Ever since the release of the American documentary Blackfish, the
company SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment has been under a tremendous amount
of public scrutiny. Blackfish initially
screened at the Sundance film festival in January 2013 and described the killing of orca trainer Dawn
Brancheau by Tilikum, one of SeaWorld’s most popular orcas. That incident was used
in the documentary to describe the treatment of orcas in the parks of SeaWorld,
and the consequences of keeping these animals in captivity such as additional
attacks.
When broadcaster CNN aired Blackfish in October 2013, the documentary led
to an international outcry. Continuous negative headlines and celebrities calling upon their fans to no longer visit the theme park
turned out to have severe financial consequences. Over the course of 2014, the enterprise’s
shares dropped by more than 40%, which subsequently led to its CEO resigning at the end of the year. In the summer of
2015, the company’s financial report showed an 84% decrease in net income in comparison with the year
before, due to a massive decline in attendance. Unsurprisingly, by the end of
2015 the companies’ new CEO announced to phase out the theatrical orca shows in 2016 and
2017.
One of the many answers as to how all of this could have possibly
spiralled so enormously out of control is that one should never presume that
communications could be controlled, either practically or theoretically. For starters, the case very effectively
shakes up Timothy Coombs’ well-known Situational Crisis Communications Theory (2007). According to Coombs, SeaWorld’s’
PR team should have had an easy job as the crisis would theoretically fall within
the accidental cluster (‘some stakeholders claim an organization is operating
in an inappropriate manner’), and thus this sort of crisis should have been
much easier and less expensive to deal with theoretically speaking than what it
turned out to be.
On the other hand, the crisis does support the views of scholars that
rather critically reflect upon traditions in communications science. For
example, this case supports Davis’ (2000) statement that contrary to popular belief, it is no longer just
corporations with financial resources that are able to dominate effective
public relations. Blackfish showed how a
non-official source such as a documentary maker was able to upset an opposition
dramatically.
Furthermore,
the case supports Valentini’s thesis (2015) that even though the
dominant discourse states that social media is an amazing technological development,
there is a lack of critical reflection on the implications of social media for
organizations and their PR professionals. The disastrous social media campaign that SeaWorld eventually engaged in
affected 311 employees severely as they were laid off (most of them supposedly working in the
PR department of the company).
In the end, what this case shows is that a crisis did not only turn an
entire company upside down – but even a field of science. Blackfish manages to
contradict a crisis communications’ scholars’ most popular theory and fully
supports those authors that have argued against popular beliefs in the field.
