Brands can find themselves in crisis mode at a moment’s notice
Successfully emerging from a crisis with your reputation intact is something even the biggest brands struggle to achieve.
Modern-day brand crises can occur at any time. Lightning-fast information flows on social media and online news sites exacerbate issues, as brands often struggle to control the narrative when a crisis hits.
The cure is to be proactive and create a strategy to spot and resolve crises before they become overwhelming.
Creating a crisis communication strategy means you’re insulated from the worst aspects of a reputational crisis and are prepared to act. This article provides a comprehensive guide on how to develop and execute effective crisis communication strategies to protect your organization’s reputation and maintain public trust.
In this guide:
Understanding crisis communication
When we talk about crisis communication, we’re focusing on what happens when brands suffer a reputational crisis. This could come from a faulty product, a badly-executed marketing strategy, perhaps even a rogue employee.
Crisis communication is about how a brand publicly responds to a problem. It encompasses the preparation and implementation stages, and also considers the post-crisis learning phase.
It involves clear, honest, and timely exchanges of information with various stakeholders – including employees, the media, customers, and the broader public. Whether a crisis occurs, the aim is to communicate effectively and minimize negative impacts.
At its core, crisis communication is about:
- Timely and accurate communication: Delivering the right information at the right moment, which helps prevent rumors and misinformation from spreading.
- Transparent approach: Maintaining openness builds trust and credibility, even when circumstances are challenging.
- Consistent messaging: Providing uniform messages across all channels to ensure that every stakeholder receives the same information, reducing confusion.
- Preparedness: Creating a well-drafted crisis communication plan and clear identification of potential crises to ensure that your team is ready to act quickly.
Key components of effective crisis communication
A proactive crisis communication plan involves four core areas: planning, team building, implementation plan, and deployment. The first three areas focus on creating a framework so the fourth point – deployment – can unfold as smoothly as possible.
1. Proactive crisis planning
You can’t effectively address a crisis and expect to emerge with your brand reputation intact without a plan to follow. Crises often cause chaos, so it’s imperative you create a template to streamline your actions.
Your plan should include:
- A comprehensive risk assessment: Evaluate internal and external factors that could trigger a crisis. Consider all types of crises – from data breaches to employee scandals and consumer dissatisfaction – and estimate their potential negative impact. Then conduct an audit of your current systems and processes, and ascertain where you need to make improvements.
- Detailed scenario plans: Develop potential scenarios, including best-case, worst-case, and most-likely outcomes for each possible crisis. This planning helps in crafting appropriate responses.
- Regular training sessions: Commit to regular drills and workshops across your company. Your crisis management team should lead on this and guide everyone in what to do when an issue strikes. Educate employees on how to respond quickly, effectively, and responsibly.
- Simulate crises: Test your crisis management plan through simulations to ensure key team members can act quickly when needed.
Using these proactive measures, organizations can solidify their crisis communication strategies, ensuring that they’re not caught off guard when a crisis occurs.
2. Building a dedicated crisis management team
Your crisis management plan is only as good as those trusted to implement it. A crisis management team is your core set of stakeholders who oversee the strategy and deliver results. This team should include individuals with expertise in crisis communication strategies, risk assessment, strategic communication, and public relations. You might choose to employ external specialists to oversee a particular aspect of a crisis plan, or act as a chair to monitor the entire process.
Required roles in a crisis management team include:
- Crisis communicator: Your primary spokesperson who is the face of the brand during a crisis. They need to be well briefed and exceptionally calm under pressure when delivering accurate information in public.
- Resolution implementer: A crisis needs resolution, not just communications management. Your resolution implementer needs to work alongside the comms team and feed accurate information that can then be disseminated when required.
- Communication coordinators: Coordinators need to ensure all messages are clear, concise, and consistent across all channels. They need to work alongside the resolution implementer.
- Risk assessment experts: Someone must monitor emerging trends and potential threats, in case a crisis grows or moves. This is particularly pertinent when a brand is suffering a PR crisis and news stories are emerging beyond their control.
- Social media managers: Ideally a group of managers oversee communication on platforms like X, Facebook, and LinkedIn to address public concerns in real time. Social media is usually where brands first spot crises and can address them before they become overwhelming.
Creating your crisis management team might not take long. Often it’s about allocating responsibilities to employees and stakeholders who are already working for the brand.
However, you still need to ensure those you elect to specific roles within the team have the skills required to carry out their duties. Ensure you choose experienced team members who have gone through brand crises before. Create a system where members can collaborate during the strategy stage. This builds trust that is invaluable when you need a tight group during the crisis.
Finally, make sure your elected members have the power to enact their roles within the crisis strategy. Whoever is tasked with monitoring social media, for example, needs access to your brand’s social media monitoring tool.
3. Creating an actionable crisis communication plan
Your crisis plan needs to be realistic and provide guidance on how it will unfold in the moment. Remember, the aim is to create a smooth process that people can follow, to reduce stress, inefficiency, and mixed messaging that can make a PR crisis worse.
You effectively need a playbook. Start with creating lists of internal and external contacts who need to be kept in the loop. Some of these will be company stakeholders, while you’ll also need a press list.
From there, develop pre-drafted messages that act as placeholders when a crisis hits. These can be templates that other members of your team can use. Ensure they’re tailored to different crises. This includes social media statements, press releases, and company statements on owned media.
Then create an approval process so people know exactly who is in charge of what. The chain of command is imperative if you’re going to achieve full oversight of a communications strategy and pull your brand out of a crisis. It also includes a channel strategy, where you allocate responsibility for messaging on specific channels (social media, owned media, speaking to the press) to specific people.
4. Deploying clear and transparent communication
You might not need to activate your crisis communication strategy for years but, when a problem hits, you need to be ready. Enacting the plan should be easy if you follow the steps you outlined.
You’ll probably first hear of a reputational crisis when monitoring the media. You might spot a negative trend of social media comments about a new product launch, or a journalist might break an employee scandal within your company.
Whatever the crisis, your monitoring tool will flag the issue. From there, it’s time to implement your strategy.
Share accurate information with your crisis team and get ready to deploy internal and external messages. Publish your pre-prepared statements that acknowledge the issue, take responsibility for the problem, and explain that you’re investigating. You need to show you’re being proactive.
Maintain consistency and ensure all communication channels – internal memos, social media posts, press releases, and email updates – deliver the same message. This builds trust among key stakeholders.
Then, while you investigate the crisis, provide regular, consistent updates to calm nerves and maintain control of the narrative, even if all the details are not yet available.
Work with journalists and reporters to keep them onside, monitor social media to understand where the crisis narrative is headed, and stick to your plan. Liaise with the resolution implementer so you know the current status of the issue, and when to send out updates.
Evaluating crisis outcomes and making improvements
After the immediate crisis has been managed, it’s vital to evaluate your response and identify opportunities for improvement. After all, you’ve now got a real-life template to follow and improve. Use your crisis experience to build a better, more resilient plan for next time.
To do this, start by forming a post-crisis analysis. Gather your team together for subjective accounts on the successes and failures of your response. Where do you need to improve? What would you implement again? Do you need extra help in certain areas?
Next, dig into the data collected from your crisis response. Look at internal and external feedback. Assess your brand’s reputation and health before, during and after the crisis. Gauge how audiences feel about you now.
Use this primary data alongside your team’s anecdotal data to build a post-crisis report. Include suggestions for change and improvements. Then, implement those changes in your strategy and build an enhanced plan for next time.
Crisis communication example
The consumer-rewards app, Fetch Rewards, is focused on rewarding consumers for their purchases every time they snap a photo of their receipt or submit it electronically. And Fetch goes beyond a basic rewards system by incorporating engaging features such as an in-app leaderboard and other perks, adding a layer of excitement and enjoyment to the user journey.
Fetch recently rolled out a new social feature that allowed users to connect with friends and compete in friendly competition through an in-app leaderboard. However, the new feature received mixed reviews from users, with some people sharing online that they disliked it and others stating that the new app layout was confusing.
By analyzing online conversations in real time, the Fetch research team gained instant insights into the app’s user experiences. That context helped the team understand how the leaderboard feature impacts overall brand perception.
The team dug a little deeper and found that despite the negative spike in conversation about the new feature, those conversations represented just a fraction of the total Fetch Rewards conversation. There was no need for a full-blown crisis response. The team confidently managed the minor crisis and learned from consumers to inform their future strategy.
Using Brandwatch to tackle crisis communication
Effective crisis communication and management requires data and a robust strategy. Brandwatch offers a suite of solutions that empower organizations to monitor, analyze, and respond to crises promptly.
Combining Media Intelligence and Consumer Research gives companies a full understanding of their brand health. Add Brandwatch’s Social Media Management suite to this mix and you can track every brand mention on sites like Facebook, X, and Instagram, and spot a crisis quickly.
Use the suite to look at historical data and build your strategy from the ground up. Establish media monitoring systems that, in times of crisis, allow you to make well-informed decisions that can significantly influence outcomes.
Brandwatch gives you the tools to oversee a crisis response and implement each step of your strategy. You can keep abreast of moving news cycles in real time and, once a crisis is over, use data to refine your plan for next time.
The future of crisis communication in 2025
2025 is a big year for crisis communication and companies figure out how artificial intelligence can aid their planning, responses, and post-crisis reflections.
Tools like Brandwatch use AI to help brands develop their crisis responses and analyze data in real time. Brandwatch users have been able to lean on learning models since 2008, when it was possible to spot nuances in tone across different languages.
These days, AI helps with everything from strategic planning to creating automated responses, which can be crucial when dealing with fast-flowing crises.
Meanwhile, digital transparency has become a core aspect of crisis communication. Brands cannot simply post a statement on their website or call a journalist for a quote, and hope the crisis will blow over. Instead, a structured approach to digital comms – from liaising with online publications and news sites, to managing social media conversations – is vital.
Indeed, the focus in 2025 is on holistic reputation management that covers all interaction points across the media. A combined tool like Brandwatch and CisionOne can help deliver a comprehensive approach to crisis planning and implementation, where you can protect your brand reputation through proactive responses within the media and online.
Remember, your crisis communication strategy must evolve to suit the media landscape. Organizations that integrate technological advancements and prioritize digital transparency are better positioned to navigate future crisis situations effectively.
If you’d like to know more about how Brandwatch can help, request a demo today and speak to one of our experts. Your journey to effective crisis management planning starts here.
