Challenge
Keston’s experience is no different to that of many other manufacturers of consumer goods – on rare occasions, it becomes necessary to deal effectively with public criticism or negative media reports. And in this age of the Internet and social media, you have to deal with them quickly.
Solution
When an unreasonably one-sided story about Keston Boilers broke on the front page of a trade newspaper and appeared at the same time on the publication’s website, alleging that a product failure had led to a fire, it threatened to spread virally across the Internet.
PRG brought the story to the attention of its client, held a phone conference hours later with company directors, then contacted the paper’s publishing director to present a carefully constructed argument explaining why the report was unbalanced.
It was too late to halt circulation of the newspaper, but by convincing the publisher to remove the story from the website, our effective crisis PR prevented it from remaining visible in Internet searches and damaging the brand for years to come.
Result
Generating positive news coverage remains the focus of our PR activities at PRG. For five years we regularly generated positive media coverage for Keston which, when compared to the cost of buying equivalent advertising space, delivered a return on investment of anything from 3:1 to 10:1.
The crisis management activities we put into effect following the close call caused by the newspaper were so cost effective that Keston increased our PR budget year-on-year.
Take a look at the website here: www.keston.co.uk
