Muslim Approaches to Damage Control

I recently listened to an interesting discussion on the BBC with a number of public relations experts including Eric Dezenhall, author of a new book called Damage Control: Why Everything You Know About Crisis Management Is Wrong and owner of Dezenhall Resources.

The discussion centered on corporate crisis management and how companies should approach major issues such as the Exxon Valdez crises or the famous “unintended acceleration” issue that decimated Audi in the United States.

The classic public relations approach is that the problem faced in such a situation is ultimately one of communication with the customer: we simply tell the truth to the customer, own up, fix the problem, and eventually things will improve and reputation will be saved.

However, Dezenhall offered an alternative point of view. He argued that when a company, organisation or other entity finds itself in a crisis situation, it finds itself at war. It is not simply a matter of the relationship between company and consumer because there are also competitors and others who are stakeholders in the crisis and have an interest in exacerbating and perpetuating it. These ‘enemies’, he contended, need to be fought and defeated. The company in such a situation, he argued, must be combative and win this figurative war.

As Salon write:

In Eric Dezenhall’s universe, we live in an era characterized by a “frenzy of anticorporate witch-hunts” where large companies are constantly living in fear of assault from well-funded critics eager to tar and feather them. Even worse, corporations have, by and large, bought into a mind-set where they think that apologizing is an effective public relations strategy. Nonsense, declares Dezenhall and his co-author, John Weber (the president of Dezenhall Resources). It’s war out there, and corporations shouldn’t be apologizing to the armed forces lined up against them on the battlefield, they should be fighting back! “One is more likely to be forgiven [if] instead of using kid gloves, one takes out the brass knuckles.”

This article in Business Week offers some insight into what this can mean.

When Greenpeace USA found itself the subject of an Internal Revenue Service audit last year, the environmental group thought it knew whom to blame: Public Interest Watch, a Washington nonprofit heavily funded by Exxon Mobil Corp. PIW had filed an IRS complaint against Greenpeace in 2003, accusing it of abusing its tax-exempt status. Greenpeace assumed ExxonMobil had used PIW to harass a persistent critic.

But the story, first reported last month by The Wall Street Journal, was even more complicated. PIW, it turns out, has close ties to Dezenhall Resources, a communications firm known for stealthy assaults on its clients’ foes. Founder and CEO Eric Dezenhall, who is also a TV pundit and writer of mystery novels, explained his perspective in a 1999 nonfiction book, Nail ‘Em! Confronting High-Profile Attacks on Celebrities & Businesses. “Damage control used to be about soft, fuzzy concepts like image,” he wrote. “Now it’s about survival, and this has made the battle bloodier.”

The distinction between the approaches is interesting because, in some respects, it mirrors issues we have seen in the Muslim community and our handling of the many problems we have faced in recent years. We have traditionally taken a standard (and relatively unsophisticated) PR approach, assuming that if we simply tell people that “Islam means peace” and point to some positive examples, things will work out just fine. However, it is also true that there have been other groups and individuals who have involved themselves in the issue, using it, to advance their own agendas against Islam and Muslims. In most of the examples mentioned by Dezenhall, the competition was economic but it seems to me that the Muslims have also faced attack from ideological and political competitors. For example, arguing that terrorism is a product of normative Islam rather than a product of extremism and therefore governments should take steps to oppose Islam domestically.

So, the admittedly controversial question thus becomes: should the Muslim response to crisis, such as terrorist attacks domestically and abroad, be to take a more aggressive stance with those entities and individuals identified as hostile? Or should we just focus on communicating the “Islamic position” to the broader community?