dominos debacle

This week I'm working out of our Singapore office, and have been sitting in on some valuable media trainings we've been running here. Our office in Sydney has a fantastic PR agency, and Antoni Lee is their fabulous media trainer who has been walking us through various PR exercises.

Tomorrow, I'm going to be looking at crisis communications. Just scrolling through the daily blogs today, I came across this shocking dominos story - which is a relevant example of a corporate crisis situation.

Basically, two dominos employees videotaped themselves doing inappropriate things with the food - sticking cheese up their noses and farting on salami before putting the ingredients on a sandwich. Even worse, they then put this video on youtube and its reached internet stardom. Everyone is talking about it - and important pop-culture bloggers are even headlining posts with "why you should never eat at dominos". Check out the video below - over 106,363 views...



Dominos is aggressively dealing with the situation, firing the people in the video and pressing criminal charges - and warrents have been issued for their arrest. The dominos soundbite? "not in a forgive and forget mood."

Here is the BBC article on the crisis.

This just highlights how important crisis situations are to a company - and the fact that you must deal with a crisis sitation quickly and decisively. You must make public statements acknoweldging the situation and communicating what will be done to rectify it. Before boring all my readers with a 'how-to' of crisis communications, I'll just wrap this up (how PR of me!) by saying that a crisis, even if out of the company's control, can have lasting, damaging affects.

How many of you are ordering dominos tonight? Of course this is an isolated incident, we all know that. It's clear that this was two people goofing off (in what they say was a prank and the food was never sold to anyone). Even with this knowledge, I'm not dialing in dominos tonight.... Are you???


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UPDATE

Statement from Domino's website - which puts them at responding to the crisis within 24 hours... On schedule!

"In the last 24 hours, videos of two of Domino’s Pizza employees appearing inappropriately within one of our franchise restaurants have been circulating online.

Since the videos first surfaced yesterday, the two workers have been identified, fired and the affected franchisee has filed a criminal complaint against them, and there are warrants for their arrest.

The opportunities and freedom of the internet is wonderful. But it also comes with the risk of anyone with a camera and an internet link to cause a lot of damage, as in this case, where a couple of individuals suddenly overshadow the hard work performed by the 125,000 men and women working for Domino’s across the nation and in 60 countries around the world.

We apologize for the actions of these individuals, and thank you for your continued support of Domino's Pizza."