The Empire Strikes Back

After years of public criticism, the world's largest company is striking back with a tough new public relations strategy, with lessons for all involved in the critical area of crisis communications.

According to Yahoo News' Emily Kaiser, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is taking the offensive and has started a new campaign to reassure its stakeholders that it is not the evil empire portrayed in the media. Many company officials have started firing off letters to the editor, responding to critical articles and editorial. The company has also changed its advertising campaign to showcase women managers and others who have benefited from working at Wal-Mart.

Over the years, the company has been criticized for low wages, sex discrimination and shipping jobs to foreign sweat shops. Playboy magazine even went so far as to call the company's Bentonville, Arkansas headquarters the "epicenter of retailing's evil empire."

"As we have become the most visible company in the U.S., we have increasingly become a target of criticism and even attacks," Wal-Mart spokesperson Sarah Clark told Kaiser. "We are really in the position of protecting and enhancing an already good reputation, not trying to repair a bad one."

PR experts, however, told Kaiser that Wal-Mart's image improvement efforts aren't enough to shore up its reputation. "For years, they've been a classic example of the wrong way to do PR," Jonathan Bernstein, president of Bernstein Crisis Management, told Kaiser. "They're going to continue to get beat up as long as they basically have a reputation for being unfair or unreasonable to their employees."

Instead, Bernstein says the company should change its policies to improve its image with stakeholders. "All the damage control in the world can't help them unless their policies change," he says.

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