Background: Why consider public relations?

As discussed in Chapter 14, public relations is the strategic management of relationships between an organization and its diverse publics, through the use of communications, to achieve a mutual understanding, realize organizational goals, and serve the public interest. It serves several important roles, and one of the most important is reputation management. When companies are faced with crisis situations, it is important that they have public relations expertise to respond accordingly.

Requirements: What do you need to do?

Assume that you are a Marketing Manager in Public Relations responding to a crisis:

You are the Head of Product and Marketing (including public relations) for a Canadian company called Soda Star Co. that specializes in various flavours of soda pop. Your company is excited because today you have launched a campaign in Toronto to promote the newest soda flavour, Fizzy Fun. Your company has worked on this marketing campaign for months with Rethink, a local Canadian advertising agency.

Today, you are creating a presentation to show how customers are responding to the campaign. Sales are increasing, which is good. Its 2:00pm on Thursday and you are practicing your presentation for your meeting with the CMO of Soda Star Co. tomorrow at 9:00am. You decide to take a 15-minute break to go online and check Twitter.

Suddenly, you notice people tweeting that your campaign appears racist. It seems that your commercials feature only Caucasian models with blond hair, and the public is upset because you are not showing enough diversity. You feel very sad; this is not what the company intended, but you and your team should have known better. You panic as you watch another tweet complaining that your company does not support diversity. As you scroll through Twitter and other social media pages, you see more and more complaints, mostly from college students as this is who your campaign was targeted to. #SodaStarSucks and #RacismIsNotFizzyFun starts trending. You become very concerned for your companys reputation.

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Only Caucasian blond models are featured in the advertisements for Fizzy Fun.

You know you need to take action. Your phone buzzes and you see the CMO has changed the 9:00am meeting tomorrow to an emergency meeting to deal with this crisis. You are expected to start working on a PR crisis management plan to present in the emergency meeting.

For this assignment, you will pretend to be the marketing PR manager and begin to create a draft plan to respond to this crisis and manage your companys reputation.

Answer each question below. Please make sure you number them from 1 to 4 and include the question in your final submission. See page 3 for more information on formatting.

Describe the problem created by the advertisement for Fizzy Fun. Considering the course material on PR, discuss the two major types of publics you will need to consider and who they include. Then, highlight who you will especially focus on for this plan and explain why you chose them.

Establish 1 qualitative and 1 quantitative marketing communications objective to confirm what you want to achieve with your plan to solve this crisis and make sure they relate to the situation for Fizzy Fun and Soda Star Co..

Include two types of PR media that you will use to implement your plan. Explain what these PR media are and why you chose these types for this crisis.

To ensure your communication is effective, consider the tips for handling a PR crisis mentioned in the course. Define these five tips and relate them to how your messaging for this crisis will follow each of these tips, giving specific examples for Fizzy Fun and Soda Star Co..