Crisi reputazionali e questioni di genere nelle pubblicità. I casi di Audi e Gillette.

In today’s society crises are a phenomenon that every organization should be prepared for. No organization is immune to crises, so it is fundamental for them to know how they should react when a crisis occurs. For this reason, all organizations should learn as much as they can about crisis management. Crisis management is an applied field of study that provides a guidance for business managers to help them to limit the harm that a crisis can inflict on their organization, therefore, they can protect its image, its reputation and financial stability. The main topic of this thesis is exactly crisis management and communication. The purpose of this study is to understand how business managers can handle crises and recover from them limiting to a minimum the negative impact that crises can inflict on organizations. This thesis focuses on reputational crises and presents some theories regarding reputational protection and image restoration that are achieved through effective crisis communication. In particular, this study concerns social media crises that are a phenomenon of crises that transpire or are amplified by social media. As a matter of fact, this thesis focuses on the analysis of two case studies in which two organizations, Audi and Gillette, have had to deal with some crisis about gender issues that arose on social media. These crises occurred because the organizations’ communication through their commercials was criticized by consumers due to gender issues. In this study a qualitative study approach will be used: the consumers’ criticism on social media, especially Twitter, and the organizations’ responses will be collected and analysed to show two different ways of reacting to a similar crisis.In order to fulfil this purpose, the following research question has been formulated: How did the two organizations react to the consumers’ criticism about gender issues in their commercials? The results of this study will show that the two organizations reacted to consumers’ criticism using different communication strategies.