The crisis and media strategies for marketing places – Part Two

The media information indicates that many destructive events occur every day; homicide, robbery, natural disasters, corruption and other afflictions. These kinds of «possible crisis in places», as the economic and financial situation, have a very high space in the broadcasting, newspapers, Internet websites and the social network, and an impact on the places image.

According to Glaesser (2006: 12) a crisis is “a critical change in an important variable that endangers or destroys either parts of or the entire system”.  In the line of the Avraham & Ketter (2008: 79) theory, “the systemic approaches offer a general definition, emphasizing the occurrence of a change in institutions, companies, groups or places that threatens to break the current equilibrium or routine”. Mansfeld & Pizam (2006) suggests a list of five possible crises in the places:

i)       “Crime-related events;

ii)     Terror-related events;

iii)   Political unrest events;

iv)   Natural disaster events;

v)     Epidemic-related events.”

Local decision makers should be prepared for all these descriptions and should accumulate knowledge for managing them, with a necessary perception of the Coombs (1999) dichotomies – “whether the crisis is internal or external and whether the crisis is intentional or unintentional”. If one or more events occurs, and if the consist in a crisis, many spokespeople try to decide how their place or organization should react. Decision makers, place marketers, political, citizens send their suggestions to change a place image after the crisis. But, the choice of the most suitable communication response strategy depends on the type of crisis, the place’s characteristics, the target audience and other circumstances.

Glaesser (2006: 14) suggests a comprehensive definition for crisis:

“A crisis is an undesired, extraordinary, often unexpected and timely limited process with ambivalent development possibilities. It demands immediate decisions and countermeasures in order to influence the further development again positively for the organization/destination and to limit the negative consequences as much as possible. A crisis situation is determined by evaluating the seriousness of the occurring negative events, which threaten, weaken or destroy competitive advantages or important goals of the organization/ destination.”

Glaesser combines different variables relevant to crises in a country, city or tourist destination: i) unexpectedness; ii) time limits; iii) unpredictable future, and the iv) risk of losing the place’s competitive position and cause a negative impact in place image.

What are the contemporary examples of a crisis in the places? To take some recent examples, Hong Kong suffered a crisis caused by epidemics; New York suffered a crisis as a result of terrorism; Croatia due to war; Nepal because of political unrest and New Orleans through natural disaster. Recently, the earthquake in Haiti, is another good example.

The main problem is the continual broadcast of the catastrophes, and the possible impact in the place image. With this, what is the core-question to place marketers? What do they need to do in order to manage the crisis and how can they prevent potential damage?

Note: This post was written by Eduardo Oliveira, one of the participants of the 13th World Business Dialogue. He has a degree in Geography, a post-graduation in Tourism from the Portuguese Catholic University and is a Marketing Master Student at the University of Minho, Portugal. He has been working as a research assistant in the School of Economics and Management of University of Minho.  He develops a blog about marketing research and networks which you can find under New World Research.