A CASE OF MISTAKEN IDENTITY

A good reputation takes years to establish and minutes to destroy if a company manages a situation badly.

A mortuary in Birmingham made that expensive discovery a few years ago.

More people die over the Christmas break than at any other time of the year. Hospital mortuaries fill up quickly and management will make use of external services.

In 2015 two men passed away in Birmingham hospital. One was a Member of the European Parliament, the other wasn’t.

With similar names, the almost inevitable happened. The independent mortuary muddled them up and left the MEP’s body behind, instead taking the other body to the crematorium.

The MEP’s funeral service was attended by senior party members and the body was cremated.

It was only later that the mortuary’s error was discovered. Local and national media were all over the story. But when journalists started asking questions, the mortuary owners refused to talk.

Although independent from the mortuary, the funeral directors contacted James Ashe of Worcester and Cheltenham-based communications company Mighty to undertake crisis management.

James immediately formed a task force between the mortuary, the hospital communications team and his clients, the funeral directors. Mighty responded on everyone’s behalf, controlling the situation for all three organisations, even though James was only working for the funeral directors.

“Our 24/7 media doesn’t like a vacuum, they have a lot of airtime to fill. We issued regular updates so that they knew what was happening,” he said.

An enquiry into the incident six months later renewed media interest.

Again the mortuary owners wouldn’t talk, and with no official word from them, the media began to fill airtime with assumptions, in some cases interviewing people who had an opinion but didn’t know the facts.

James said: “Media interest focused on the mortuary because their unwillingness to communicate with journalists looked like they had something to hide. Our client wasn’t mentioned in the later news reports.”

A company’s reputation makes up around 40 per cent of its value, according to the latest Reputation Dividend Report.

This annual report, produced by London-based brand research consultancy Reputation Dividend, says that profitable revenue generation, effective operation and strong governance creates the possibility of earnings momentum, but it is the thoughts, feelings and impressions in the minds of company watchers that underpin investor confidence.

Mighty has also been working with the company that bought the business which manufactured the defective doors at Grenfell Tower.

“The best time to prepare for a crisis is when you don’t have one,” said James.

“We are also doing a lot of work around the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR).

“Many people think that crisis management is about making the crisis go away. But it’s about telling the truth and being transparent.

“If a company tries to hide or adapt the truth, their sins will find them out. We encourage them to tell the truth in a managed way. In a crisis you can either hide or front it up. And show you have remorse.”