My attempt at deciphering the Dutch football PR crisis. Don’t judge.
An interesting blog post by Diederik covered the PR failing of the Dutch Royal Football Association. According to the article, the team mishandled public and media criticism after they stated that they “just have to win every game now” to compensate for the team’s decline in performance. Now I’m not so much into football (except for 2 reasons), and as a French-Brazilian girl you can understand that my knowledge of the Dutch team is pretty limited… however I still thought this article was worth commenting on.
My first and second reason to watch football.
In this post, I will elaborate on three points Diederik made, one which I completely agree with and two where my approach is slightly different.
The apology tactic.
The first point made is that the team should have apologised: based on Coomb’s SCCT, Diederik mentions that “an organization should take responsibility for their actions in order to gain control over the situation”. Now, Diederik isn’t wrong when he says an apologetic tactic would have been suitable for this situation, but apologising isn’t the only response possible. My belief is that instead of a purely preventable cluster, the Association’s situation was in between an accidental and a preventable cluster. Thus a diminish strategy could have supported their apology. Perhaps the club’s statement was over the top, but winning every game can be interpreted as a goal. As a response, the club would have diminished the situation by stating their previous victories, and encouraging hope for their fans that they will TRY to win every game and rise again from the ashes. How about that for a response strategy?
Influencers as crisis assets.
The second point is that the team should have used the help of influencers to gain back support after their crisis. I totally agree with this point. In one of my previous blog posts, I elaborate on why influencers are effective assets to include in PR social media strategies. Two points I made, taken from Charest and Bouffard (2015), are particularly relevant to the Dutch football case. First, influencers are effective for boosting credibility. The association could have partnered with an influencer to gain back trust in a credible manner by having them endorse the team. Second, influencers are linked to a community of interest, in this case: football. They could have been the best way for the association’s response to reach the right audience, instead of the array of criticisers their press release reached instead.
Media relations, framing, and inter-media agenda setting.
The final point is that the team’s method of responding with a press release was unwise, as the news media framed it to appeal to the team’s criticisers. I agree with this, however I believe that the framing of their statement could have been better controlled with better media relations. Journalists and PR professionals influence each other and are interdependent (Verhoeven, 2016), so strong ties with journalists could have led to more positive framing. Also, an inter-media agenda setting effect has been suggested to occur from social media to traditional media during a crisis (Sung and Hwang, 2014). Perhaps using social media to respond FIRST to influence agenda-setting could have helped the association limit negative framing and public backlash.
You’ll do better next time!
Christine Schneider: Christine is a Master student in Corporate Communications and University of Amsterdam. She took interest in corporations after studying communication and media for her bachelor’s at Brunel university in London. She now aims to become a Public Relations practitioner or consultant.
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