In 2013 the British public was smitten with Costa Coffee.

The UK press did not care for the muffled whimper of independent coffee shops, with the small exception of the entirely indy highstreet of Totnes, Devon which petitioned the behemoth out, but overall the chain was on a positive press high.

By 2014, Costa was lofty, indeed — having been recently acquired by Whitbread — it had an envious market share, approximately 1,750 stores across the country and was aiming for £2bn in sales by 2018.

This was enough to lure Kerry Parkin, founder at The Remarkables (formerly Sway) away from her Australia-based role of global communications director at beverage manufacturer Pernod Ricard to lead Costa’s communications and CSR in 2014.

But, what Parkin didn’t realise was Costa was about to experience what she describes as “tall poppy syndrome”. The media brewed up several negative news articles per day amid Costa’s rapid growth, giving shareholders at the FTSE 100 listed company cause for concern.

The lessons she accumulated from the experience of dampening the press’ enthusiasm for destruction were invaluable, as Parkin had to set about delivering media training and implementing a comms infrastructure across the business. Ultimately, one fatal incident saw Parkin learn the biggest learning of her then 15-year PR career.

The moment

“We didn’t know what the casualties were, but we knew TV news crews were on the way.”

“Like many in-house comms professionals I had dabbled in issues and crisis PR. I’d come back from Australia and accepted the role at Costa, which was the first time I had operated in a business at scale,” says Parkin.

“During my first week, we were front page news of every major national newspaper for a variety of reasons.”

Parkin explains the rapid scale of the business meant decisions from a reputational standpoint had been overlooked; unhappiness around high sugar content and selling coffee products in school vending machines.

The management team were concerned about the negative press, and in her first week, Parkin worked to help the business understand the importance of its reputation.

This meant improving its crisis management and escalation protocol, especially as it had close to 2,000 stores. She also says the media reaction was likely “tall poppy syndrome” as Costa potentially needed to be “knocked down a peg or two” in some publications' eyes.

“Until that time, Costa had been a real darling of the community and a really great British growth story, so there was a level of anxiety around why it was suddenly encountering all these issues. For somebody who had dealt with probably three or four issues a year, to suddenly deal with one a day was a real step change for me in my career.”

“As [Costa] kept growing, it was attracting more issues. I had always dealt with corporate reputational issues, but not human impact intertwined with corporate reputation.”

The lessons were coming in thick and fast for Parkin who had a strong year of bedding in crisis procedures and media training for all of the regional and local store managers.

It was a year later, on Christmas Eve, 2015 that Parkin put this training to the test and experienced the most pivotal moment of her PR career.

“I got a call from the regional director to say there had been an incident [at one of the stores] in a sleepy village in Kent, which had one Costa branch on the corner of a junction in a 30mph zone,” she recalls.

“I thought maybe we’d have to shut a store down because there had been a fire…but I was told a motorist had accelerated at full speed into the storefront. We didn’t know what the casualties were but we knew TV news crews were on the way.”

The incident meant the main road into Westerham, Kent was closed down. Nobody could get to the site and Parkin had to rely on the store team to give information and manage the situation. For the first time in her career, Parkin had to suddenly deal with human impact above corporate reputation and repivot her perspective.

“You have to remove yourself from the actual business section of [the tragedy]. Once you start thinking about the human capital in that equation…it becomes a real challenge because you also feel highly emotional about what's happening and you can't get there to help

She says management of the situation became a “triage” of whether the staff and customers were safe, and leaving the media response till last.

The takeaway

“There’s more demand now than ever before to see the empathetic side of leadership, especially in big corporations.”

“If I’m faced with issues for business, I always think about human impact first and then how that impacts corporate reputation and how the business needs to respond,” she says.

“It was really interesting to learn when a business should comment on something. [In that situation] it was not the responsibility of Costa to talk about, but rather the emergency services. And after that, we became more pragmatic about what we considered true incidents and crises.

“I think it really re-based our evaluation of when we needed to mobilise as a business versus when we needed to take care of day-to-day business. It was a very instructional moment.”

Parkin says that she now uses the incident at Costa as a “case study” on the importance of media training and having a crisis management plan in place, but on a personal level, she now approaches everything with humans at the heart of a response.

“Even if you’re dealing with a [corporate response] like a plant shutting down, you should always think about it through a human impact lens and go from there.

“There’s more demand now than ever before to see the empathetic side of leadership, especially in big corporations. Thinking back to the situation at Costa, we didn’t know an awful lot so you have to try and act in good faith and sensibly say ‘this is clearly terrible, it’s clearly high impact, let's try and say as little as possible.’

“But some businesses are more reluctant to go there, and quickly, and in the long-term their reputation takes a bigger hit.”

At Parkin’s request, we would like to signpost anyone affected by this story to contact Cruse Bereavement Support