Gap: Refusing to be the Mattel du Jour

Muckraking and flacking are close cousins, and the Gap/child-labor story has provided avid spin-watchers with excellent examples of both.

The coverage was triggered over the weekend by an Observer story from Dan McDougall, who not only followed good journalistic practices by making sure the company got to respond, but also apparently followed good capitalist practices by selling a more inflammatory version of the story to the Sunday tabloid News of the World.

What made McDougall's trigger stories such fine muckraking specimens?

1. Both used inflammatory headline language

"Indian 'slave' children found making low-cost clothes destined for Gap"

"Gap Slave Kids: EXPOSED: 10-year-old UNPAID workers who help clothing giants make billions"

2. NOTW used compelling images. A picture of a beleaguered child is worth a thousand column inches.

3. Both connected the problem to a global brand. The existence of a sweatshop becomes exponentially more interesting when it's in support of a huge, marketing-driven American corporation.

4. Both connected the global brand to its celebrity endorsers. If the corporate brand name didn't get your attention, how do names like Madonna, Lenny Kravitz, Bono or Sarah Jessica Parker work for you?

5. Both popped on the weekend. Weekends are slow on general news, and completely dry of business news. Thus, there's little competition out there. And when the same story comes from two papers as different as the Observer and NOTW, everybody feels inclined to follow.

Those five elements made it a big, big story worldwide, despite the fact that little attention is usually given to better-reported pieces on social injustices that are equally or more disturbing.

Gap, for its part, showed impressive capability, demonstrating healthy doses of the three most critical ingredients for effective crisis management -- speed, principle and decisive framing.

Speed. Because the Gap flacks were able to provide McDougall -- and then everybody else --with a quality response, they ensured simultaneous resolution of the conflict raised by the report, instead of provoking a second big round of coverage by responding later

Principle. Every good crisis management repsonse is built on the foundation of a solid, concrete, clearly articulated statement of principle. Gap's is simple -- "We will not tolerate child labor from our suppliers."

Decisive framing. Because the company's response gave reasonable evidence that Gap was taking action to both rectify the specific situation and prevent future incidents, it did indeed provide a logical sense of resolution within the initial wave of reports. Just as important, the actions that Gap announced clearly framed the situation as an independent supplier violating its agreement with the company. The "zero-tolerance" language distances Gap from culpability by implicitly putting the company in the enforcer's role.

Thus, while the original story is still bouncing around the global echo chamber, Gap has effectively taken the air out of the ball. CNBC and other stock-centric media have already congratulated the company for superior bullet-dodging, many of the stories have shifted focus onto the Indian government's battle with local activists, and the story fell off the Google News business page early yesterday.

Is it over?

Unless another incident rears its head some time soon, the story will slowly fade away over the next 48 hours. If another one does occur, then the company must respond with the same speed, but bolder actions, such as calling on the Indian government to crack down on local suppliers.

The flacks at Gap surely know that the murky world of global production stands as the company's most likely provider of future crisis, and they would be smart to start playing offense on this issue on a full-time basis.