Crisis Communication Strategies During the Estonian Money Laundering Scandal: A Case Study on Swedbank and Danske Bank

Abstract

This sequential exploratory mixed-method case study assesses Danske Bank’s and Swedbank’s crisis communication strategies in the context of the Estonian Money Laundering Scandal. By utilising the concepts from the new media crisis communication model, situational crisis communication model and integrated crisis mapping model, the research aims to explore whether the clusters of defensive and accommodative crisis strategies differ from each other and which bank was more effective in their choice of crisis communication in terms of achieving favourable sentiment and emotions in the stakeholders. The study achieves this by qualitatively analysing, applying thematic research, press releases of the banks during the 3rd stage of Estonian Money Laundering Scandal and applying Sentiment and Emotion association analysis, enabled by NRC Word Emotion Association Lexicon, on the 957 media articles gathered from international sources in English. The research finds that there are differences between the accommodative and defensive strategies if they are used purely and that holistic strategies yield better results. The case study results suggest that Swedbank opted for a superior set of crisis communication strategies. Their sentiment and emotion associations remained stagnant throughout the third stage, while Danske Bank experienced adverse results due to their incoherent strategy.