Dimensions Of Crisis Communication Revisited: A Case Study Of Kingdom Holdings

Crisis at Kingdom Holdings-Detention of Prince Alwaleed bin Talal

Discuss about the Dimensions of Crisis Communication Revisited.

Kingdom holdings is one of the largest investors in hotels, the company has a great portfolio of leading hotels and holds a majority interest in international hotel management companies.  The strategic approach of the Kingdom holdings is to identify optimal opportunities to invest and derive value from underperforming or undervalued assets worldwide. KHC adopts a very scientific method in evaluating the investment opportunities; it does a strong research and analysis of the current global market dynamics and understanding of the local or regional market before reaching to any conclusion (Al Qurtuby & Aldamer, 2018). The company besides investing in Hotels and Hotel management companies also has vested interest in variety of sectors like, consumer, education, energy, financial , healthcare, manufacturing, media and education, private equity, hospitality, aviation, real estate and technology.  Kingdom holdings investment strategy is based on the three pillars of sustainable business growth, diversification and geographic expansion. This is one of the strong contributing factors behind the extension of Kingdom Holdings services from regional to global markets. A number of projects developed in Saudi Arabia are a benchmark of the success for Kingdom Holdings. The company continues to contribute to the nation and its economy by investing in undervalued assets and develop them to churn money. Investment in high performance and leading brands, long term investment approach, extracting value from underperforming assets and network of contact are the pillars on which Kingdom Holding’s successful investment strategy is based

The 38 year old conglomerate has been in news recently for all the wrong reasons. Its chairman and founder Alwaleed Bin Talal was arrested as a part of anti-corruption purge in Saudi Arabia, since then the shares of Kingdom Holdings have been plummeting. The purpose of the report is to identify the crisis situation for Kingdom holdings and the journalistic angles related with the crisis situation. To what extent cultural differences play a role in situation of a crisis and how the organization should respond to the growing speculation on the fate of the company. At the end, some recommendation will be provided on how an organization should ideally handle crisis at hand.

Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal was born in the year 1955 in Riyadh, went to Menlo College and holds a net worth of 18.7 Billion USD is the brain behind Kingdom Holdings (Sakr, 2016). Alwaleed Bin Talal who is one of the wealthiest individual was arrested along with some 200 prominent businessman and Saudi royals on the eve of Nov 8, 2017 by the anti-corruption in anti-corruption probe. 45^th Richest man on the planet earth, which is at the helm of investment and is a frequent guest in a lot of shows at CNN, CNBC and fox news, the news of his detention was not received well amongst the shareholders of the Kingdom Holdings. The shares plunged to the deepest ocean, and fell much lower than the lowest the lowest mark company hit in the year 2000. According to one of the journalist, Novak (CNBC), there is definitely more to the news of the Prince’s arrest. According to the journalist, the Prince was known for his good work and brilliant investment strategy which helped the Saudi nation considerably. According to some of the earlier news, the new Crown Prince had him detained to create an example in front of the wealthy people of Saudi (Almoualed, 2016).

Issue Analysis on the arrest

There was a lot of speculation surrounding the arrest of the Prince and till date, no one can claim with utmost certainty the reason for the Prince’s arrest. Some of the people who were involved in the anti-corruption probe gave out some of the reason for his arrest, some of them were:

• Prince took a royal loan after his investment sank in the year 2008 and he never fully paid the loan back to the government.
• It was told to one of the daily news that Prince openly criticized Prince Mohammed’s reform program as being misguided, hence in order to take revenge the young leader got him arrested.

However, the arrest was nothing like the usual treatment which is given to people who are detained with corruption charges, in the case of Prince he was taken into Ritz Carton, where he had almost all the freedom in the world and could enjoy the hospitality of the hotel. Prince was released after few days and in an official statement he said “It was a misunderstanding by the government and the matter will be cleared in the coming time. He also said that he is in discussion with the government on several matters, and it’s just a matter of time before the entire story unfolds itself”. The shares of Kingdom holdings fell 10% since his arrest, resulting in billions in losses for the shareholders of the company (Gross, 2017).

The arrest of Prince created a situation of Panic for many international investors who were in talks with the Prince or were involved in financial dealings in Saudi and other Arab countries. The news of his detention was not received fairly well by them, and there were certain reports claiming some of the investors want to back down. However, nobody knows the reason why the arrest happened; the most believable reason until now is, being on the wrong side of the new Prince.

There was very limited access to the Ritz Carlton hotel, where the Prince and other members of the royal family were detained; however some of the journalist got a chance to visit the facility and some of the detainees. Some points which came out from the media directly were:

• The detainees had access to good food, TV, coffee and everything; however there was no internet and Wi-Fi facilities so that the detainees cannot connect with the outer world and ask for some help.
• Prince was devoid of his right of appointing a lawyer to discuss the further strategy to come out of the detention and manage their reputation in the outside world.
• Speculation which was riding high in the market was that the new Prince wanted to emerge as the front runner in the development of Saudi and had a lot of vested interest in investment in and around the Saudi nation. Hence, in an ode to make a point he got the Prince arrested (Aarts & Roelants, 2015).
• There were reports that initially Prince Alwaleed was not in good books of Prince Mohammad, he openly criticized the reform policy of the newly appointed leader, which certainly did not go down well with him, and hence in order to teach him a lesson, he got him detained.
• A lot of money, to the tunes of Billions of dollars was collected from the detainees by the government.

• The shares of Kingdom holding fell by 10%; it was first time in the history of the company that it shares dropped so much.
• From a fundamental standpoint the company’s position was very strong, they were in no hurry to sell assets as they did not have any cash troubles going on for them.
• People believed that the government will punish the offender, if found guilty and not touch the company, hence the shareholders were not much worried.
• Kingdom holdings to hold onto its shareholdings in companies like Four Season Hotels, Apple, Twitter, Daimler, Accor and Citigroup.
• Cracks started appearing in the company, resignation of Mohamed Fahmy (CFO) definitely a sign of concern for Kingdom holdings.

The position of the company did not suffer much in comparison to the image of the Prince which was tarnished in the entire process, however, the support of maximum companies is still with KHC and people still have heard half cooked stories, thereby KHC position is strong in the market (Ulrichsen, 2016).

Some of the prominent stakeholders, where Kingdom holdings have invested deeply and were supporting the Prince even at the time of crisis were:

• Twitter
• Apple
• Citibank (Chorafas, 2014)
• Fox News-Kingdom holdings invested 5% more after the arrest
• Banque Saudi Fransi
• E-Bay
• Com
• Accor Hotels

Crisis communication in itself is a part of Public relation profession which is designed to protect and defend an individual, a company facing a public challenge for its reputation. In the case here, Kingdom holdings was in a middle of Crisis, when the Prince was taken from one of his desert camps and transported to Ritz Carlton, no one had the slightest of idea as to what has happened, and thus a situation of mayhem was created. It is to avert such situation and to keep the shareholders and stakeholders of the company at peace, companies devise what is called as a crisis communication plan. In the case of emergencies in an organization, the need for communication is immediate; hence it is required to be prepared for this kind of situation. It is advised that the business must be able to respond promptly, accurately and confidently during an emergency in the hours and the days to follow (Swamy, 2014).

Media Reactions to the Story

It was mentioned in some earlier reports of the New York Times, a sum of 6 billion USD was asked from the Prince for his freedom. The amount even for 45^th richest man on the planet earth is difficult to hand over to the government for the charges which were not even proven, hence the only option left were to either fight till the end, or strike a deal with the government and liquidate the company and still be the leader of Kingdom holdings. However, as mentioned the King was released after few months, the deals of negotiations are yet not clear, in those two months, Kingdom holding was functioning without its founder and leader, at the very same time, its CFO also resigned, definitely creating a difficult time for the company. A crisis communication plan would help the company to mask it from future uncertainties like these:

Anticipate Crisis- The first step might sound like inviting trouble, but on the contrary it’s a preclusive step to avert any kind of crisis. A crisis communication team has to sit together and brainstorm on all the possible crisis issue which can surround the company; it can also be futuristic changes in the company which can lead to crisis. The idea here is to be prepared and have a beforehand knowledge of what can happen in future. This strategy will not only help in assessing the crisis, but will also help in formulation of defence strategy in any condition what so ever (Olsson, 2014).

• Identify crisis communication team-Creating a crisis communication team is really important, the team has to be ideally led by the CEO, along with his legal counsel and advisors. Followed by a small team of senior executives, PR agency, some individual consultants, subject matter experts and most experienced people in the organization. The team will be one of the best team to sit and brainstorm on any possible crisis which could occur and accordingly will be in a position to make a plan to diffuse the situation.
• Identify and train spokespersons-It is highly recommended that in case of crisis, people who have been trained after screening should only speak with the media. The person should have the right skill, should be in a right position and should have received the right training to be a spokesperson. 2 backup options also have to be created as a part of Plan B (Heide & Simonsson, 2014).
• Spokesperson Training-Crisis communication is all about preserving the organization and not about promoting the organization. The stakeholders are the people who are maximum affected by the crisis, and in such a condition, they are in a state to misinterpret or misunderstand a sentence or a statement. Hence, the spokesperson should be given rigorous training before making him the chief spokesperson in the situation of crisis (Fearn-Banks, 2016)
• Establishment of notification and monitoring systems-In this age of disruption, where technology is playing central roles in the lives of people. It is extremely important to develop a notification system, which is different from other systems used during normal days. The information about the system should be given to the stakeholders and they have to be notified at the time of crisis, very useful in keeping all the stakeholders on the same page. Monitoring is the process of doing active social listening through Digital media, online channels, Twitter and Google; all these new platforms have made information accessible to even a remote location in few seconds. The crisis communication team have to monitor the conversation happening in and around their company, important players and changing ecosystem of the industry to sense any crisis coming in the way of the company.
• Identifying and knowing the stakeholders-Employees are the biggest stakeholders in any company, but besides them even the customers, suppliers, partners and shareholders are parts of the ecosystem. At the time of crisis, everybody will speak something or the other; hence it is advised to beforehand communicate the message through the notification system to all the stakeholders well in advance(Coombs, 2014)
• Developing holding statements-This is a standard fully developed & created message, which is prepared to use in crisis situation. For some of the crisis situation these messages can be standardized. Hence, it is important to draft the message for 5-6 possible crisis scenarios well in advance.

• Assessing the crisis situation-Reacting to the crisis without having adequate information is a classic example of how the company responds poorly in situation of crisis. However, with the completion of the pre-crisis steps, the crisis communication team has to come out and preserve the position of the company by not disclosing any information which is not available publically, maintain the privacy and secrecy and convince the stakeholders of everything being in a wellbeing state (Hawkins & Lee, 2017).
• Finalize and adapt the key message-After assessing the crisis situation, and improving the holding statement after receiving fresh pieces of information, the crisis communication team by this time is aware of what is the information the stakeholders are looking for in a statement. Drafting the statement matching the need of the stakeholders is the key step post crisis (Graham, 2016).
• Post crisis analysis-This is a formal analysis after the clouds of worry have long gone. The crisis communication team has to sit together, analyse what were the key takeaways from the entire process, what went good, what went wrong and what could have been done to improve the process. This would then serve as benchmark for future crisis situation (Jain, 2015).

Conclusion

Every organization is vulnerable to crisis these days hence the importance of communication plan is crucial in the present context. The case here is of the Founder and CEO of Kingdom Holdings, who was detained for few weeks by the Saudi Government; this was a situation of crisis for the company. The entire process was highly guarded and was in complete secrecy, therefore it was a difficult situation for Kingdom holdings, the company was clueless about its way forward, the stocks plummeted to 10% and the CFO was quitting the organization. To avoid such crisis, a crisis communication plan has been devised for the company, wherein they have to create a crisis communication team and take all the proactive measures before the crisis, during and after the crisis. To conclude, it can be said, the better the level of preparedness, accuracy and attention to detail, the probability of averting crisis increases.

References

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