[Bonus] Connecting and Branding in a Time of Crisis with Kathleen Lucente

Thanks for listening to this bonus episode of the podcast. I'm recording a number of interviews and including them in the podcast and online on my YouTube channel with people who are mastering the communications game during the Coronavirus pandemic. On this episode, I spoke with Kathleen Lucente. She is the president and founder of Red Fan Communications. Now, I found Kathleen through one of her co workers at her firm who is a part of my Communicators Response Kit. If you head on over to my website, mollymcpherson.com or responsekit.org I want you to join the community of fellow communicators, fellow business owners, people who are running organizations that need a little bit of help, encouragement, or a community who are trying to communicate to all their stakeholders. During this pandemic. I wanted to reach out to Kathleen because one her coworker is Mimi is very good at communicating in this group and it led me to believe that her firm had nailed it, had figured out the best way to communicate with their audiences. And Kathleen did not let me down. She is offering a lot of advice. First, from a crisis management point of view, she has a lot of crisis experience and she was working during the SARS epidemic and when she was working the finance industry for JP Morgan, she brought a lot of experience from that in terms of how to respond in a time of crisis or a pandemic. But she brings that knowledge into marketing. And normally I wouldn't think crisis management and crisis communications would ever intersect with marketing, but it certainly does in the time of pandemic. So where we start with crisis response, we end with how to market. Normally, I could break this down into two episodes, but the segue is critical. It's important to notice that it's there because businesses that are in the business of just marketing product, they can land themselves in a crisis immediately if they don't know how to do it properly. But also for brands who are probably more prone to having crisis management or always being mindful of their reputation, well, they can use marketing techniques to be able to reach their stakeholders. So definitely take a listen to this episode with Kathleen Usente.

Kathleen, hello. Thank you for taking the time out of what I know is probably a very busy week for you to speak with me today about crisis management in the time of COVID 19.

My pleasure, Molly. And I'm delighted that you're taking the time to explore and find out what's going on around the country because it's pretty fascinating right now.

You know, it is fascinating. And Kathleen, I'm going to start here when I look back on my journey, my COVID 19 journey. Three and a half weeks ago, I was in New Orleans. I was at an annual meeting, and I was. And we heard about the virus happening then. I will admit, I was a little more on guard than I think most people at this meeting. And then I had to fly through. I had one more stop. I had to speak at one more annual meeting event. And I was flying through Minneapolis St. Paul Airport, and I noticed that there was a shift. There was this change that kind of happened in the environment. And one of those shifts was that south by Southwest was canceled that day.

Oh, yeah.

Okay. Yeah. So you're now sitting in Austin, and it's interesting, when I was watching online, the feedback and the chatter about how it resonated of this cancellation, tell me what you were. Your thoughts were back then, being in Austin.

Well, I mean, you know, being in Austin, south by is a. Is a brand that impacts the entire economy here. And so when the outside world might look at it as, oh, it's the music and it's the film and it's the tech and all that, which is huge. But there's also Airbnb and people who actually bought real estate here in Austin that we're counting on, you know, making $30,000 off that real estate in a given week. And suddenly, you know, all of these things start to evaporate. I mean, I think the restaurants, the first wave was the restaurants and things like that started to realize, wait a second. Oh, bummer, we're not going to have, you know, the influx of people coming that we expected. And obviously, cancellations of events for south by was canceled. You know, we had major clients. So what became very apparent was we're going to need to pivot, and we're going to need to start to bring things online in order to connect people. Salespeople who thought they were going to originally be face to face with people are no longer going to have that opportunity. Musicians who thought they were going to have a live concert. And I was just on the phone with a musician who's launching an album, a friend of mine. And we're looking at doing a digital concert, and we're looking at doing an immersive experience with restaurants. Right? Like getting the restaurants, hey, order your food. Have the food delivered to your home. It was. It didn't hit everyone right away. I think it almost had a shockwave effect. And so that's. That's kind of what happened when south by got canceled. For sure.

When you talk about that immersive Experience. That's very interesting that you, that you touch on it that way. That was the shift that happened. Tell me from your experience and you have, you have, you have unique crisis management experience going back to 9, 11, of course, and the SARS epidemic. Did you, Kathleen, do you think you were ahead of the curve in terms of the knowledge of how big of an impact that the coronavirus would be on the economy and just globally?

Yeah, I mean, I think that it's hard to compare crises. Every crisis has its own kind of DNA to it, but there are a lot of similarities and it was a little bit like deja vu, like I've been here before, to be honest with you. The difference is with SARS in Hong Kong and with here the same. There are some things that are similar and different. One is being in a foreign country and feeling that the information coming to you is not accurate is very nerve wracking. And so in, in Hong Kong, when I was with JP Morgan, the first thing we noticed was that people started to panic. They thought it was an airborne disease. We had people who wanted to open up windows. You're in high rises. There's all these challenges and really it's internal because it's lack of information and lack of knowledge. The first thing we did was we brought in health experts externally from Australia, the UK and London to really make sure that we could see the pinnacle for our employees, that they could trust, that we were bringing in experts that were going to be telling the truth and that we were going to take our information and make our decisions based on that. The other thing that we knew very quickly was that things were going to shut down in Hong Kong. And so as a company, the first thing we did was we took our top bankers and we put them around the country, around Asia, in different locations so that we could continue to do our business. SARS was not as contagious. So while people still followed procedures, we also had travel bans. Pretty soon after we moved our bankers, we knew that we'd made all the right moves because now you were in isolation. And those travel bans really actually helped quite a bit with the virus that we're seeing right now. What we're seeing is that there's this nervousness of, wait a minute, if we're even standing next to each other, oh, wait a second, did you travel? There's 14 days that this could incubate. It starts to bloom into a lot of other concerns. And so what we're seeing with companies where they actually had to or they're Closing down. With sars, you didn't see companies closing down. They actually kept their businesses moving. And so that was really, really important. And it's a big difference.

So your job, your role was corporate communications for JP Morgan. Back then I noted that you, one of the first tactics you mentioned was internal communications, like speaking to your internal stakeholders. Could you tell me the importance of that when you were working in Hong Kong?

Well, yeah, absolutely. In Hong Kong, one of the things that happened right away was, luckily when I got to Asia and got to JP Morgan, the first thing I knew is that I had to make very good relationships with my chairman, my head of hr, my coo. The first thing I do in any situation like that, even if it's a client, but I was working in house. And so luckily we had already created a crisis plan, so we knew if certain things happened, what you triggered. So we came together immediately on communication. When we saw that panic with employees, we certainly got our infrastructure in place. And then we decided to start putting out notes twice a day at the exact same time with updates, because this was evolving in a pretty rapid response. I'm seeing the same thing in here in Austin, Texas, and with my clients. What I found was even companies, large companies that have communication professionals, they start to panic and they're reacting to the CEO like, let's do a video, let's do this, let's do that. And I, I am the sanity person who comes in and says, okay, lots of great ideas here. We're putting the crisis team together. We are going to communicate not twice a day, but once a day. So, for example, one of our clients, we created a template, it's still personalized by the CEO. We can really write in his voice. He has a call with his senior executive every day at 10am he has another one with them in the afternoon. We have a checkpoint at noon. We draft a memo that goes out and it goes out at 2 o' clock every single day. And let me tell you, the feedback has been amazing from employees. They feel like it's like a beacon they can look forward to. They know what's going on. They know that we're. For example, this company happens to have the privilege of keeping their factory open because they create LED lights for growing vegetables and cannabis and so commercial. And so they actually are in the classification of being able to stay open. So we were able to also help them work through that process and make sure that we're following all the procedures and that employees understand the procedures that are being followed and that we're not doing anything out of that would not follow what the government would want.

Okay, exceptional. That matches precisely what I have been guiding my clients for as well. So that's interesting. So it seems like it is an internal document, that it's the internal inner workings of a company. Where does this document go? Does it stay internal or does it ever show up to an external audience like on a website?

Anything that we write, we assume is going to go external. And I know that from personal experience in corporate world, you just need to expect that it would. But we also have created a separate document where on their website it has all the information, including a frequently asked question, so that even if the customers have questions, everything is in one place. The other big piece to this that a lot of people do not think about is making sure your sales team has the right tools to communicate. So if a product is going to get delayed and being delivered, you don't need to give them all your dirty laundry. You know, you don't need to say, well, it's because Joe's grandmother may have been by someone with COVID Like, no, like. And you get people who want to write notes that are kind of like Dear Abby notes. That is not the right way for your customer service team to be. Still need to be professional. You need to be transparent, but you don't need to get into details that are going to cause worry for your customers. And so communications teams really need to step in and work with the sales teams and customer service teams on these things as well. Because if you do everything great on the corporate side and then you have sales teams just kind of going doing their own thing, you're going to have a problem.

Right. Okay, so that's interesting. You're talking about the. The internal communications for salespeople that they need to understand. Tell me, is what are the channels that you're giving out all this information? Is it just internal email intranet? What how are they getting this information? Like a salesperson, for instance?

Well, I mean, to be fair, you know, remember I was telling you, our client, this one example has a meeting of all their senior leaders every day. They have two meetings. They're virtual meetings, of course. And the head of sales, the head of operations and the customer service desk, they are actually in that meeting. So they are getting documentation. We rely so much on email and everyone jumping into a boardroom. The fact of the matter is, the best companies that are going to work through this process are the ones that actually have these checkpoints. And at some point, you actually can loosen up Your checkpoints, like at JP Morgan, when we were doing the SARS communication, we had two memos going out a day. And then at some point, we actually did a video as well. The fact of the matter is, we started to change it and we actually also then communicated to our employees, hey, by the way, we feel like we're in a good place. We thank you for your attention and all the questions that you send in. We hope that you're feeling good. Here's some resources. We are going to now move from every day, twice a day to once a day. And then we moved to Monday, Wednesday and Friday. And we didn't just do it. We made sure that we prepped our employees so they could digest that. This is going to be a little bit of a change in the cadence. And that's also equally important because even if you look at. Edelman just did a report, and the report showed that basically employees are really counting on their employer to be a reliable source. It's almost like a parent child relationship in some respects. Right. And so, you know, the way companies behave through a crisis is so, so important.

Tell me a little bit more about leaders. You're mentioning that some are going to. You just mentioned that some will show up ready for the crisis. Some will show up as the crisis itself. With the clients that you're working with now over this past month, which leader, if you could give them an avatar, which leaders are going to be able to rise from this? Which ones? What are some of the characteristics that will hold these leaders back and in turn hold their companies back?

The leaders that are going to be the winners here are the ones that are communicating extremely effectively with their senior leadership team, but also with their entire employee base, not just leaving it up to their management to carry the torch. In fact, there's some CEOs now that maybe have stepped back in the past, and maybe they're more doing investor relations and doing town halls, and they haven't been as visible. This is the time to be more visible. This is the time. And the other thing is that leading is not getting caught in a quagmire. So if you get caught in a quagmire and all this crisis communication stuff, and you don't keep a team that's just solidly focused on that, which is important, keep that team solidly focused, but then have another team that is also focused on moving things forward. If you are, you know, there is the appropriate drum beat for keeping the brand vibe alive. Right. And so if you just rest on your laurels or Go into, oh, we're going to look selfish if we get out there and try to do customer service right now. You're absolutely wrong. You might not make a lot of sales right now. This might be not the right time to do that. But pick up the phone, activate those customer service teams, and call people and be human, because people are going to remember those human interactions at the end of 60, 90 days when you might need to go back and, hey, by the way, I do want to sell you something. The reality is we care about people who care about us. Right. And so it is a human business at the end of the day. And if you can get people to pick up the phone and start to really connect with people, like, hey, how are your kids doing with that homeschooling? My kids are going crazy. I mean, it really creates a different relationship. So leverage that.

Such wise words. Of course, the commodity now is just being human and more altruistic as opposed to focusing on the bottom line. Absolutely. I love that.

One other thing I would say would be if you can do those first two things really well, the third thing you need to do is look at your community, right. And figure out, how can we do something really cool. So, for example, if your factory is open and restaurants in your community are suffering, basically get food brought in, right? Like, do something that helps another industry within your backyard and do some creative things that show appreciation to employees that do have to work in the factory floor. Do you have to come in to work together? You know, and then in turn, you're helping the restaurant industry.

Right, Right. Let me touch back for a moment. Let's talk more tactically, because strategically, you're saying how a leader needs to lead, really, in the next 60 to 90 days.

Right.

What about some of the tactics you mentioned, the word video, what is being used? So I want to know about video, how we're using video, and then any insight that you have about channels, about the communication channels that people should be using, businesses should be using.

Absolutely. So I'll give you an example. We have a couple of clients who spend a lot of money on conferences all over the world. And so those conferences did not pay them back when they canceled. Right. So I'm going back in and leaning into that with my clients and saying, okay, which publication was connected with that event in South Africa or Australia? And let's do a webinar with them and find a way to get that thought leadership still in front of the audience that would have traveled. And let's do these webinars. And I'LL give you an example. We had two webinars in the last 30 days for clients. We had a thousand people come to 500 each. That's very valuable. I mean, that is huge. That might even be better than the conference itself. We may start see that some of these more intimate gatherings make a big difference. And, you know, this isn't new. This isn't something that we weren't already doing selectively with clients and seeing value. But I think that what you're seeing now is this is really, really important. We have to pivot and not just throw our hands up. We need to start looking at smart ways, be creative, and even help some of these event companies start. Maybe they're suffering, and maybe they need to think a little bit differently about how to serve things up, not burn bridges with relationships that they hope will come back to them, you know, a year from now.

You're speaking my language because it's. As a speaker. Okay. And someone who had all of their events canceled or postponed, you know, to the fall. Yeah. Or into next year. You know, that's interesting. There's. We talked about the internal stakeholders that you're speaking with, your employees, but now the external ones, how you can extend. Extend it through thought leadership where a lot of these organizations still need to. A lot of them are transitioning to virtual meetings and annual meetings and events and where leaders can pop into these places to extend that thought leadership. That's interesting.

We have a client that has a really interesting offering where it allows. In fact, they helped Uber open in 14 countries without having to open offices, for example. So they were going to do a big event in New York, and with our partner in New York, instead, we're turning it into a virtual event. And in fact, we're seeing. We're able to invite people much further away, and it's turning out to take lemons and turn them into lemonade.

Right. So as a business owner, not only are you serving your clients now as they get through COVID 19, but you're also doing it now as a business owner. You have employees that you need to take care of. Have you made any shifts in your business to keep the lights on, so to speak?

Absolutely. I mean, everybody has to be thoughtful right now and make some changes. And so one of the things that we're doing, obviously we are applying for the loan, the SBA forgivable loan. Today is the big magic day. Friday supposedly kicking off with that. So we are going to be pursuing that. We are pivoting. And I've got some plans on how to maintain the staff that we have. That's my number one thing. I will tell you that we did lay off two people at the beginning of this because the one thing that you know as a company owner is that you have to make the smart decisions early on so that you don't die of a thousand paper cuts. You're a really good manager. You know that I've been doing this business a very, very long time, and I could see that with the clients that we have, there were certain clients that started to say, hold on a second, we need a pause. And so whereas other clients really needed to ramp up. And so by looking at that, I had to look at my staff and make sure we had the right people that were going to be with us for the long term, and that we had to make some changes. And that was hard. That was really, really hard to do. Especially virtually, I would say that's a really tough thing to do in my lifetime. I'm 53 years old. I've done hiring and firing and layoffs in my life. At redfan, we really actually have never, ever had to do any layoffs. So we did two. And then I pulled my entire team together and we made a plan together of how we can stay together. And I have to say, I was really. I'm blessed to have an incredible team of 11 people that are passionate about our company. And also, we're seeing new business starting to come in. So it's different kind of new business, but it's a lot of thought leaders that are just perfect right now. So we have a geopolitical analyst right now that's talking about supply chain management. We have a dentist expert that uses Xylitol and is helping people think about how to care for their teeth at home, not show up with cavities at the end of 90 days or whenever this does end. We've got mom experts that are out there, doulas and things of that nature that are wanting to talk about virtual doula, and some really interesting things that you wouldn't have thought of. But when you have a crisis like this, there's different levels of expertise that are needed. And so those people are coming to us and saying, can you help us? And we are more than happy to do that.

I know I said it was the last question, but now you triggered something to me, a question when you were talking about branding, Branding in the time of COVID 19. What are you doing? I know there's a lot of PR fails out there and a lot of journalists are on Twitter complaining about these bad PR pitches that they're getting. Is there a template for how to pitch during coronavirus, the time of coronavirus.

You have to be really respectful. And so, for example, if I'm pitching lights for growing vegetables, we don't want to have a shortage of vegetables four months from now, Right? And so, yeah, it's the same thing as when you think about you're in a crisis, and you also have to keep the lights on and keep running the business. As a world, we need to make sure we're going to have vegetables. We need to make sure that people who are doing cancer treatment have the cannabis that they need. So those are things that if we don't do the right thing now, we aren't going to have those things. I would say that we are very carefully looking at the experts that we have, like I mentioned, and they are very much the positive stories that reporters are actually looking for that still apply to what's going on. In the context of what's going on, if you have. It's not easy. I'll give you an example. When I was at Ketchum years ago, we really pulled together. I remember we had the Tide account, and the team that was running it, they were struggling getting press coverage, and this wasn't even during a crisis. And we pulled together and brought in experts all together, and we brainstormed and we basically came up with the Tide Stick. We came up with the idea that people are out there, you know, during the holidays, they need. You know, they need. They need something to get that wine stain out. We came up with a series of seasonal storylines that the team could go back and pitch. Everything from, how do you get grass stains out during baseball season? It had to fit to what was going on in the season, right? Same thing with COVID I mean, the reality is, at some point, not reporters don't want to tell negative stories forever. They do want stories that can offer tips to people who are stuck at home. You know, how to entertain elementary school kids that might not have a really strong curriculum. You really need to think about what's going on with humans right now, right? And what do we need? And so the best PR people are going to customize their stories in ways like that.

Now, let me ask you this. Certainly when you're fulfilling a need, certainly if it's needed, if it's vegetables. But what if Tide Stick wanted to do some type of campaign right now? Would there be a place for a tide stick in April 2020?

That is a very good Question. I think there's a lot of laundry getting done right now in homes. I would say Tide Stick might not be the thing that you'd be pushing. You might be offering a massive discount on just products in general. I mean, home products. I might, if I were Target, I might package up like, here's all the things that you need and like, to survive. Covid. Like, here's a package of things. And I think some of these companies can get creative in how they package things without trying to push the wrong thing.

Oh, that's interesting. Okay, so it's in the packaging, serving and filling a need. But if you don't do any of those things, or as you mentioned, too, offering it as a heavy discount or free or something, it has to give. But there's no room for the straight, blatant pitch, correct?

No, no. I mean that, you know, it will fall short. It will fall short. And I think you have to just recognize that. I mean, it's. PR professionals have been doing this forever. You, you know, if there's something bad happening, you know, if you're not following what's going on in the news and you're just blindly pitching, you know, you're just doing a terrible job, you also have to be honest with your. And I think that's a really important thing. If a client is pushing you to pitch something that is absolutely going to fall flat, you don't want to just say no, but you want to come up with something better and more creative that will understand. What are the business goals that this client has? What are they trying to achieve? And then what are the right levers to be pulling right now? That's true consultation, that's true guidance, and that's where the best PR people stand their strongest. Honestly, any client that's trying to push you to do something that is going to ruin your relationships with reporters and they're not willing to listen to you, is probably the wrong client to have.

It's the wrong client to have. I couldn't agree more. Kathleen, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. Even though we started at crisis management and we ended with product marketing, you see, though, that products that are poorly pitched or products that are inserting themselves where they should not be are creating a crisis for the brand.

Yeah, you need to really have a handle. I mean, I was talking to a woman yesterday who is a dating specialist, and you would imagine dating is not, you know, not. Not easy right now, right?

Yes.

And it turns out that it's. It's turned into its own very sexy, you know, offering. If people do it well. So what they're doing is, you know, you're in New York, somebody's in Chicago, you send them dinner, you both open up wine, and you're having a virtual date. And it slows the date process down, and people are getting wooed more versus this immediate, you know, hey, let's get together. And so let's see what kind of relationships develop from a new spin on dating.

Oh, what a great story to end on. Like, something no one would ever think about, like the match.com world, the dating world. But certainly there's an angle for everything nowadays to help someone, right?

Absolutely. People don't want, you know, we are a social being. Right. And so people who. I mean, I have a family. I've got teenagers who are downstairs doing their school and all that stuff. And so I'm pretty lucky. Everything's going just smoothly. But people who are home by themselves, you know, they want to engage. People are having happy hours. I was talking to a musician about charging money to drop into a Happy hour for 20 minutes and play for 20 minutes, like her new album. I mean, why not? I would pay for that. I mean, you bring your girlfriends together from around the country, and also you're helping a musician. Why not?

Yes. Helping someone else. Absolutely. Oh, I love that. I love that. Kathleen, thank you for taking the time to speak with me, because it is interesting having that crisis management background. How really this is. We're in an environment of a crisis, but everybody still has to live in it and do business in it. And you have found a very unique niche of how you can still carry on with business in a time of crisis.

You have to carry on. Remember, we've got to focus on the crisis. We need to treat it well. We need to treat our people well and our customers even better. But also, if you can do great things in your community that make you feel good and you're doing some good things, we're all going to come out of this much stronger. So pick up the phone, connect with people. That's my message for the sales team. You got to get out there and build those relationships. Don't push product, push relationship.

Oh, Kathleen, well said. And thank you so much for connecting with me and for my listeners as well. I mean, there's so much advice in there that is going to be helpful for so many different people in all categories. So thank you, Kathleen.

Pleasure. Pleasure is mine. Thanks so much.

Thanks. I want to thank Kathleen for sitting down with me and having that conversation about marketing and communicating during the time of a pandemic. And honestly, I wish I could have done it in a bar having dinner in Austin, Texas where her firm, Red Fan Communications is located. So check her out, check her out online and also follow Red Fan communications. Check out responsekit.org if you want more information on how to communicate during this time of the pandemic.