It’s valuable to frame the Slater and Gordon crisis via the recent Roy Morgan survey on trust and distrust. Reviewing the Roy Morgan presentation is well worth 20 minutes of communications professionals’ valuable time. Some key points:

1. It puts data around the cliché that you can spend a lifetime building trust and trash it in five minutes. In Slater and Gordon’s case, the trashing took a few days.

More relevant now for the legal firm is that it takes five years to rebuild your brand close to where it was before the crisis, according to the data. There are conditions, the main ones being that you have to do the hard work in the first nine months, and then keep at it.

This is consistent with our experience.

For S&G, following the damaging email send, the next nine months are critical. Typically, the two main stakeholders, staff and clients (current and prospective) will be considering options.

Dina Tutungi

2. A bit more on how the damage to brand materialises: In Wilkinson Butler’s experience one negative story may not damage a brand – journalists are not trusted to that extent. A run of stories, three or more, however, can do immense damage.

My first experience, now replicated many times, was with a large Australian retailer accused accurately on A Current Affair of misinformation. The first story did no detectable damage: after the third they lost $10m in sales.

One misstep that company made was........

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