The Zombie’s Brain

In a crisis, what you see is what you get.

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No, I am not making a trite statement about “it is what it is,” or about transparency. What you see is what you comprehend… what you understand… what you internalize.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about the pieces you need for effective crisis communications, and I’ve been thinking even further about how inadequate most organizations are with regard to making the right impressions stick. I can look at your messaging and know what you meant for people to get. But how do you take that next step so the public at large truly feels and knows what you want them to remember?

Changes in the Brain

Earlier this year, I had the privilege of attending a workshop with Dr. Barbara Reynolds, with the Centers for Disease Control. The CDC is way out in front in terms of measurement and effectiveness of communications. They have to be, because failures in communicating risks and remedies during a potentially lethal outbreak results in needless death.

What the research has proven to date is that people think differently when their life, health, family, security and/or livelihood is at stake. People will tend to retreat to a more primitive part of our brain. Logic and reason go out the window – we’ve in survival mode, and you’re likely to see behavior analogous to Fight or Flight.

As it happens, the part of the brain we start using is stimulated by the visual cortex. We’re still able to process pictures and videos, and they become even more trustworthy and important. That is the time when we want to see things for ourselves.

Is your company prepared to deal with Zombie Brains? Most have a hard enough time dealing with staying Strategic during the crisis, and most fail at getting key messages approved in a timely fashion. But the evidence suggests that having the messages out in time still isn’t enough if you’re not communicating them in the right way.

Oil’s Well?

Want proof of this in action? Look no further than BP, and one of the things it did right from a public relations perspective.

For weeks, you had cable networks and internet news sites streaming the geyser of crude spilling up from the bottom of the ocean. For weeks, a constant reminder of the failure. Traditional communicators saw the live camera as a gigantic blunder – a constant public reminder of BP’s negligence.

But then something happened. One day, the well was capped, and the geyser was no more.

BP took a bold strategic move, and it paid off.

The company knew it was getting pounded, and its reputation would be tarred for some time to come. But the camera wasn’t about showing the stream of damaging crude. It was about supplying the proof that it was finally stopped. BP could suffer through a few weeks of hell, because the long-view perspective is better served with people believing that the worst is indeed over.

Had there not been an underwater camera showing the lack of spillage, what percentage of the public would have believed it was really capped? BP’s underwater view bought them a chance to re-establish integrity with communication, a new platform of credibility to build from. No press release could do that – no public statement or news conference could deliver that.

For 99% of the world, the crisis was suddenly over, and it was no longer top-of-mind. For the people living on the Gulf Coast and affected by the consequences, there is still much to be done to restore the balance. There’s much hard work ahead. But you can’t deny that – as counter-intuitive as it seems – the video was a powerful tool for proving a point, and that BP is in a better posture moving forward because of it.