Stop treating communications as an afterthought

Companies too often make decisions without thinking about what their real impact will be. Public announcements become lessons in damaging their own brand rather than protecting and building it. The damage is done because communications are not fully considered.

Just take the recent example of the ‘Singhbury’s’ vs ‘Morrisinghs’.

A decision made by Sainsbury’s to protect its name and brand by threatening legal action against the owner of the local shop featured in media across the world. It is not that the decision was ‘wrong’ but it was communicated in a way that made the company look distant and heavy-handed. Morrisons, on the other hand, grabbed the media opportunity with both hands and welcomed the shopkeepers ‘good taste’.

The situation for Sainsbury’s was only protected from further damage as the shopkeeper said he understood their position. If he had been more damning then the reputational impact would have been even worse.

But time and again decisions made by one part of an organisation, many apparently sensible, have an adverse impact. Instead of thinking about communications from the outset, the relevant teams are only used when it comes to sorting out the mess. The ‘communications team’ then has to become the ‘crisis communications team’ trying to get the company out of a hole of its own digging.