Did Heathrow’s shutdown prove that bad press no longer matters?

On the night of March 20, a fire at the North Hyde electrical substation in Hayes, west London, resulted in a large-scale power outage in the surrounding area—including Heathrow airport.

The blaze continued until firefighters managed to bring it under control at around 8:00am on Friday morning. The situation at Heathrow, however, was noticeably less under control. The outage caused by the fire led to the airport closing its doors for 18 hours, throwing its flight schedule into disarray and leaving around 200,000 passengers around the world stranded until some flights resumed that evening. By Saturday, the airport announced it was back up and running.

The domino effect of this sudden closure hit the news cycle with force; language such as “fiasco”, “clear failure”, and “global humiliation” were splashed across newspapers and news websites, with The Daily Mirror arguing that the incident had made the UK a “laughing stock."

Heathrow has since defended its handling of the incident amid questions over whether it needed to shut given the availability of alternative power sources. A spokesperson said: “Hundreds of critical systems across the airport were required to be safely powered down and then safely and systematically rebooted. Given Heathrow’s size and operational complexity, safely restarting operations after a disruption of this magnitude was a significant challenge.”

But the immense furore from the media—much like the chaos at the airport—died down almost as quickly as it ignited, which begs the question: Does this say something about the wider implications of an increasingly rapid news cycle for PR disasters?

Does a short burst of negative press actually materially impact a brand’s reputation, considering how fast the news cycle moves on?

Not just tomorrow’s chip paper

Fast-paced news cycles are, according to Nikki Jain, founder of The Sprout PR, a double-edged sword for businesses. 

On one hand, she says, they offer brands the opportunity to quickly “drown out” negative press, typically by executing a “controlled distraction”—pushing positive news.

“On the other hand, they have created a ‘crisis fatigue’ in the public psyche. The media covers so many business mishaps today that it has made the public indifferent. This has lowered the bar for accountability.”

Oliver Foster, CEO of corporate communications agency Pagefield, believes that a short burst of negative press “can absolutely have a major impact”, especially when it taps into wider concerns such as around infrastructure fragility or consumer confidence. “In Heathrow’s case,” he says, “this wasn’t just a power cut - it became a story about resilience and reliability at one of the world’s busiest airports.  

Reputations don’t simply “reset” because headlines do, adds Rebecca Miles, head of practice at marketing agency Red Lorry Yellow Lorry. Heathrow’s power outage might not be dominating the news anymore, but that doesn’t mean the “PR job” is done. The “memory” of such a crisis lingers and shapes the perception of a brand in ways that business leaders “don’t always clock."

The real test, she believes, isn’t just weathering the storm, but what happens after: “Did they [Heathrow] take control of the story, reassure customers, and prove it won’t happen again? Or did they just wait for attention to shift elsewhere?”

Stakeholder attention will “linger and escalate” if businesses are found to be underprepared for a crisis or the response is “inadequate or ill-judged”, says Jonathan Hemus, managing director at crisis management consultancy Insignia.

“Once under the media microscope for a mishandled crisis, it is very hard to escape it. They will scrutinise your every move. Further incidents will thrust the organisation back under the spotlight and [be] used as evidence that it has failed to learn from its experience. It’s a trap that Boeing has fallen into ever since the fatal 737 MAX crashes in 2018 and 2019.”

Prior to the invention of digital and online media, Hemus says that bad news could be “dismissed as ‘tomorrow’s fish and chip paper’”, but this is no longer the case.

“Google ‘BP’ today and on page one, you will find a Bloomberg video entitled ‘Where it all went wrong for BP’. It features its 2010 oil spill and subsequent missteps. Getting into a crisis is much easier than getting out of it. As Warren Buffett said, ‘it takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it’. It’s a statement that is truer today than ever before.”

Defining a crisis

For Kate Brader, senior managing director at FTI Consulting and crisis communication and management specialist, a short-lived media reputational crisis is exactly that—short-lived. She believes the fast-paced nature of the media cycle “means that bumps and issues can quickly move away”, but the mistake is defining them as a ‘crisis’ in the first place.

As the media landscape evolves, she identifies three key factors that can spell long-term negative impacts on reputation and which therefore define “real crises”: ‘indexing’, moving across media forms, and misinformation.

‘Indexing’, Brader says, is the phenomenon of an issue or incident becoming the “latest of the note” —something that is dropped into conversation every time the topic is raised e.g. the incident at Heathrow has the potential to be brought up whenever the topic of power cuts is raised, should a similar incident not occur in the near future.

“The most significant crises, like the Post Office scandal, we see move from ‘print’ (the written word) to podcasts, to mini-series. The interview with Prince Andrew was in 2019, but it feels more recent in our memory as it has moved across media formats. Finally, misinformation can be damaging: it’s not there yet as a threat as significant as cyber[crime] for corporations, but it has the potential to cause an ongoing thorn in the side and to exacerbate crises when they hit.”

When planning for crises, Brader says, leaders should ask themselves: Is the framework there to move quickly and own the narrative? And is there a plan for handling things long term?

“Think about it now and you won't lose good people at the expense of an incident that wasn't their making."

This article first appeared on Management Today.