Slowly but surely the other side of the Kryptonite lock picking story is coming out. OK, some of the bloggers got it wrong - nothing new there.
I still maintain Kryptonite handled his terribly. Any crisis can be mitigated through effective communication. The vacuum of silence will be filled by misrepresentation, drivel and poison (I think Schopenhauer said that).
All the interviews reinforce for me is that as a business they responded well (except it turns out the problem had been flagged years before and they did nothing then). As communicators, they did lousy. If they knew about the commentary, but didn't respond, it's pretty much the same as not knowing and not responding. No response is no response.
And for the record, about that time I bought a neat new mountain bike. I needed a lock. The blog coverage specifically caused me not to buy their product. If they had communicated what they are communicating now, I might have done so. To answer the question posed by Kryptonite: "here are millions of blogs, but what are the audiences of these blogs?" - it's me, the bike owner. The interview gets worse, reinforcing further cluelessness about the blogosphere: "We know that lots of teens and college students have blogs and, mainly use them to communicate with friends and family. These are our customers, but are they going to corporate blogs? Not so sure about that."
And then, worse still, they correct the misperception that they only found out about the problem in last year when bloggers started getting into it. Oh no, they knew about it in 1992 - and it would appear they did nothing? That's meant to inspire confidence?
I had the privilege of working around some of the best crisis communicators in my agency days. I once asked why there were so few case studies on this type of thing. I got an interesting response - post crisis, all you want the focus to be on is how the business is moving forward - you don't want to get into the mechanics of the crisis, it just casts further light on your problems. A pretty good idea in my book. Seems like Kryptonite is determined to teach us what not to do pre, during and post crisis.
Donna kindly responded to my piece below on the Kryptonite thing. It's worth reading the comment - she makes some fair points. In response I'd say:
- I did read the response to Rebecca on Dave's site. I'll leave it at that.
- Communications is an integral element of any brand - it directly influences reputation and consideration, which in turn impact buyers behavior. So, to answer the question, "shouldn't you buy
a lock based on the effectiveness of the lock? Thieves don't care how
we communicate an issue, they care about whether or not they can defeat
a lock on the street." The answer is yes - but you can't break the company, the lock and the brand from each other. They are one. That's why I didn't buy. Oh, and theives aren't the audience, bikers are - especially those of us stupid enough to fork out thousands on a new bike. We really care how good the company that made the good lock is. And if you aren't telling us that where we are reading (aka, blogs) - we won't find out.
- To the point that Kryptonite would like to get past this but can't because people like me write about it, well, I'm only writing about it because you are doing interviews. You've made the very issue hot again and of interest to me. You turned the conversation back on. Which gets back to my point that you always want to avoid speaking to the mechanics of the past.
So, here is another thought. Kryptonite is clearly a good, "do no evil" kind of company. Start framing this one positively. Show us how incredibly strong these locks are. Use every opportunity to talk about that. And issue a $1m challenge to anyone who can pick it using a Bic pen. Take it to the market. Explaining the mechanics of the past is of less interest to us prospective buyers than the integrity of the company and product today.Maybe I'll get a Kryptonite lock for xmas?
Santa?