How To Handle Negative Publicity as a Small Business

Handling negative publicity can be a daunting challenge for any business, but especially for small businesses. For a small business with limited resources and a more intimate connection to their community, the impact can be significant. Navigating negative attention requires a strategic and thoughtful approach to minimize damage, protect your reputation, and ultimately, rebuild trust. Here are 4 practical steps to help you effectively manage and respond to negative publicity as a small business owner: create a plan, assess the situation, be honest, and take action.

1. Create a Plan

As a small business owner, you may assume you’ll never be caught up in controversy. Unfortunately, it is more likely to happen than you think. The best way to handle negative publicity is to have a plan already in place. If you already know how you are going to react and respond to controversy, then it will be less of a scramble if something happens. Your publicity plan should include the following:

• How quickly you are going to respond. It is important to give yourself time to gather all the facts about the incident, but you want to respond in a timely manner. It could be that you give yourself 24 hours to investigate and craft a response. As a small business owner, you could also craft a response asking for more time to investigate. Make sure you mention in this response that you will be providing a more detailed response later on, once you’ve had time to gather information.
• Who is going to respond? It could be that you have a designated PR person who will handle all communications. As the business owner, it might be in your best interest to be the person to respond. This will show your audience that you are taking the matter seriously.
• Take your business’s philosophy/values into consideration. Your small business should have a set of values that you stand by. Always take these values into consideration when responding and reacting to negative publicity.

2. Assess the Situation

When dealing with negative publicity or an incident, it is extremely important to not immediately engage with people outside of your small business. Before you try to defend or soothe the situation, you need to gather information. Try to learn as many details as possible about the situation, and keep your employees updated on what is going on. As the small business owner, you cannot freak out and get defensive – especially if you don’t have all the information yet.

3. Be Honest

Once you have gathered all the information, it is time to release a response. Your response should include clear, concise, non-accusatory language. Your small business must take responsibility for the negative publicity, whether there was an actual incident or not. How you respond to an incident is just as important as the original issue, if not more. The public is not likely to forgive you if they feel as though you are avoiding blame and trying to bring down others. 

There are times when businesses have responded and called out others for being the cause of an issue. (A great example of this would be when a business calls out a reviewer who left a bad review but didn’t tell the full story.) While many businesses have had success in doing this, most have not been so lucky. As the small business owner, it is your decision on how you want to handle negative publicity – but we do not recommend this route.

Your response should also include an explanation of what happened and how your small business is rectifying the situation. Do not lie about what happened or tell the public you are going to take action that you are not going to take. Lies are almost always found out, and this will cause a deeper rift in how the public views your business than the original incident.

4. Take Action

Take the necessary steps to ensure that the incident never happens again. This could mean retraining your staff or getting rid of outdated software. Whatever you stated you were going to do in your apology, you need to actually do that.

Negative publicity can be a huge deal for a small business. Knowing how to respond and rectify the situation will help you keep a positive brand image. As a small business owner, you can prepare for situations like these by creating a plan ahead of time. Remember, when responding to negative publicity you need to: assess the situation, be honest in your response, and take action.