When Crisis Victims Are Not Customers: SCCT and the Equifax Data Breach

The Equifax data breach in 2017 provides an interesting case for analyzing effective crisis communication. Unlike other data breaches, victims who were potentially damaged in this breach were not customers of Equifax. Benoit's (1995) Image Restoration Theory (IRT) and Coomb's (2007, 2015) Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT) are used to analyze effective communication strategies in print media. Critical discourse analysis method is used to evaluate quotes from Equifax' spokespersons published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post from September 2017 through July 2019. The choice of well-known business news media outlets and a time frame with immediate temporal proximity to the data breach serves to enhance the reliability and the completeness of the quotes from Equifax spokespersons. Select financial data from Equifax is also analyzed as tangible evidence of the success (or failure) of strategic communication responses in this crisis. Equifax lacked consistency by using deny strategies with diminish or rebuilding strategies and the company failed to use rebuilding strategies throughout the crisis period. Equifax effectively used the adjusting information strategies. Although Equifax did not perform as well as a main competitor, its stock market performance was still higher than the Standard and Poors 500 (S&P 500) market average in the years following the crisis. Keywords: Image Restoration Theory (IRT), Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT), strategic communication response, Equifax, data breach
In September 2017, Equifax publicly announced a data breach within their company that would eventually end up affecting approximately 147 million consumers (Equifax Data Breach Settlement, 2020). Hackers stole Social [...]