Hong Kong companies are going through a grim time, and both small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and international enterprises, especially those that have been stereotyped as political, will be greatly affected. Nowadays, with the rapid development of technology, netizens have divided stores of all sizes into “yellow” and “blue” colors, and even made mobile phone maps so that users can distinguish the political colors of stores at any time, which has greatly changed the consumption ecology of customers and greatly affected the original business of stores.
Businesses are absolutely free to express their political stance, but they must be mentally prepared to offend the other party; If you insist on political neutrality, you may have the opportunity to “not be human”, or you can continue to operate in a low-key manner. Many companies want to avoid involving politics in their business, but “people in Hong Kong can’t help themselves”, and politics has long been integrated into people’s daily lives. In the end, what should people who want to maintain their business but don’t want to gain or lose “yellow” and “blue” people?
In fact, it is absolutely no problem for companies to adhere to political neutrality and not express their stance at all, and netizens will mostly analyze rationally and think independently, and will not “presume innocence” and fabricate that the store is “yellow” or “blue” out of thin air. Therefore, talking less and doing more things without expressing a position is also a practical method.
However, the larger the company, the more careful it is to control the speech of individual employees because of the large number of employees, and the employees represent the corporate image.
If the employee is dyed due to his political stance, the best way to deal with it is to refer to “Circle K Convenience Store”. In recent months, an employee of the Circle K Convenience Store in Tseung Kwan O branch refused to allow citizens to enter the store to buy bottled water for eye washing, which caused netizens to be dissatisfied and caused a lot of bombardment on Facebook.
Circle K’s public relations department did not make any excuses, and immediately issued a series of apology statements, stating that it would strengthen employee training and improve crisis awareness. Although there are still netizens who are dissatisfied, most netizens believe that convenience stores cannot control the behavior of all employees, and this is only an individual incident of the branch, and they are willing to receive the goods, so that the incident will be turned from large to small, and slowly come to an end.
In the above incident, Circle K did not take a political stance, but only took a neutral and reasonable approach to the sudden crisis, which is definitely commendable. Therefore, in this moment of crisis, it is indispensable for companies to be able to warn themselves in a timely manner.
Crisis Alert means that when information is found on the Internet that may endanger the enterprise, the alarm will be sounded, and the enterprise will be notified immediately before the crisis spreads.
For example, the “Tam Jai Yunnan Mixian” broke out in a huge crisis due to the fact that the store was plastered with a strong political notice by a strange man, but the public relations team issued a clarification statement at a very fast speed, and within three hours, released a CCTV clip to disclose the truth, which was highly praised by netizens and successfully turned the crisis into an opportunity, so as not to follow in the footsteps of “Yoshinoya”, all thanks to Crisis Alert.
When politics is stained with business, it is more complex and difficult to solve than any problem. Therefore, Crisis Alert is a life-saving alarm bell that companies must have when they don’t know when politics will come to their doorstep.
