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The Year Of The Data Breach 

One could easily argue that 2015 was less the Chinese year of the goat than it was the American year of the data breach. Data breaches have become a status-quo in our connected world as they strike  every field of our society; government, education, finance, healthcare and even the security industry itself. Ironically enough, even the Hacking Team [a private intelligence contractor, ed.] got hacked...

In 2015, 245,919,393 data records were "lost" or stolen...in only 6 months

Yes, data breaches are legions nowadays, they are so common that people are actually desensitized to a certain extent. When children come into the equation, however, the real crisis sparks off.

The Case

During previous fall, a breach occurred into the Chinese toy maker Vtech's data, snatching personal details of nearly 5 millions parents. As a consequence, pictures, names, genders, birthdates of more than 6.4 millions kids [the largest known hack targeting childen, ed.] were leaked along with their parent’s data. The worst thing is that Vtech was not even the one that got aware of the leak in the first place; they were given a tray by other data companies. 

This security issue doesn't sound very professional, right? 

And from a P.R. point of view? It's even worse, you'll see.  Let's try to shed some (academic) light on this P.R. meltdown, shall we?

Cold-blood is no good

On the 30th November 2015, Vtech issued a press release acknowledging that 'that an unauthorized party accessed VTech customer data'. If the press release actually did address the problem, it did not duly address it in different ways... From a P.R. professional approach and in the light of academic research, 3 faults were committed:

Firstly, not one single shred of emotions or empathy emerges from this statement, it s almost as if a robot had written the latter. It's a shame because, as academics report, showing emotions such as regret is a more efficient strategy than not displaying any.  Add worried parents to the mix and it indeed becomes essential to go beyond practical implications and to acknowledge the emotional dimension of this particular data breach. In their case, adding regret to their statement and thereby humanizing the crisis would have been of great help, researchers say. 

More, by not being the first ones to notice the breach nor to address it publicly, they then lost all sense of control in the eyes of skateholders, which is said to be extremely harmful for corporate reputation and to lead to tremendous levels of anxiety in skateholders.

Finally, though it is surprisingly common in crisis management nowadays, if they did address the issue in their statement, they did it dramatically too late. Vtech U.S. customers had to wait for a long time to be reached out by the P.R. service.

Why were they so slow? They were probably surprised. And why is that? Becayse they definitely lacked of preparation... Which leads us to our final point.

Managerial preparedness is everything

Before the crisis

As far as crisis management is concerned, and more especially in the case of data breaches, research reports that though a crisis cannot be planned, the preparedness to face such attacks can and should be planned and executed. Nowadays, it is also eased by new technologies. This has been found over and over in the literature. Accurately enough, researchers are concerned by the fact that companies such as Vtech does not take advantage of previous research.

And after the crisis?

Researchers add that post-crisis management is as crucial as pre-crisis and crisis management. Restoring reputation is a hard and long way. In this regard, Vtech is hardly following the right path as they have recently added another major P.R. fail on top of their crisis: they have embellished their Terms and Conditions with the following language, and obviously it got spotted...

"You acknowledge and agree that any information you send or receive during your use of the site may not be secure and may be intercepted or later acquired by unauthorized parties."

Sure, some argue that a crisis can be beneficial to a company, nevertheless, the crisis has to be addressed quickly, handled with empathy, and communication managers have to be prepared.

Colin Volvert, Master Student in Communication Science, Record Collector, Label Owner and Music Enthousiast.