No doubt they have much more on their hands than the website announcement banner. Who cares if it addresses the cause of the difficulties. It's well known via the news. Any Google search will provide the answer.
We’ll have to agree to disagree on that one, Al.
So this will sound wonkish and ridiculous to some, but so be it. I spent decades in crisis communications and saw many, many businesses do it the right way and the wrong way. The wrong way—always—is to lie, misdirect or minimize in any public communication. The first impulse when something goes wrong is often to say “nothing to see here folks,” and hope it goes away. It usually won’t—especially if you’ve had fire trucks pumping water on your business.
My work experience has been with large to very large corporations under constant media and regulatory scrutiny. It would be unthinkable—in fact, a likely firing offense—for anyone, including the CEO, to lie or blatantly minimize/misdirect in a public statement that affected the company’s credibility. That may sound absurd to someone not familiar with that kind of environment, but in many businesses credibility is valued as highly as profit. Once lost, you don’t get credibility back without some degree of house-cleaning.
Smaller, unregulated companies with limited resources that operate out of the public eye may feel they have no incentive to be forthright in their public statements. But I believe not doing so sets a crap example and erodes trust among employees, customers, investors distributors and the community you operate in. Yes, Blue Sea had a lot on their plate with the fire, but too often how a company communicates when things go badly wrong becomes number 11 on a list of 10 and their credibility suffers. That’s why more and more companies have crisis communications plans . . . so—in the heat of the moment—they don’t do lasting harm to their reputations after the smoke clears and the immediate crisis is over.
Will I, as a customer, continue to buy from them when they recover? Probably. Their stuff is generally great and I have a boat full of it. But in the back of my mind, I’ll always know they (or somebody who worked there) were willing to minimize/mislead/lie when the chips were down. So I’ll continue to believe the UL ratings on the equipment they sell and take everything else with a grain of salt.
