How to handle a PR crisis.

Social media masterclass or self-inflicted PR disaster? Thoughts on Yorkshire Tea's handing of its Tory Tea PR crisis in 2020.

Given my day job is mostly about supporting smaller brands, advising clients on avoiding PR crises is not something I do every day. 

This is because PR crises usually happen when the powerful are accused of an abuse of that power, and there’s an absence of facts to defend themselves.

Most of our clients, however, are smaller brands hustling for attention, rather than larger brands whose focus tends to be defending reputation. But having spent a number of years in leadership comms roles for larger brands I’ve been in a few difficult situations, so I was invited to share my thoughts on PR crises on the Wax Lyrical marketing podcast after airing my views on the Yorkshire Tea "PR crisis" (episode here).

Yorkshire Tea’s unwanted brand ambassador, Rishi Sunak

Back in February 2020, the then recently-appointed chancellor of exchequer Rishi Sunak tweeted a picture making a ‘proper brew’ of Yorkshire Tea for colleagues. Some people mistook it as an orchestrated piece of influencer marketing and tried to instigate a boycott of ‘Tory Tea’. 

A ‘twitterstorm’ then ensued with the social media team dragged into an apparently 'difficult' weekend of repuational firefighting which included social media managers being trolled - followed by an emotional reflection from the brand and appeal to the trolls to “be nice” with the message that real people with feelings sit behind every social media account. Hey, social media managers have feelings too.

This seemed to tip the story into the mainstream media, creating a slew of coverage in the PR and marketing trade press, and then a second twitterstorm and media cycle the following week on the handling of the ‘crisis’. 

Hence my invitation onto the show.

I found this a difficult interview. 

Despite generally positive trade media coverage for how the company handled the situation, I don’t think the outcomes were positive. But I do appreciate how difficult unplanned PR situations can be to manage in the moment and don’t want to criticise other PR professionals when not in possession of the facts.

So here's my takeaways on 'crisis management'.

1. Intervene quickly, and calmly, when there is a real crisis.

Any Tory chancellor falls squarely into ‘unwelcome brand ambassador’ territory, especially in the current context. He’s a politician and polarising by nature, but is an unwelcome endorsement a crisis? The first things to do in an emerging situation are to establish the facts, and assess the impact.

Here, the facts were immediately known. As the chancellor is clearly not an official ambassador, getting that point made public, quickly, as the fake news starts to spread, should divert most of the anger.

There was a three and half hour delay between Sunak’s original tweet and the rebuttal I could see. And when it did come, this only seemed to appear buried in a thread; so whether it was quick enough or prominent enough is up for debate.

Content-wise the rebuttal was pretty good. It didn’t get political, wasn’t personal to Sunak, had an element of personality and carried humour consistent with the ‘house style’.

What about impact? Much of the media coverage cited ‘many’ people threatening to boycott the brand. But how many? And how many were influential enough to have a real impact?

This is a long way from causing long-term reputation damage or having a real-world dent in sales, so it’s a mile away from the very real hygiene-related crises that the likes of Birds Eye or Dominos have experienced, and dealt with brilliantly, in the past.

2. The much applauded ‘human’ response took the story into the mainstream

After what was no-doubt a difficult weekend for the social media team, the company issued an emotional thread on the following Monday, appealing for calm.

Uses of words such as ‘shock’ positioned the company as victims, while the phrase ‘be nice’ linked the story explicitly to the anti-trolling sentiment following the tragic death of Caroline Flack — enough to take the story into the mainstream media, with reports in the BBC “Yorkshire Tea ‘shocked’ by backlash over Rishi Sunak photo” and the Guardian “Yorkshire Tea calls for truce after chancellor tweet attracts abuse”.

Whilst not necessarily reputationally damaging, the coverage reinforces the link to the company’s unwanted brand ambassador and — though I may be overthinking it — the human and vulnerable ‘be nice’ plea feels a little off brand compared to Sean Bean’s bold and confident ‘do it proper for Yorkshire’ portrayal in the TV creative.

And despite all the coverage clearly mentioning the company’s rebuttal, this didn’t prevent a second cycle of Tory Tea trolling.

3. Clap Backs at critics can help brands create a splash or ride a wave

Tackling haters’ attacks head on with witty quips — described as a ‘Clap Back’ — can be an effective way for a brand to draw positive attention to itself and create a new thread, or to insert itself into an existing trending topic.

Done well, an inbound attack from someone in a position of power can be turned around with wit and dignity. Greggs’ brilliant response on Piers Morgan’s disgust at their vegan sausage roll, or KFC’s deft deflection of the Conservatives’ awkward “JFC, the election chicken” are good examples.

To do this well consistently requires creative wit, cultural bravery and a very clear sense of who and what your brand stands for. It’s easy to attract criticism for a put down that’s tonally off-point enough to lose the moral high ground.

In the Yorkshire Tea case one particular tweet, criticising the hapless ‘Sue’ for ‘shouting at tea’, attracted a lot of attention, so much so that #sueyourshoutingattea was a trending topic the following week.

Four days after the initial trolling started, and after a full media cycle, this brought the initial story to a wider audience still, creating a second twitterstorm and round of media commentary, widely applauding the tactics. So much so that there is meme merch on sale.

If Yorkshire Tea’s tactics were to inflame the situation, and ride the attention for all it was worth, this is a textbook example on how to do it.

4. But landing corporate punches on soft targets can be a dangerous game

The target in this case was ‘Sue’ and her off-topic rants about Tory austerity politics. Yorkshire Tea’s tweet wasn’t nasty in tone. “Try and be nice” is a little bit patronising, but on balance it’s witty. Objectively it’s easy to see why it got the attention it did.

But while I agree in principle that some social media trolls may stop to think if they see other trolls taken down a peg or two — put in the digital stocks so trolls from the other side of the argument can ‘pile on’ — should this be the remit of a consumer brand?

Furthermore — as pointed out in the New Statesman — the brand risks losing the moral high ground it gained with its ‘human’ plea to ‘be nice’, only to mock a person for shouting ‘at tea’ through its faceless Twitter account less than 24 hours later. Glass houses and all that.

5. Was this the perfect social media brew, a PR disaster or a twitterstorm in a teacup?

When all’s said & done… I don’t know the social media objectives, the brand’s desired positioning or the corporate culture at Yorkshire Tea. So my opinion is no more or less valid that anyone else’s and it’s why I critique with care. Not least because many PR professionals saw this as a triumph, with PR Week describing it as the highlight of the month.

Yorkshire Tea’s ‘human’ response to trolling won plaudits across the PR industry, including PR Week’s coveted ‘Top of The Month’

So if the objective of the social media team is to attract a lot of attention on social media and impress the twitterati and media commentariat — this episode was a resounding success. And did the digital-native millennial media (sorry for the use of the M word) love it? Absolutely.

But if the objective of the social media team is to manage corporate reputation in events of crisis, then the jury is out. Are the board, the investors, partners, customers and wider business world happy that the lingering memory will be the BBC coverage, and are they happy with the attention? Only they know.

And if the objective of the social media team is to drive sales and grow the brand, well, that also remains to be seen.

Are more (older) people likely to buy Yorkshire because they read the BBC article reporting on their PR crisis? It’s high-profile brand awareness after all, and who’s to say the tone will put them off? Probably a net win.

Are more (younger) people more likely to buy Yorkshire because they relished the public put down of the hapless Sue? And in greater numbers than the number of people who really will ‘boycott’ the brand? Again, probably a win on points.

6. What’s the point of corporate social media?

More broadly, I’m sceptical when it comes to the brand-building value of social media accounts — particularly in respect of non-DTC consumer brands.

I believe an excessive proportion of advertising spend goes into the more tractional digital search & social channels, at the expense of high-impact emotive brand-building media channels like TV, print and out of home. PR is largely about reputation and brand, after all. Both are important of course, like strategy AND tactics, but I’m more school of Mark Ritson than Gary Vee on this issue.

The last time I wrote about social media was when JD Wetherspoons ‘pulled out’ of using it. I felt this was a good decision as it had become a public megaphone for customer complaints, a cost and attention drain for the staff, detracting from face-to-face communications, and created little value to their core customers. I sort of feel the same here.

I felt JD Wetherspoons made the right call in pulling the plug on social media in 2018.

The other unseen element is how marcomms is set up within the parent company Betty’s & Taylor’s organisational structure; namely where corporate comms stops & where marketing starts, where social media fits into that, whether risk-taking is in the culture, how much resource, training, independence and autonomy the marcomms people have, where social media fits in the overall marketing mix versus other channels, what chain of command and editorial approval exists in the event of a ‘crisis’ — and so on.

It’s this unknown that makes a fair assessment of the comms team’s performance, in context, impossible. As others have said, few brands give their social media teams this much freedom but with freedom comes responsibility, and there is a fine line between brand bravery and reputational recklessness. Only Yorkshire Tea knows where that line is and whether it was crossed.

Either way, it’s a fascinating case study.