Crisis Comms Coca Cola
Crisis Communications
2. How does Coca Cola handle crises? Discuss whether this global leader has succeeded in handling crises from headquarters in Atlanta with reference to both the Belgium school children case and to Dasani in the UK. You must access relevant media comment from the time in making your assessment.
A crisis is “a major occurrence with a potentially negative outcome affecting an organization, company, or industry, as well as its publics, products, services, or good-name”; it is also “a sudden and unexpected event that threatens to disrupt an organization’s operations and poses both a financial and a reputational threat”. All organizations need to be prepared for any kind of unexpected crises, as true crises define the companies’ future actions and have long-lasting implications for organizational climate and profitability. The bigger the organization is the higher the chances are for a crisis to happen at one point in its evolution. Crises cannot be predicted, but they should be expected, as managers should anticipate them and prepare for them.
In this essay, we will examine two of the best known crises, suffered by the Coca-Cola Company, the one in 1999 in Belgium and the one in 2004 in the UK, focusing on their crisis management. Crisis management can be defined as “a set of factors designed to combat crises and to lessen the actual damages inflicted”.
In Belgium, the crisis started when more than 200 consumers of whom most of them were children, became ill after noticing an irregular taste and odour in bottled products and on the outside of the canned soft drinks. The Belgian authorities stated at that time that the drinks had triggered a blood disorder that caused the destruction of red blood cells among people who had drunk Coca-Cola. Those affected suffered from nausea, shivering, headaches and diarrhoea, some of them seriously enough to be admitted to hospital.
Trying to manage the crisis from their headquarters in Atlanta, Coca
2. How does Coca Cola handle crises? Discuss whether this global leader has succeeded in handling crises from headquarters in Atlanta with reference to both the Belgium school children case and to Dasani in the UK. You must access relevant media comment from the time in making your assessment.
A crisis is “a major occurrence with a potentially negative outcome affecting an organization, company, or industry, as well as its publics, products, services, or good-name”; it is also “a sudden and unexpected event that threatens to disrupt an organization’s operations and poses both a financial and a reputational threat”. All organizations need to be prepared for any kind of unexpected crises, as true crises define the companies’ future actions and have long-lasting implications for organizational climate and profitability. The bigger the organization is the higher the chances are for a crisis to happen at one point in its evolution. Crises cannot be predicted, but they should be expected, as managers should anticipate them and prepare for them.
In this essay, we will examine two of the best known crises, suffered by the Coca-Cola Company, the one in 1999 in Belgium and the one in 2004 in the UK, focusing on their crisis management. Crisis management can be defined as “a set of factors designed to combat crises and to lessen the actual damages inflicted”.
In Belgium, the crisis started when more than 200 consumers of whom most of them were children, became ill after noticing an irregular taste and odour in bottled products and on the outside of the canned soft drinks. The Belgian authorities stated at that time that the drinks had triggered a blood disorder that caused the destruction of red blood cells among people who had drunk Coca-Cola. Those affected suffered from nausea, shivering, headaches and diarrhoea, some of them seriously enough to be admitted to hospital.
Trying to manage the crisis from their headquarters in Atlanta, Coca
Bibliography: [ 2 ]. W. Timothy Coombs, Sherry J. Holladay – “The Handbook of Crisis Communications”, Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2010, pg 707 [ 3 ] [ 20 ]. W. Timothy Coombs, Sherry J. Holladay – “The Handbook of Crisis Communications”, Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2010, pg.707 [ 21 ]