Crisis Communications PlanDevelop a crisis communications plan for your stakeholders, including a social media policy. The plan should include ideas you have offered in essays and assignments you have

Mini Project: Crisis Communication

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April 17, 2019

Introduction

Watson is one of the largest company in Hong Kong that supplies of health and beauty products using over the world that serving around 28 million customer’s form which around 3 billion customers have the membership with the company. Watson supplied food supplements, vitamins, and minerals of different types and recently become a part of Teva pharmaceutical in January 2018. Recently, the Watson faced the series of claims that the company had wrong prescription drug prices paid by Medicaid health insurance company that affect the Watson company badly as it defrauded on average $7 billion in wholesale prices. These inflated prices varied from drug to drug and have approximately 1000 percent on usually purchased drugs. This inflated prices of drugs tainted the medical unit of this company and facing some penalties form the customers that effect around $20,023,974.23 damages to the company (Thomas Sullivan, 2018). The purpose of this report is to design a crisis communication for Watson.

Purpose, Scope and Goals of Plan

Communication crisis is a situation in which public relation have to design to defend an individual and company for facing the challenges from the public. These crises occurred when the information exchanged between public and company or organization that effects the organization after such crises. Crisis communication plans are designed to defend and protect the organization and individual of that company and help them to face the challenges and public penalties. These plans use to resolve the crisis of organizations and help them to readjust in the society as well as maintain the reputation (Banks, 2016).

The purpose of the crisis communication plan uses to provide such policies and procedures for the communication between an organization and public agencies including media, customers, stakeholders, and board of directors of the organization. The main and important goal of the crisis communication plan is to establish the dealing guidelines among company and customers such as the Watson Company faces the public ignorance to purchase drugs for sometimes after that incident. The company faced difficulties with managing these crises in society, as there are dozens of companies around Watson Company that have an eye on it. In the result of this crisis communication, the company faced losing as the internal and external way in the large amount. As an internal crisis, the company has less amount of employers and stakeholders affected management that has a negative impact on the progress of the company. Same as the lack of retail and purchasing effect externally as the customers did not trust that company and social media influence the company’s reputation.

Expected Audience

Crisis communication strategies used to achieve the communication objectives to both internal and external crises. These strategies consisted of four components including target audience, communication goals, communication plan, and the channels. In the communication goal, Watson had designed some goals related to its company and those goals discussed generally to provide awareness in the public and employers. For internal communication, stakeholders were targeted as audience and the loyal customers and media targeted for an external targeted audience (John Spacey, 2019).

Communication Strategies

After targeting the audience, the management discussed their communication plan in which they mentioned their goals, strategies, format, and implications that how they will reduce such kind of incidents in future about inflated drug prices. They also discussed how they would advertise their next plan and inform the public about their clearance from the medical unit that help to enhance purchasing their drugs. They can use communication channels to clear themselves in front of the public such as Television, internet, mass media as the social media highly used in crisis communication (Graham, Avery, & Park, 2015).

After communication strategies, the Watson Company have to use, the concept of operations for crisis communication in which the company will define themselves in front of stakeholders related to previous issue and the clearance of that issue. It further explains the role and responsibilities of the stakeholders and another management team. The Watson can also use the dynamic human policy in which it describes the previous inner differences in people as these dynamics are on culture, age, race, and gender of the team members even the stakeholders. In this human dynamic strategy, the members have to blame one another on that previous incident on the base cultural, religious and gender differences. However, for further planning, the Watson organization team have to manage themselves without racial and cultural differences that will help them to puck back in society. The staff members have to avoid the blame game with one another, and the team leader has to check and balance on all matters including prescription and drug prices. This kind check and balance from the leader will be beneficial for the company, as they did not face any incident in the future as well as it also helpful for the progress of their company.

Banks, K. F. (2016). Crisis Communications A Casebook Approach. New York: Routledge.

Graham, M. W., Avery, E. J., & Park, S. (2015). The role of social media in local government crisis communications. Public Relations Review, 386-394.

John Spacey. (2019, January 14). 4 Examples of a Communication Strategy. Retrieved from Simplicable: https://simplicable.com/new/communication-strategy

Thomas Sullivan. (2018, May 4). policemen. Retrieved from Policy & Medicine: A Rochpoint Publication: https://www.policymed.com/2018/02/watson-pharmaceuticals-now-part-of-teva-to-pay-33-million-to-mississippi.html