Eliciting collaborative positive psychology in tourism crisis communication: The role of visual framing

Local government units (LGUs) are at the forefront of the Philippine government’s COVID-19 pandemic response. One of their most important functions is crisis and risk communication to ease public fear, mitigate the damage caused by the pandemic, and promote the adoption of health and safety protocols to control the spread of COVID-19. However, only a few studies on local governments’ COVID-19 experience are present, and an in-depth study of the crisis and risk communication of Philippine LGUs has not been done yet. To fill this gap, this study investigated the communication strategies used by LGUs to inform, educate, and connect with the public during the pandemic, particularly in 2020–2021. It employed a mixed method approach consisting of desk review and cursory audit of national plans and policies on COVID-19, key informant interviews with representatives of the selected LGUs (Pasay, Manila, Caloocan, and Navotas), and social media search and content analysis of the COVID-19-related messages on the LGUs’ official Facebook pages. Results showed the use of traditional and modern communication channels in crisis and risk communication. Modern channels such as social media, virtual meetings and groups, and online messaging platforms were largely used and proved to be useful given mobility restrictions and the need for social distancing. Nevertheless, traditional channels remained an important communication strategy of the LGUs, particularly face-to-face communication whenever possible, printed IEC materials, and interpersonal channels on the ground, like barangay officials and health personnel. The effective and efficient conduct of the LGUs’ communication functions during the pandemic was affected by many challenges, such as the late receipt of official memos on new policies and guidelines from the national government, the fast-changing guidelines, inadequate training in science, risk, and crisis communication, insufficient resources, risk of COVID-19 to personal health, and discrepancies in the COVID-19 case reports. Found in all four LGUs was the absence of a communication plan and monitoring and evaluation system, which hindered them from systematically implementing their communication interventions, monitoring progress vis-à-vis objectives, and evaluating the effectiveness of their communication strategies. Also, while social media has been widely used, the LGUs failed to maximize its potential to correct fake news and increase their responsiveness to the public. Only 45 of the 6,787 COVID-19-related posts on the LGUs’ Facebook pages, or less than 1 percent, were posts intended to correct false information. Only one of the three LGUs responded extensively to public comments on its Facebook page. The analysis of the LGUs’ messages on Facebook also revealed a need to improve the clarity of their social media posts, which can be achieved by using the local language more, explaining and simplifying technical terms, and using more visual communication.

Finn Frandsen and Winni Johansen have won the 2019 Danish communication prize (KOM-pris) for their world-class research in organisational crises, crisis management and crisis communication. This prize is awarded by The Danish Union of Journalists (Dansk Journalistforbund) and Kforum. http://mgmt.au.dk/nyheder/nyheder/news-item/artikel/finn-frandsen-and-winni-johansen-win-the-kom-pris-2019/ The aim of this handbook is to provide an up-to-date introduction to the discipline of crisis communication. Based on the most recent international research and through a series of levels (from the textual to the inter-societal level), this handbook introduces the reader to the most important concepts, models, theories and debates within the field of crisis communication. Crisis communication is a young and very vibrant field of research and practice. It is therefore crucial that researchers, students and practitioners have access to presentations and discussions of the most recent research. Like the other handbooks in the HOCS series, this handbook contains a general introduction, a chapter on the history of crisis communication research, a series of thematic chapters on crisis communication research at various levels, a chapter perspectives, a glossary of key terms, and lists of further reading for each chapter (with references to publications in English, German, and French). Overview Section I – Introducing the field General introduction A brief history of crisis management and crisis communication: From organizational practice to academic discipline Reframing the field: Public crisis management, political crisis management, and corporate crisis management Section II – Between text and context Image repair theory Situational crisis communication theory: Influences, provenance, evolution, and prospects Contingency theory: Evolution from a public relations theory to a theory of strategic conflict management Discourse of renewal: Understanding the theory’s implications for the field of crisis communication Making sense of crisis sensemaking theory: Weick’s contributions to the study of crisis communication Arenas and voices in organizational crisis communication: How far have we come? Visual crisis communication Section III – Organizational level To minimize or mobilize? The trade-offs associated with the crisis communication process Internal crisis communication: On current and future research Whistleblowing in organizations Employee reactions to negative media coverage Crisis communication and organizational resilience Section IV – Interorganizational level Fixing the broken link: Communication strategies for supply chain crises Reputational interdependence and spillover: Exploring the contextual challenges of spillover crisis response Crisis management consulting: An emerging field of study Section V – Societal level Crisis and emergency risk communication: Past, present, and future Crisis communication in public organizations Communicating and managing crisis in the world of politics Crisis communication and the political scandal Crisis communication and social media: Short history of the evolution of social media in crisis communication Mass media and their symbiotic relationship with crisis Section VI – Intersocietal level Should CEOs of multinationals be spokespersons during an overseas product harm crisis? Intercultural and multicultural approaches to crisis communication Section VII – Critical approaches Ethics in crisis communication Section VIII – The future The future of organizational crises, crisis management and crisis communication For a detailed table of contents, please see here .

Local government units (LGUs) are at the forefront of the Philippine government’s COVID-19 pandemic response. One of their crucial functions is crisis and risk communication to ease public fear, mitigate the pandemic’s damage, and promote the adoption of health and safety protocols. However, only a few studies have examined LGUs’ COVID-19 experience, and no study has delved deeply into the crisis and risk communication strategies of Philippine LGUs. To fill this gap, this study investigated how LGUs communicated with their residents during the pandemic, particularly from 2020 to 2021, following the Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication model. It utilized a mixed method approach encompassing desk review, a cursory audit of national COVID-19 plans and policies, key informant interviews with representatives from Pasay, Manila, Caloocan, and Navotas, and a content analysis of COVID-19-related Facebook posts from these LGUs. The results revealed the LGUs’ lack of a strong preparation phase, highlighting their reactive approach to the pandemic. All four LGUs did not have a communication plan and a monitoring and evaluation system, which hindered the systematic implementation, monitoring, and assessment of their communication strategies. A closer look at their interventions showed that they used a combination of traditional, electronic, and digital communication channels. Digital channels, such as social media, virtual meetings and groups, and online messaging platforms, were largely used and proved useful amid mobility restrictions and the need for physical distancing. Traditional channels remained useful, particularly face-to-face communication whenever possible, printed materials, and interpersonal channels on the ground like barangay officials and health personnel. While social media was largely used, LGUs failed to maximize its potential to combat fake news and enhance their responsiveness to the public. The analysis of the LGUs’ Facebook messages indicated a need for clearer communication by using local languages more frequently, simplifying technical terms, and increasing the use of visual communication. Several contextual factors affected the LGUs’ communication functions during the pandemic. These included delays in receiving official memos on new policies from the national government, rapidly changing guidelines, difficulty in communicating a novel disease, inadequate training in science, risk, and crisis communication, insufficient resources, personal health risks of COVID-19, and spread of false information.

Infecting more than two hundred and nineteen million people internationally as of September 2021, SARS-Cov2 (COVID-19) remains a major health crisis despite the availability of vaccines in many countries and publicized guidance on effective preventative measures (WHO, 2021). To combat the spread of the virus, governments worldwide have found themselves relying on their ability to exert control over health behaviors in public and private spaces. Visual communication, which includes both graphics and text, are an integral component of how these behavioral advisories are communicated to the public. Authorities translate scientific information into digestible designs for the public to achieve effective understanding and actionable protective measures. How are governments presenting and assessing the effectiveness of COVID-19-related information? Are there opportunities to maximize communication and develop models using existing frameworks?
 This interdisciplinary literary review pairs three models of risk and crisis communication with an information design framework to analyze COVID-19 materials shared by international governing agencies. Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication (CERC) blends two popular disaster mitigation approaches to create a model that considers all stages of disaster response (Reynolds and Seeger, 2007). The Protective Action Decision Model (PADM; Lindell and Perry, 2012) and the Scenario Transition Model of Viewing and Reading (Jaenichen, 2017) highlight the importance of considering context when crafting communication to increase the likelihood of message comprehension under stressed circumstances. Design perspectives are incorporated through the semiological lens of Jacques Bertin’s research on effective visual compositions (Bertin, 1983). Graphics sampled from the websites of international governments are used to illustrate the importance of leveraging design and communication strategy when communicating about risk and crisis scenarios.

To address the dearth of research in visual pandemic communication, this paper proposes the VISTA framework drawing together research from visual communication, persuasion, crisis communication, and health communication to propose that effective health crisis response includes minimizing visual complexity, using strong iconography and symbolism, and effective text to accompany the visual material. The framework was applied to a cross-national comparison of the English and Scottish governments’ COVID-19 pandemic response on Twitter finding that the framework’s application provides good evidence to explain the substantially worse health outcomes across the pandemic in England compared to Scotland. The authors argue the three critical lessons learned from this analysis are that governmental pandemic communication must: (1) use clear visual branding for its pandemic response; (2) combine effective visual and text-based messaging; and (3) keep pandemic messaging positive.

About the Authors

Crisis communication is an extremely broad area crossing various disciplinary domains, both within and outside communication. Moreover, crisis situations include disasters, political upheaval, terrorism, pandemics, and managerial misconduct by corporate executives. Hence, whenever one discusses crisis communication, it is imperative to be precise about how the term is being used. This chapter narrows the focus to organizational crises, those potentially disruptive situations that demand a response by the organizations perceived to be responsible for the negative event. The first section more fully articulates how the terms crisis and crisis communication are being defined. As a maturing field of research, crisis communication can benefit from a careful consideration of the paths less traveled, as researchers begin the reimagining of crisis communication. Not all paths have the same potential to yield insights into crisis communication. This chapter considers those paths that seem appealing but offer marginal returns and those paths that have the potential to illuminate both crisis communication theory and practice.

Textual marketing communication is effective in various contexts such as print advertising, user-generated content, and social media (Diamond 1968; Ludwig et al. 2013; Nam and Kannan 2014). However, visual marketing communication studies are limited in the context of print advertising (e.g., Hagtvedt and Brasel 2017). This dissertation includes two essays to examine the visual communication effectiveness online. Essay 1 develops a conceptual framework to examine the visual-based brand perception (VBBP) and related concepts on social media. We propose that the VBBP is a co-creational process between a company and its consumers and exhibits three characteristics: i) a two-way communication that both a company and its consumers are pivotal authors of brand stories, ii) a dynamic process that the brand meaning keeps evolving, and iii) a dyadic process between a company and its consumers. In the conceptual model development, we identify six visual attributes as measures of VBBP and adopt a machine learning-based image mining technique to quantify the measures on a large scale. We empirically validate the conceptual model and find that during the co-creational process, both the company and consumer visual-based brand perception information richness (VBBP_R) increase over time. Moreover, in examining the difference between a company and its consumers, we find that there is a visual-based brand perception gap (VBBP_G) between a company and its consumers. From these findings, we advise three marketing communication strategies to help companies manage their VBBP_G. Essay 2 examines a related research question: the joint effects of visual and textual communication on crowdfunding success. Essay 2 extends Essay 1 in three ways: i) we consider both textual and visual marketing communication on another online platform, ii) beyond the concept of perception, we emphasize examining how marketing communication influences a marketing outcome: duration of crowdfunding success, iii) we investigate not only how visual and textual communication influence crowdfunding success individually but also how they influence the outcome jointly. We empirically validate visual communication is more effective than textual communication on a crowdfunding platform. Our findings support an integrated marketing communication strategy that marketers should implement using multiple communication tools in a harmonic way. We demonstrate that the synergistic effect of visual and textual communication has a positive effect on crowdfunding outcome.

Drawing on recent research on robust governance, we conceptualize robust crisis communication as a dynamic process centered on evolving public communication demands. We propose a three‐dimensional measurement for empirically examining the robustness of government crisis communication in the context of the COVID‐19 pandemic. We collected 43,642 Twitter messages posted by 50 state governors in the United States from January 1 to June 30, 2020. We applied machine learning algorithms to code the voluminous Twitter data based on messaging topics, sentiments, and interactions. This study found an overall low level of robustness in the governors' crisis communication. Governors most frequently posted reputation management tweets, followed by tweets about the government's handling of the pandemic. This research presents empirical evidence for the heavy influence of politics on governors' crisis communication strategies and highlights the need to understand and build robust crisis communication.摘要本文借鉴稳健性治理的最新相关研究，提出稳健性危机沟通的概念，将其界定为聚焦于满足危机中持续变化的公众沟通需求的动态沟通过程与模式。基于此概念，本文以新型冠状病毒肺炎疫情中的危机沟通为例，构建三维测量方法，用以检验政府危机沟通在内容主题、情感表达和对话互动三方面的稳健程度。本文收集美国50个州长在2020年1月1日至2020年6月30日期间发布的43,642条推特信息，并应用机器学习对所有信息的主题、情感和互动特征进行编码分析。本文发现美国州长危机沟通的稳健性程度总体偏低。美国州长最经常发布与声誉管理相关的推文，其次是政府的疫情防控措施。文章进一步阐释与例证政治因素对州长危机沟通策略的深刻影响，并强调政府部门理解与践行稳健性风险沟通的必要性与重要性。

Do crisis evolve linearly through sequential one-directional stages that end with their resolution? Or are crisis, a set of nonlinear events with somewhat a chaotic nature, better represented as multilayer relapse cycles, that is, a series of dynamic processes and templates that evolve at different levels of analysis and can either go forward—achievement—or go back—relapses? Moreover, should crisis always move forward to reach their resolution or should we strive to achieve social systems resilience, grounded on learning and adaptation processes, that is, moving forward and backwards, until achieving it? To argument in favor of achieving crisis resilience, we propose a theoretical model—the crisis layers and thresholds (CLT) model grounded on the following assumptions: (a) individuals' evaluations and responses should be the basis/core of crisis management and crisis communication activities;(b) different concurrent psychosocial and organizational processes occur at different levels of analysis of a crisis, from a microindividual level to a macro organization level;and (c) rather than striving for crisis resolution, we should strive for crisis resilience, preparing the social system for current and future emerging risks and crisis To implement effective evidence-based crisis management and crisis communication in line with such assumptions, we also propose the CLT-ResiliScence approach, an Information and Communication Technology-mediated crisis sensing approach This is based on monitoring “social sensors” data, particularly from social media, as an important source of information Examples of this will be provided based on research on the current COVID-19 pandemic © 2020 Wiley Periodicals LLC

Editors’ letter: New research and opportunities in public relations and visual communication

The Covid‐19 crisis makes the study of languages in management even more relevant and timely than before the crisis. This “black and brown epidemic,” as Joseph Betancourt from Massachusetts General Hospital called it, brings to the fore social divisions and hardship, accelerating and magnifying processes and practices of linguistic inequality with fatal consequences (Goldberg, 2020).

The purpose of this study was to explore the host–guest interaction in tourism crisis communication. Guided by a practice-based approach, our study used the recent event of the 2018 Florida Red Tide as the context. It explored both visitors’ and residents’ information-acquiring and sharing practices in crisis communication. A total of 969 potential visitors and 460 Florida residents were surveyed, respectively. The findings of our study show that visitors preferred residents as their primary information sources in the crisis communication process. Repeat visitors who have no children and are the primary decision-maker are more likely to rely on residents for risk information than first-time visitors. The results further indicate that most respondents in the resident sample have shared Red Tide information with visitors through various channels. Knowledge and social identity influenced their information-sharing behaviour. The findings suggest that residents can act as risk insiders in tourism crisis communication. A new research direction involving the guest–host interaction in tourism crisis management is proposed. This study offers practical implications for promoting effective risk and crisis communication in destinations and incorporating residents in tourism crisis communication and management.

The different effects of crisis communication on different negative emotions induced by tourism crisis news remain under-explored. Drawing on the appraisal tendency framework, this study analyzes and verifies the interactive effects of anger-inducing news with rational crisis communication messages and anxiety-inducing news with humorous messages on tourists’ forgiveness. Furthermore, perceived sincerity mediates the former relationship and destination trust mediates the latter. Our study contributes to the existing research regarding the applicability of humorous crisis communication. The results provide theoretical insight into tourism crisis communication from the perspective of message framing selection and promot the reconstruction and governance of post-crisis destination reputation.

Sustainable travel has been redefined by the pandemic, as tourism destinations continue their struggle to stay resilient and vibrant. The COVID-19 crisis has fueled a lackluster performance and declined tourism growth worldwide while imposing serious threats to employees’ resilience across the globe. However, little is known about the interaction between the global tourism crisis and employees’ resilience in toxic leadership environments. To augment the existing understanding of the way employee resilience unfolds to respond to a crisis under toxic leadership, we draw on predictive research involving the UAE tourism industry. The UAE’s economy was forced to shrink largely due to its long-lasting dependency on inbound tourism. Hence, the study data were collected from 412 employees working in the hospitality and tourism industry in the UAE. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to test the impact of toxic leadership on crisis communication and employees’ resilience in the UAE’s tourism industry. The results showed that both employee resilience and crisis communication are negatively influenced by toxic leadership in COVID-19 tourism. Furthermore, crisis communication positively influences employee resilience, and significantly mediates its relationship with toxic leadership. Interestingly, the findings suggest that the toxic work culture constantly blurs the lines of communication, and, ultimately, the contagious behavior of toxic leaders overwhelms the resilience of employees while they respond to a crisis. The theoretical and practical implications of this research are not confined to toxic leadership; however, the strategies to nurture crisis communication and employee resilience for sustainable tourism are presented in an evolutionary perspective based on the conservation of resources theory.