Crisis Management Case Study: Dolce & Gabbana and the Wrongful Advertisement
- Linh Le
- Aug 12, 2020
- 3 min read
Updated: Aug 13, 2020
How can an organization handle these problems?
What is consider suitable PR tactics?
Without careful preparation, it’s not a surprise that many top companies’ reputations are damaged after crises hit. An unfortunate example for this is the Dolce & Gabbana’s crisis in China last year.
How did it all start? - A crisis timeline
Dolce & Gabbana was scheduled to do a fashion show called the Great Show in Shanghai, China on November 21st, 2018. To promote this event, on November 19, D&G published a video campaign featuring a Chinese model wearing a luxury D&G dress, struggling to eat Italian food – pizza and pasta – with chopsticks.
People on social media storm and sent a lot of criticism towards D&G. The video was removed from Weibo – Chinese biggest video site – after 24 hours.
The situation became even worse when photos of an Instagram conversation, in which Stefano Gabbana – co-founder of D&G – making derogatory comments about China and its internet users, using words such as “China Ignorant Dirty Smelling Mafia” and poo emoji, were widely shared in the Internet.
The impacts
Dolce & Gabbana and Stefano Gabbana both claimed that their Instagram accounts were hacked. They apologized to Chinese people, but it was too late. People were raging, and Cultural Affairs Bureau forced D&G to cancel their fashion show.
Not only that, on Thursday, many online sellers in China, from major e-commerce to smaller luxury retailers, removed D&G products from their brand, including Tmall, JD.com, Suning Tesco, Netease Koala, Vipshop, and Seecoo. Fashion rental app Y-closet stopped loaning pieces from the brand, Sephora stores in China also pulled the brand’s beauty products from their selves.
This event also affected offline retailers. Customers were returning D&G products, according to Lane Crawford, a Greater China’s most influential department stores*.
SKP, a luxury department store, cancelled D&G display window scheduled for next month in both Beijing and Xi’an stores. Group-buying platform Meituan Dianping also removed the D&G stores from its directories*.
Numerous Chinese celebrities and influencers also expressed their Chinese pride and ended their support for Dolce & Gabbana.
The crisis made its impact globally as well. In Milan, on November 21, a group of Chinese protestors stood outside of the Dolce & Gabbana holding signs showing Gabbana’s “Not Me” declaration. (add photo). Luisa Via Roma, a retailer based in Florence, also announced its action to cancel relationship with D&G.
On November 23, D&G issued an official apology video with the co-founders saying: “We have nothing but respect for China and the people of China”.
What can we learn from D&G crisis management?
It is obvious that Dolce & Gabbana hadn’t handle their issue very well. There were a lot of thing that contributed to the leverage of this scandal. Let’s compare D&G actions to the three crisis management principles that we know.
1. Responding quickly
D&G initial response to the action was very quick. After receiving bad feedbacks from the public, they took the promotional video down within 24 hours. However, they should have issued an apology to the public right then. When the screenshots of Stefano Gabbana’s conversation came out, the announcement about their accounts being hacked was made constantly. But again, no sincere apology was being made. It took D&G five days later, after all the negative effects had already happened, to release an official apology. Unfortunately, it was too late.
2. Speaking with one Voice: Consistency
During this crisis, D&G should have kept a consistent response to the public. The company itself made efforts to apologize to the public and clarify wrongful information. However, the incident got worse because of Stefano Gabbana, co-founder and also an official spokesperson of the brand, sent a totally opposite message to the public. No matter if his account was hacked or not, the fact that the founder of the company was associated with that type of message damaged the brand tremendously.
3. Transparency: The New openness
In my opinion, D&G wasn’t totally transparent to the public during the crisis. They faced many criticisms from the media from the video and the screenshots. The best thing they could done was to come clean to the public, explained in detail the sources of the problems, their points of views, and what actions they would take. The fact that D&G only took down the video, stated that their accounts were hacked, wasn’t convincing and believable enough.
Conclusion
Crisis, by definition, is a time of intense difficulty, trouble, or danger. Crisis is unavoidable for an organization. From Dolce & Gabbana case, we could have all learned a few things about crisis management. It’s important to think from the stakeholder’s point of view in these situations.
To learn more about D&G case, visit these articles:
- Written by Lidaily
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