The SZA Incident
In April, a Sephora employee in Calabasas, Calif., made three serious mistakes that landed her a spot at the “Notorious” retail store.
First, she called for a security check of an innocent shopper, in an apparent racial profiling act. Second, she didn’t recognize the shopper as a celebrity — a platinum-list record star with 2.7 million Twitter followers who had appeared in promotions for one of the hottest labels in the store, Rihanna’s Fenty. Third, the celebrity she pursues — singer-songwriter SZA — is a former Sephora employee. SZA knew that treating her clients like this was not okay, and she let the world know what was going on.
Now, Sephora executives face the risk of making mistakes in what they call the SZA incident. They are closing stores, but only for an hour at the start of the day on June 5th, and then reopen as usual. Instead of announcing action on SZA’s analysis, they stuck to a marketing plan they had developed months before the incident.
The company won points on social media for appearing to be taking forceful action after an embarrassing instance of racial profiling. It then lost those points by maintaining the closings and workshops had been planned long before the SZA tweet, and for only devoting one hour to the training.
Ironically, the SZA incident came as Sephora was gearing up to launch a marketing campaign highlighting its strategy to become an all-inclusive cosmetics retailer that sells brands for all skin tones, ages, genders and personal preferences. The company said the June 5 store closures and employee workshops were planned long before the SZA event as part of the “We Belong to Good Things” campaign.
Sephora acknowledged in its statement that SZA’s tweet “really reinforces why belonging is more important now than ever.” By emphasizing that inclusivity training is part of a long-planned marketing campaign, Sephora is missing an opportunity to demonstrate that it can pivot and act decisively when it needs to address racial bias.
I believe setting aside time for diversity training does address the perception issues associated with bias events. Employees need to know this is unacceptable, organizations take this very seriously, and the public needs to know that organizations take it seriously. Closing stores to hold training workshops or requiring employees to attend training shows that.
In general, Sephora’s crisis management was ok. Sephora’s quick response and planning is a great testament to good crisis management. They publicly corrected their mistakes and apologized promptly. Plus, their taking action and having their employees trained on diversity really shows they’re working on a problem. But they could of done better, people can barely notice the store is really shutdown for the training and not sure if they are really training or not.
But they are saying the training event is not responding any specific event which I believe it’s not true. The Sza incident did not occur in isolation. It gained traction online in part because of her existing social following. I believe that is the reason why Sephora is expediting the campaign and training session. But this somehow look bad for all the audience as they will think they are not admitting their own mistake and still try to draw the attention out of the SZA tweet incident.
A solid crisis management plan can prevent and limit the impact of these happenings. No matter the industry, your company is likely to face a social media crisis at some point. It may come in the form of incessant customer Tweets over a service outage, or it could be a poorly timed or insensitive post from your brand.
