The Client
Founded over 50 years ago, our client is an international fast-food chain operating in more than 100 countries. This company is on a mission to provide customers with fast, healthy, made-to-order meals.
The Challenge
The client was concerned that a specific media outlet, and journalist writing for that outlet, were disproportionately publishing negative coverage about them compared to their competitors.
Why This Was a Concern
- Reputation Management Risks: Negative narratives, especially when repeated by influential journalists, can become self-reinforcing and shape broader industry sentiment.
- Competitive Disadvantage: If competitors were receiving more neutral or positive coverage from the same journalist or outlet, it could create an uneven playing field in public perception, potentially affecting consumer behavior, investor sentiment, and industry partnerships.
The Communications team needed an objective, data-driven media analysis to assess whether they were being unfairly targeted. Validating this concern would then would then allow them to develop an appropriate media strategy to proactively manage any reputational risks.
Our Solution
Because PublicRelay believes in providing insights that are strategically aligned with our clients’ specific business goals, we designed a custom media analysis to understand the reality of coverage from the outlet and author in question. This analysis:
- Tracked the volume, tone, total social shares, and potential impressions of our client’s mentions in the outlet over the course of the previous 3 years and compared that coverage to 10 of their top competitors.
- In that same reporting window, we dug further into the outlet and journalist’s coverage of our client regarding key reputational issues such as Franchise Complaints, Corporate Issues, and Physical Harm.
We focused on these specific elements — volume, tone, social shares, and key issue tracking — to provide a comprehensive, data-backed understanding of their media coverage by this outlet and author. By comparing coverage across competitors and analyzing issue-specific narratives, we ensured the client could differentiate between perception and reality.
Results
Our analysis provided the client with a clear, comparative view of their media presence within the outlet in question. Key findings included:
- The media outlet covered one competitor 15X more than our client over the past three years. This competitor’s coverage also far outweighed all other competitors tracked in this analysis. However, this competitor’s coverage was primarily focused on product quality issues (41% of its mentions), with a quarter of mentions being negative.
- Business strategy, a core reputational driver, dominated our client’s coverage, comprising 61% of total mentions. The author in question published 20 articles about the company, with 19 focusing on business strategy. While 37% of these contained negative mentions, the majority of more recent critical stories centered on franchisee complaints about promotions and supply chain changes, rather than consumer-facing issues.
- Only 13% of our client’s coverage focused on reputational risks such as safety, customer complaints, or corporate ethics. This indicated that while there was critical reporting, it was more focused on internal business operations rather than public-facing risks.
Our findings confirmed that while the journalist and outlet as a whole covered our client frequently, there was no clear evidence of unfair targeting. Instead, the analysis showed that the author’s focus on corporate strategy rather than consumer-facing concerns reduced the overall reputational risk.
By leveraging data to replace assumption with objective analysis, the client was able to make a confident, strategic decision on how to engage with this media outlet and journalist moving forward. With this insight, the communications team refined their media strategy:
- Rather than prioritizing damage control, they focused on proactive engagement.
- They provided the journalist with additional context on corporate decisions to help shape future coverage.
- They also adjusted their messaging strategy to better differentiate themselves from competitors in the outlet’s reporting.
