Arthur S. Demoulas, who was cast as the villain in the Market Basket saga, made a number of missteps but faced an uphill battle to turn around public opinion in his favor, communication experts say.
"I think Arthur S. was demonized unfairly because he never put a face to this or communicated what his goal was," said Richard Nicolazzo, founder of Nicolazzo & Associates public relations firm. "I think that was probably the weakness in his strategy from a communication perspective. He created a lot of bad will unnecessarily because he wasn't proactive."
And Demoulas didn't help his image when a Channel 7 television reporter unsuccessfully tried to talk to him outside a board meeting last month, Nicolazzo said.
"He was uncomfortable in his skin and didn't seem to care," Nicolazzo said. "He didn't have to account to anyone because he was in control of the company. He came across as not being a man of the people."
Demoulas broke classic crisis management rules, said Daniel Korschun, a Drexel University professor and fellow at the Center for Corporate Reputation Management.
"The classic ways to manage reputation in a crisis is to respond quickly, accept responsibility for anything that's gone wrong and to be transparent about what steps you're going to take to remedy it," Korschun said. "They didn't act quickly at all. They never recognized the concerns of employees and customers and they certainly were not forthcoming on how they were going to fix the crisis."
Improving the public image of Demoulas would have proved nearly impossible in the face of such genuine and authentic support from fans of beloved rival cousin Arthur T. Demoulas, said Helene Solomon of crisis communications firm Solomon McCown & Co.
"Arthur T. let the employees, managers and customers tell his story. Arthur S. didn't have a comparable proxy," Solomon said.
"The undeniable evidence of nonunionized workers and customers going to bat for Arthur T. seemed to dwarf anything the other side would say. Maybe (the Arthur S. side) made a calculation they weren't open to that public debate," she said.
Efforts to reach Arthur S. Dem-oulas, O'Neill and Associates and Kekst and Co., which represented Market Basket's embattled co-CEOs and board, respectively, were unsuccessful yesterday.
Solomon said the deal to sell ultimately may have boosted Arthur S. Demoulas' image.
"At the end of the day, Arthur S. has to get a little bit of credit because they came to terms," Solomon said.
"And a deal of this magnitude under the public microscope, that's pretty significant," she said.
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