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Focus on Crisis Communication - New Insights

14.2.2011

The International Business Communication (IBC) unit at the Aalto University School of Economics organized the third IBC Evening Seminar on 10th February. This time the focus was on crisis communication, which was discussed both from the perspective of research and that of practice.

- This seminar continues the “IBC Evening Seminar” series, where we have annually organized a seminar covering different themes in international communications. We started in 2008 with the theme ”Knowledge Communication in the Corporate Communication Function”. In the 2009 seminar we concentrated on ”Corporate Responsibility Report: Commit or Crunch”. The goal of these seminars is to get together communications specialists from our partnership companies as well as researchers and students of the field and thus stimulate dialogue and benefit all parties, said professor Leena Louhiala-Salminen in her welcoming speech. A lively discussion followed the presentations.

Crisis communication as the rhetorical arena

Finn Frandsen and Winni Johansen are the founders of the ASB Centre for Corporate Communication at the Aarhus School of Business and Social Sciences, Aarhus University, Denmark. They are internationally widely known researchers of crisis management and crisis communication and have published e.g. in the Handbook of Crisis Communication (2010) and SAGE Handbook of Public Relations (2010). In addition to their academic career they have experience from crisis communication consulting in private companies as well as public organizations.

– Crisis communication is like a rhetorical arena, where many corporate and non corporate voices meet and compete, collaborate and negotiate, and there are many senders and receivers of a variety of messages, said Frandsen and Johansen. They presented the development of crisis communication research in the past few decades in a very interesting way and – in spite of the topic – with good humor.

Frandsen and Johansen defined crisis communication as a complex and dynamic configuration of communication processes before, during, and after an event or situation. It is interpreted as a crisis by the organization and/or one or more of its key stakeholders.

Crisis communication today doesn’t solely focus on the organization’s reputation but on finding a win-win solution to all parties. Frandsen and Johanssen call for more research on the periods before the crisis and after the crisis as well as on the complexity of intercultural crises and on the role of the Internet and social media. They would also like to study internal crisis management and crisis communication within companies and public organizations. This is, however, challenging as researchers are not necessarily given free access to such internal processes.

Making sense of crisis – a practitioner’s perspective

Minna Mars, a doctoral candidate in the IBC Program of Aalto University, presented four different crisis communication cases, in which she has been involved in 2004 - 2008 when she worked as Communications Director of Kone Plc.

In her conclusion Mars said that it is good to have crisis communication manuals. They, however, won’t do the communication in a crisis situation, where it is ultimately people talking to people.

Minna Mars convincingly argued that a crisis should be handled as any other communication event, i.e. with empathy and respect for the viewpoints of those involved. The messages have to be open and transparent, as well as honest and truthful. The persons involved in crisis communications have to be available and accessible. After a job well done, life goes on.

Text: Terhi Arvela