Other Stakeholders: Dealing with the Public, Customers and Suppliers

Abstract

As soon as a crisis breaks in the media, it will immediately attract public attention. For most people, the crisis will generate idle curiosity and little else. They will take the information given to them by the media, make their judgements on it and move on. However, a small minority — for whatever reason — will take a more direct interest. This small minority can sometimes be just hundreds or, at other times, thousands of people. For example, if a bank has a problem with hackers getting into its systems, potentially almost all the bank’s customers are affected. This can be millions of people and thousands of these will be concerned that the details of their accounts have been made public. These people can vary from the naturally paranoid to errant fathers who have not been paying proper maintenance for their children and are keeping their financial details secret from their former spouses.