Articles by Levick Experts

When crises occur, it is critical to take a broad view of available resources. In some cases, a trade association is a natural refuge. It will fight the battle for you by deflecting negative coverage, seeding positive coverage, and generating endorsements. After all, the association exists in order to protect and advance the interests of its members.

However, the flip side is that trade associations must ultimately think and act in terms of what’s best for the overall membership. That collective interest could directly conflict with your immediate needs. Consider:

• On some issues, it is usually impossible for the association to respond with anything but the blandest statements when what you need is aggressive commentary on specifics that the association simply cannot address.
• Some trade associations have thousands of members, which exponentially decreases the likelihood of a consensus for positions or initiatives that will help individual members facing specific allegations.
• Trade associations for highly visible industries tend to avoid risk because a misstep on their part would cause widespread damage.
• In the worst case, the trade association may be obliged to isolate your problem as the problem of a single company. In that event, you’re worse off than if the trade association had never become involved.
• In a crisis, the long-term goals of the association’s larger member companies will drive its agenda. How big are you?
• Always remember that the trade association’s membership includes your competitors. How eager will they be to help? How sad will they be to see you mired in a long-term public imbroglio?

There are, to be sure, some trade associations that provide crisis resources for member companies on a timely basis, simply because specific industry issues arise over and over again. These associations have drawn on lessons learned during chronic lawsuits and crises, creating a repository of references, research, factoids, etc. to address these problems as they recur.

Examples would be the Motion Picture Association and the Recording Industry Association of America, with their constant struggles against piracy of intellectual property. Yet even in that struggle, we see the essential conservatism that drives trade association strategies. For many months, RIAA refused to go after Napster’s end users. Its messages carefully distinguished between infringing businesses like Napster and the consumer public. Only gradually did the association adopt a position where those consumers could also be targeted for legal action.

High-tech companies may find their trade associations are less conservative and more aggressive than the norm. On some high-tech frontiers – life sciences, for example – the industries are still very new. Risk is therefore a more inherent part of the business culture and professional groups often less risk-averse in their response to crisis.

By and large, though, trade associations help control the media through public pronouncements, broad consumer-awareness programs, online media strategies, etc. on a long-term and highly orchestrated basis. As such, the best time to rely on a trade association is therefore later, after the fever of an original crisis has broken.

In that context, as part of the trade association’s longer-term efforts to shape public perception, and to clarify problematic issues, companies can play roles very much in their own direct interest.