Stopping the Self-Storage Crime Madness

November 19th, 2007

Check out an excerpt from the Mini-Storage Messenger Xtra and then let’s consider the implications…The article by David Lucas reads:
The tragic murder of a self-storage manager during an armed robbery in Houston, Texas, in September shocked the industry. Unfortunately, robberies, assaults, and other crimes do occur at self-storage facilities, although, according to an industry expert, they are rare.

“It’s so rare that if we have an armed robbery, we don’t really address it much,” says Tom Litton, president of Lodi, Calif.-based Litton Property Management. “As an industry, we don’t do a lot of training on how to handle an armed robbery.”

Shaken by the violence at the Texas facility, some self-storage operations are putting personal safety policies in place and providing training on how to behave during robberies and other potentially dangerous activities.

The article goes on to offer some general guidelines on how to handle yourself during potentially violent encounters. But have you considered the public relations implications and guidelines? I submit to you that the industry, through its national and state organizations, needs to get proactive about counteracting all the negative media we see about crime in self-storage. Rare as it may be, that’s not the message consumers are getting.

The industry needs is own “McGruff” style branding campaign to get the message of safety and security out to the market. We’ve already lost ground to the ongoing media headlines and we’ve already seen the government amping up its spotlight on the industry. We can’t just sit still and fail to communicate how much more sophisticated our technology and security is today.

Let’s get busy.

Entry Filed under: Crisis Communications