's consumer is desperately looking for companies to trust. And that trust in a crisis situation comes from executives who understand the power of apology and how in this day and age an admission of guilt and a subsequent determination to put things right does a lot a more to enhance a reputation than being so pathetically defensive.
It's time companies such as Nationwide started taking PR seriously.
It is a remarkable business tool and cheap at the price.
