No Such Thing as Bad Publicity? These Corporations Would Beg to Differ
FitSmallBusiness.com Ranks the 10 Most Costly PR Fiascos of the Last Decade
NEW YORK, April 9, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Everyone who reads this gets $1 million. Wait…that's not what I meant to say.
Even PR professionals make mistakes. Sometimes, a mistake can be corrected simply and easily. But, every so often, the problem can't be swept under the rug. These problems can be costly. Very, very costly.
Well-known companies such as Uber and Facebook have suffered bruising headlines due to greed, negligence, and questionable morality. These PR nightmares not only resulted in mountains of legal fees and damaged reputations, they also led to drastically reduced customer bases, and, in many cases, corporate leadership changes.
And that naturally begs the question: What were the costliest PR fiascos of the last decade?
The researchers and writers at FitSmallBusiness.com, the digital business publication, set out to discover this with the following criteria: The crisis had to be covered by at least three national news outlets; the legal damages totaled at least $1 billion; and the corporate leadership either shifted, changed or was directly impacted by the crisis.
You can find the full list HERE:
THE MOST COSTLY PR FIASCOS OF THE LAST DECADE
1) BP Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill - 2010 – Cost: $65 Billion
2) Mattel Toys Lead Paint Scandal – 2007 – Cost: $30 Billion
3) Bank of America Securities Scandal – 2008 – Cost: $16.5 Billion
4) Volkswagen Emissions Scandal – 2015 – Cost: $14.7 Billion
5) Uber Sexual Harassment Scandal – 2017 – Cost: $10 Billion
6) Deutsche Bank – 2017 – Cost: $7.8 Billion
7) Samsung Exploding Battery Scandal – 2016 - Cost: $5.3 Billion
8) Toyota Lethal Gas Pedal Crisis – 2010 - Cost: $1.6 Billion
9) Facebook Data Breach – 2018 – Estimated Cost: $1.6 Billion
10) United airlines Passenger Abuse – 2017 – Cost: $1.4 Billion
"A PR blunder can cost a company its reputation, its stock value and its income; fortunately, at FitSmallBusiness, we have a great PR team to handle anything before it becomes a crisis," says David Waring, Co-Founder, FitSmallBusiness.com. He then added: "But, don't quote me on that."
About FitSmallBusiness.com:
With a rapidly growing monthly readership of more than 2.5 million, FitSmallBusiness.com is an online publication devoted to helping small business owners. Its full-time staff of writers spends hours of research, data analysis, and interviews with industry experts to answer the questions that owners want in order to run a successful small business.
For more information on this list and this topic, please contact Sarah Johnson, [email protected], 917-864-6355.
SOURCE FitSmallBusiness.com
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