In Crisis...Dunkin' Donuts

Last week, Dunkin’ Donuts pulled an ad featuring Rachael Ray after conservative pundits equated a scarf she was wearing to a keffiyeh, a (very common) traditional male Arab headdress, which Michelle Malkin so eloquently called "jihad chic." With a firestorm brewing in the blogosphere and the threat of a boycott, the company nixed the ad at near lightening speed. I'm not going to debate the merit of such a foolishly broad generalization, like calling everyone that wears a keffiyeh a terrorist. Instead, let's talk Dunkin' Donuts crisis communication strategy.

When it was first brought to their attention, the company tried to explain that the scarf wasn't a keffiyeh. Not long after, the online chatter got so loud, Dunkin' Donuts pulled it and released this statement:

In a recent online ad, Rachael Ray is wearing a black-and-white silk scarf with a paisley design. It was selected by her stylist for the advertising shoot. Absolutely no symbolism was intended. However, given the possibility of misperception, we are no longer using the commercial.

Were they that afraid a "boycott" would affect long-term sales and reputation? Did they think, as the Brand Man notes, that by pulling the ad they would avoid major negative publicity? Often times, when a company is under attack, it is easy to get caught up in all of the incoming stimuli (e-mails, calls into consumer care, etc.) and not step back from fray to look at the big picture. Of course, I don't know what tools Dunkin' Donuts has in place to monitor all of their stakeholders (and it is way easier to do an analysis of a crisis after the fact) but the company acted like it had only a limited picture of online discussion and public opinion.

In the end, the company received significantly more media attention after they took the ad off the air; some of it critical of the decision. Taking the temperature of the rest of the blogosphere (and TV punditry), they would have found the public overwhelmingly in their favor. Instead, they seemed to cave to a small but very loud constituency. They may have fared better addressing the information in the blogosphere first and then, when discussion turned mainstream, leveraging public annoyance about the accusations against the ones who started the issue in the first place.