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Final Project: Crisis Communication Plan

Taylor Kueppers

Department of Communication, University of North Dakota

COMM 451: Risk and Crisis Communication

Dr. Amanda Lucas

December 12, 2022

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Identify the company

The organization that I choose to write a crisis communication plan for is Amazon.

Amazon can be seen as the world’s largest online retailer and a prominent “cloud service

provider” (Yasar, 2022). A “cloud service provider” is any company that offers a form of cloud

computing. Amazon is guided by four main principles customer obsession rather than competitor

focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking

(amazon.com, 2020). Amazon is responsible for powering many different tools, including Prime,

Kindle, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa. The mission statement of Amazon is to “serve

consumers through online and physical stores and focus on selection, price, and convenience”

and their vision statement is “to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can

find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers

the lowest possible prices” (fourweekmba.com, 2022). Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos in

1994 out of his garage in Seattle, then in 2021, he stepped down as CEO to become an executive

chairman of the company (Forbes.com). Some other important people at Amazon are Andy

Jassy, the president and chief executive officer, Brian T. Olsavsky, the senior vice president and

chief financial officer, Douglas J. Herrington, the chief executive officer of Worldwide Amazon

Stores, Shelley L. Reynolds, the vice president of Worldwide Controller, Adam N. Selipsky, the

chief executive officer for Amazon Web Services, and David A. Zapolsky, the senior vice

president of General Counsel and Secretary (aboutamazon.com, 2022). You can get in contact

with the Amazon executive team by email, Douglas Herrington’s email is

dherring@amazon.com, Andrew Jassy’s email is ajassy@amazon.com, and Jeff Bezos’ email is

jeff@amazon.com (elliotreport.com, 2022).

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Exigence

Amazon provides all different types of products to customers all over the world. With the

unique Prime feature, customers no longer have to wait business days to receive their orders,

they can receive the order in two days or sometimes even that same day. Unfortunately, products

do not always get produced the way they are supposed to. At the beginning of 2022, a batch of

diapers made through Amazon had glass shards embedded in them. Twenty-four different

customers had received the contaminated batch of diapers, it wasn’t long after these diapers were

delivered that these customers were leaving terrible reviews and calling or emailing Amazon

customer service. The customers were reporting that their babies had extreme burning and rashes

on their bottom halves. The flood of negative reviews, calls, and emails to Amazon was larger

than they had ever seen before. Customers had lost confidence in the brand and no longer trusted

that the products they were ordering from Amazon would be safe to use. As such a large brand,

Amazon needed to act quickly to ensure they would not lose any more trust from their

customers.

Crisis Plan Goals And Reasoning

The crisis of glass inside diapers hit Amazon very rapidly and strongly, and the need for a

crisis plan was urgent. The plan that I have came up with to solve this crisis at Amazon is to first

and foremost apologize. We want to knowledge the mistakes that were made and change them

for the future. This situation was not something that Amazon ever thought would happen or

wanted to happen. Issuing an apology is the first thing that I would plan to do because as a

respected company you need to take responsibility for the situation. We will also recall the

diapers that were produced with that batch and all diapers that were produced around the same
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time. This is to ensure that no other diapers with glass will be sent to other customers and stop

them in the warehouses before they can reach the public.

After the first initial apology, we plan to reach out to each customer individually that

received the product. From our textbook, Effective Crisis Communication: Moving from Crisis to

Opportunity, we learned that when the threat is higher, the response time needs to be faster.

Since the situation is involving children and their safety, the response time will need to be

immediate. While Amazon is reaching out to each individual customer, they will include all the

possible information they have, how it happened, where it happened, and what they are planning

to do about it in the future. Giving the customer the available information is important because

during a crisis you need to remain transparent with the public to show that you are caring about

the customer and make the right steps to change the behavior.

Next, Amazon will open a communication line where customers can call with safety

concerns or ask general questions about what is happening with Amazon. This call line is a part

of the communication plan Amazon will remain clear and consistent with keeping

communication open-ended. We saw this explain in our textbook when Odwalla’s apple juice

was linked to an E. coli outbreak (Ulmer, et. al, pg57). The example in our book opened used a

website and call line to remain clear with their customers and the response was positive.

Finally, to prevent anything like this from happening again in an Amazon warehouse,

Amazon will be implementing new safety features to their supplies. This new safety feature will

be used to screen all products for the correct material used and scan for foreign items that do not

belong. This will be used to ensure the safety of their customers and prove to the customers that

their safety is important to them.

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Audience

Amazon has three top outside stakeholders, Advisor Group Inc. with 7.1% in shares,

Vanguard Group Inc. with 6.6% in shares., and BlackRock Inc., with 5.4% in shares

(Investopedia). The top three stakeholders from inside Amazon are members of the executive

team as well, Bezos with 11% in shares, Jassy with 0.02% in shares, and Jack Blackburn with

0.01% in shares (Investopedia). What this means for Amazon, is that these people will need to be

the main source, besides the customers, of contact. These stakeholders will need to be updated

constantly with the changing situation so that they also do not lose confidence in the company or

pull their shares. Learned in chapter three of our textbook, we learned that

companies/organizations should maintain open communication with their stakeholders so that

when important issues arise it is not a challenge to contact each other (pg32).

Similar Crisis

Diapers containing glass from Amazon were not the first time that baby item were found

to have glass in them. According to NBC News, in 2015 Huggies was put under investigation

after pictures and videos surfaced on social media showing a shiny residue inside Huggies wipes.

The company released a comment that the material their customers are seeing could potentially

be small pieces of melted fibers that occur in the manufacturing process. The article updates later

that even though it is not normal, it can occur (NBCNews.com, 2015).

Common questions that may arise

Anytime a crisis occurs the public will have a lot of questions about what happened and

how this could happen in such a respected company. The public will wonder how much a large

mistype occurred when it had never happened before and how the diapers made it fully through

the supply line and into the public. Amazon will respond to all questions with the full available
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truth at the time. There will also be a questionnaire added to the Amazon website where the

public can ask as many questions as they want. The company will then do this through the

questionnaire, answer the questions, and post them publicly so that customers and stakeholders

can always view them and maintain open communication with the public.

Constraints

The negative constraint of the diaper crisis at Amazon is that babies were directly

affected by this crisis. Since the glass was embedded in the diapers, as the baby wears the diaper

and the dirtier it becomes, the more glass becomes exposed to the baby's skin. Another negative

constraint of this crisis is the negative feedback that Amazon received from a ton of negative

reviews left on their products which can lead people to not want to buy certain products from

them.

A positive constraint from this crisis is that it gives Amazon a way to improve the way

they produce their products. They can increase the safety of their customers by adding new

safety features while making products. Another positive constraint from the diaper crisis is that

they can take the negative backlash and learn from it. They are able to rebuild customer

relationships to make them even stronger.

Potential Risks

Within any company, there are risks that are tied to everything they do. Being a large

company, there is always the public eye on you, one misstep, and the news will be everywhere.

The main risks with this crisis are that the customers who received the diapers with glass in them

may never stop through Amazon again. Another risk is that the company will not ab able to

bounce back from the crisis, with a big company like Amazon, the likelihood of them not being
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able to bounce back is unlikely but if this were to happen in a smaller company that may have

been the case.

Communication Strategies

The communication strategies that Amazon will use for this crisis will be through social

media, news outlets, and their website. Amazon will communicate through social media by

making posts on each platform about the situation, what happened and how they are going to

change it in the future. This will be an effective form of communication because it will be able to

reach their main target audience, people who utilize the internet for many things. By making a

statement through news outlets it will allow Amazon to reach other customers that do not find

information through social media. It is important to make statements on more than one platform

so that it has the chance to reach all its customers. Amazon will post a statement on the main

page of their website, the statement will include the call number, online questionnaire, and a list

of all the facts from the situation. By making it the main page of their website it allows all people

who view the website to see the information in one area.

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Resources

/entity/gennaro-Cuofano. (2022, October 26). Amazon's mission statement and vision statement
in a Nutshell. FourWeekMBA. Retrieved December 12, 2022, from
https://fourweekmba.com/amazon-vision-statement-mission-statement/

Amazon customer service contacts. Elliott Report. (n.d.). Retrieved December 12, 2022, from
https://www.elliott.org/company-contacts/amazon/

Forbes Magazine. (n.d.). Jeff Bezos. Forbes. Retrieved December 12, 2022, from
https://www.forbes.com/profile/jeff-bezos/?sh=fce1d5a1b238

NBCUniversal News Group. (2015, August 24). Huggies investigating claims of glass found in
Baby Wipes. NBCNews.com. Retrieved December 12, 2022, from
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/huggies-investigating-claims-glass-found-
baby-wipes-n413946

Reiff, N. (2022, July 13). Top Amazon shareholders. Investopedia. Retrieved December 12,
2022, from https://www.investopedia.com/articles/insights/052816/top-4-amazon-
shareholders-amzn.asp#:~:text=The%20top%20individual%20insider%20shareholders,
(BLK).

Ulmer, R. R., Sellnow, T. L., & Seeger, M. W. (2022). Effective crisis communication: Moving
from crisis to opportunity. SAGE.

US About Amazon. (2020, September 18). Who we are: Amazon. US About Amazon. Retrieved
December 12, 2022, from https://www.aboutamazon.com/about-us

US About Amazon. (2020, September 25). Our positions. US About Amazon. Retrieved
December 12, 2022, from https://www.aboutamazon.com/about-us/our-positions

Yasar, K., & Wigmore, I. (2022, June 8). What is Amazon? definition and company history of
Amazon.com. WhatIs.com. Retrieved December 12, 2022, from
https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/Amazon
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