Tactics to use to ensure that the brand images are not adversely affected?

TASK 4

CASE 1 – Lancome’s PR Disaster in China

On June 2, 2016, actress and singer Denise Ho performing at an event in Hong Kong called Occupy Central, a civil disobedience movement. She then innocently posted a picture on Facebook about a Lancôme HK concert that was going to take place on June 19. Her post was picked up by many fans in Mainland China and reposted on Weibo.

Occupy Central is extremely controversial in Mainland China, and Denise Ho, a supporter of the movement, had left Mainland China due to opposition to her stance. The situation worsened in May when she met the Dalai Lama, with whom the Chinese government has had a fraught relationship. Now, this friction was about to overwhelm Lancôme HK and all of the brands that

belonged to L’Oréal Paris.

On June 5, moving quickly to distance the brands from Denise Ho, Lancôme China’s Weibo account featured an official announcement stating categorically that the actress has no connection with Lancôme China. Unfortunately for Lancôme China, it was too late. Net-users in

Mainland China were not about to forgive or forget the connection, however unintentional it may have been. Damaging hashtags started appearing, such as #againstlancôme and #againstl’oreal.

Lancôme China was forced to announce (for security reasons) that a concert planned for June 19 had been cancelled. On June 7, China’s Global Times blamed Denise Ho for implicating Lancôme with the Occupy Central campaign. The newspaper went on to suggest that Chinese consumers would not be quick to forgive in circumstances such as this and that Lancôme would continue to suffer adverse publicity as a result.

The situation was fast becoming an international incident. French consumers were emailing Lancôme HK directly and demanding that the company reinstate Denise Ho as a spokesperson or they would boycott L’Oréal. The company now found themselves trapped between their Chinese and their French consumers, with nowhere to go.

Consumers in Hong Kong were also highly critical of Lancôme. Some of the Lancôme stores were forced to close during the protests amid accusations that the company was backing down. As for Denise Ho, the concert on June 19 went ahead without Lancôme’s sponsorship. She was, however, retained as the face of L’Oréal’s Listerine brand in China.

The fall-out was not over, though, and the crisis had its casualties, the biggest one being Stephen Mosely, President and Director General for L’Oréal Hong Kong, who took early retirement effective from the end of June 2016.

International brands are keen to find spokespersons who can have a positive impact on their image in regions around the world. What they are not looking for is controversy. The problem is that if an adverse story connects a spokesperson to a brand, it will spread very quickly on social media. In China, Weibo is widely used for information sharing, news, and promotion. Just as social media can be used as an effective and positive tool to spread the brand’s message, it can equally be used to destroy it.

Lancôme could have never predicted that an immediate and highly damaging connection would be made between Denise Ho and their brand in a vital market. Public relations challenges com in many forms, and as this case demonstrates, sensitive subjects can prove to be dangerous in many regions of the world

OUESTIONS

1. Who are Lancôme’s internal and external stakeholders that have been affected by this turn of events?
2. How should Lancôme have prepared for the results of having Denise Ho as a spokesperson?
3. In this case, is the old adage “any publicity is good publicity” true? Why or why not?
4. If you were the public relations agency for Lancôme and L’Oréal, how would you handle this situation? What steps would you take and what tactics would you use to ensure that the brand images are not adversely affected?