Restaurants Clean Up Their Acts

Jonathan Bernstein crisis communication, crisis communications, crisis management, crisis preparation, Crisis Prevention, crisis public relations, Crisis Response, reputation management Leave a Comment

Applebees and Olive Garden must take thorough steps to clean up reputations

Two of the juiciest stories of the past couple weeks have involved Applebees and Olive Garden serving alcohol to small children. For Applebees, the incident was especially damaging to its reputation because a similar incident just last year. Higher-ups at both restaurants had extremely weak initial crisis management, declining interviews and deflecting questions to PR departments or canned statements, but as time moves on they have taken action to actually resolve the underlying issues, but many are not satisfied with the response.

A USA Today article has some tips for getting things cleaned up:

•Retrain staff. “Every employee is a PR rep,” says crisis guru Jonathan Bernstein. “These incidents prove how many crises start with line workers.”

•Rethink policies. Alcoholic drinks should be served in different glasses from non-alcoholic, says consultant Linda Lipsky. 
Applebee’s says it will serve kids juice only from single-serve containers. Olive Garden says it will no longer store pre-made alcoholic drinks.
•Limit bar use. Have alcoholic beverages poured only at the bar and non-alcoholic in the kitchen, consultant Dennis Lombardi suggests.
•Be forthcoming. The chains should clearly post their new policies on their websites, Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, Paine says.
•Involve folks. Encourage social media comment on the policies, Paine says. “People want to talk about it.”

If these restaurants want to not only clean up their acts, but also bolster reputation in the process, then they must make these changes as public and visible as possible. Only when the public actually sees and believes the problem is fixed will the negative attention go away.

The BCM Blogging Team
https://www.bernsteincrisismanagement.com/

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