Public Relations Crisis Management at Starbucks

Name 1
Public Relations Crisis Management at Starbuck
Student’s Name
University
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Date
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Name 2
Table of Contents
Introduction.................................................................................................................................................3
Errors made by Starbucks............................................................................................................................3
Conclusion...................................................................................................................................................4
Recommendations.......................................................................................................................................5
References...................................................................................................................................................8

Name 3
PUBLIC RELATIONS CRISIS MANAGEMENT AT STARBUCK
Introduction
Public relations is the practice of managing the spread of information between an organization,
stakeholders and customers to protect the image of the business. This means that the organization
develops strategies that address exposure of information to the public to ensure that a wrong
impression is not created that can hurt organization proceeds (Berger & Reber 2006, p. 25). This is
achieved by establishing and maintaining relationships with the target audience of the organization. In
most cases, public relations programs are targeted at a specific audience especially during crisis
situations. In the case of Starbucks, the crisis entailed the situation where the manager called the police
to arrest two black men were asked to leave the police and policemen called to escort them out a
situation which lit up social media where people pointed out how the white people were treated
differently from black people (Kamnetz 2018, pp. 3-6). Such a crisis can hurt the image of the
organization which can trickle down to the sales that the company makes. Therefore, the company
developed a crisis management strategy to ensure that the business was not affected by this crisis.
Errors made by Starbucks
The biggest error that Starbucks did was failing to control its online reputation during the crisis. Social
media is a powerful tool that is being used today for people to share information. This means that
management needed to develop a public relations plan immediately for dealing with the online
challenge that the issue was presenting (Kamnetz 2018, p. 6). Starbucks overlooked the power of social
media and did not analyze how this can affect the business image through social media waves. This is
because, on social media, people cannot be controlled and whatever circulates can hurt a business badly
(Gonzalez-Herrero 2008, p. 149). This means that Starbucks needed to have developed an immediate
hashtag strategy to mitigate social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook regarding the issue.