You can’t build a reputation overnight but you can certainly trash it pretty quickly.

 It will be instructive to see how Sony PlayStation’s security breach and Apple’s iPhone location tracking controversies play out.

Some brands recover pretty well from disasters. Toyota’s a good example. In 2009, it issued a recall of some 8.5 million vehicles because of faulty mechanics, but the controversy’s largely behind it now. They may have been a little slow off the mark, but the general perception is that they took appropriate steps to look after their customers and communicated their progress on a regular, sustained basis. A survey in 2010 showed that 59% of Americans still viewed Toyota favourably. Given a fair swathe of Americans never looked kindly on Japanese cars, this figure represents an excellent result.

On the other hand, The Catholic Church continues to reel from its paedophile scandals. Its reputation in heartlands like Ireland has not yet recovered. That was not just because of the massive scale of the problem. Only 11% of the Irish population believe the Church handled the situation appropriately and the younger generation in particular remains utterly disillusioned. When it was revealed that the Church hierarchy knew they had a serious systemic problem and had repeatedly tried to hush it up, often by shunting offenders from parish to parish, it was at that point many of the faithful simply gave up on them. The Pope’s subsequent unqualified apology to the victims was too little, too late.

There is little room for error when you’re in the middle of the storm and you certainly ought not to try and enlist sympathy. Last year, BP’s CEO, Tony Hayward, in the midst of the protracted oil spill that spewed up to an estimated 100 million gallons of toxic oil into the Gulf of Mexico said of the local community “We’re sorry for the massive disruption it’s caused their lives.” So far, text book stuff. He then went on to say, “There’s no one who wants this over more than I do. I would like my life back.” Whoops. The criticism was scathing and unrelenting from that point – the yacht race around the Isle of Wight didn’t help either. No-one heard the apology, all they registered was ‘you want your life back, what about the 11 people who died? What about the fishing communities, those who can’t earn a living, what about the ecological impact? DON’T YOU GET IT?’ From that point, Hayward’s resignation was inevitable.

You can’t ‘spin’ your way out of a crisis, in fact the employment of spin is a guarantee that you’ll spiral deeper into trouble. Firstly, you’ve got to swiftly acknowledge that there a significant problem, don’t be dragged kicking and screaming to that realisation. Admit some culpability immediately, and that is not as easy as it sounds because it may entail a trade-off between reputational and legal risk. At all times, demonstrate that your key priority is to help those impacted, fix the problem and then learn what you can to help avoid a repetition. There are no short cuts or clever tricks. It is the ruthless and relentless application of common sense, the essence of good PR essentially.