The Olympics are in full swing in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The modern Olympic games have always created a stage where a city and a country can showcase themselves to the rest of the world. Hosting the Olympics is as much of an economic statement as it is a sports venue. Done right, it is saying that this place is stable, vibrant and open for business. Done wrong and you are sending just the opposite signal. It is not that different than the statement marketing makes about your business. So what can we learn from the Rio Olympics?

Bad press can drag down your reputation quickly. Rio has had plenty of bad press. First there was the news of the mosquito-carried Zika virus that caused many athletes to stay home from the games. Then there was the unsanitary water where athletes would be competing. The Brazilians were told to get it cleaned up. They were slow to respond to that mandate. The news also was not good when a report came out that the Rio de Janeiro that was shown to cameras was not the real city and that the unsightly portion of the city was cordoned off and out of the view of TV audiences. It has set up a class war between the native Brazilians that chant derogatory remarks toward athletes who have come from advanced countries and those who find the conditions of Rio less than acceptable. 

How do you handle news about your business, be it good or bad? You should be active in doing something  in either scenario. If news is good, you should ride it for all it’s worth. That requires you to have an outlet to distribute news - be it your own internal sources like your web site or social media, or an outside source like news agencies, trade groups, etc. Understand that for it to be relevant, it has to be timely. No one wants to read what happened to your business three months ago. News trends much quicker than that. In order to make this happen quickly, you will need a writer and a process to distribute your news. This is relatively easy to do, you just have to be disciplined in order to make it happen. With today’s measurement tools, you can very easily see the impact your message has with your target audience. 

If the news is bad, you need to have a communications plan in place to counteract the negative press coming your way. I tell our clients it is better to admit a mistake was made than to try to cover it up. But don’t stop with the admission, let people know your plan to correct the mistake. A few years ago, Dominos Pizza admitted that in customer satisfaction surveys, their pizza was scoring very low. They made a campaign out of reinventing their pizza. They said they listened to what customers wanted and vowed to change their menu. They turned a negative into a positive simply by listening to their customers, admitting their problem in a very public campaign, and spelling out their solution to the problem. 

There is an often quoted axiom in marketing that says, "there is no such thing as bad press.” This thought is based on the phenomenon that even bad press keeps your name in front of the customer. I would say there is such a thing as bad press and it can kill your company. But if you handle it in a proper way, you can make marketing work for your benefit. Take a lesson from Rio.