Brands can never be completely sure of avoiding crisis situations. There are too many variables. Human error, fallibility, corruption, ambition and rivalries can cause considerable damage to a brand’s reputation and sometimes no amount of procedure can prevent this from happening. But the brand can control its response to the evolving situation. It can make [...]

You would think that common sense and decency would kick in here and that no brand would even dream of using a national disaster or traumatic event of any kind to promote its product – especially if said product was completely useless when it comes to responding to the problem at hand. However, you would [...]

This month we bring you a selection of international failure. One thing that we try to emphasis in our social media crisis training is that brands cannot isolate offline events from spreading to the virtual realm. It just takes one funny picture, one careless sentence in an interview or one bad business decision – soon [...]

Once a brand has made a very public error of judgement there’s no way back. It happened, people noticed. The brand has to understand why people were offended, apologise, learn from the mistake and move on. As we saw in January, some brands resort to denial (by, for example, deleting all critical comments from their [...]

I’ve had a few very interesting meetings recently with a number of early-stage businesses, operating in fast-growth markets. The really positive thing for me is that they all really believe in the value of PR, and in what PR can do for early-stage or start-up businesses. PR can support fast growth businesses   You read [...]