Crisis communication is one of the most important arms of any business plan – but it can often be wrongly overlooked.
Less than half (49%) of U.S. businesses have a formal crisis communication plan in place. You might not think you need a plan, or it might be low on your priority list.
However, when a crisis hits, the effectiveness of your crisis communication could be the difference between your businesses overcoming a public relations disaster and more lasting, dire consequences.
This guide looks at what brands and businesses need to consider when creating the comms around their crisis management process.
We're not talking about crisis management here. Crisis communications is a subset of that. This is about how a crisis communications team can swiftly protect a company's reputation by correctly spreading the right information.
Crisis Communication Examples
There are plenty of groups, businesses, and governments that need effective crisis communication. This guide focuses on PR crises – the sort where a brand's reputation is at risk due to a scandal or high-profile problem.
Below are some examples for brand and business crises that require transparent communication:
Faulty Products & Recalls – For most businesses, the big worry is they have to recall a faulty product that costs millions of dollars and ruins their reputation forever. This happened to Gerber in 2023 when they had to recall baby food from stores across the U.S. The company faced a big challenge to protect its brand reputation in the midst of the crisis, and needed a real communication plan to save face.
Bad Messaging – This can be easily rectified if done right. A brand might produce communications that attract criticism. If this wasn't intended, then proactive communication is needed to address the errors and correct the record.
Employee Scandal – A business cannot predict what its employees might do, and scandals that arise from workers can have a serious effect on a business. Being able to properly communicate how you have dealt with an employee scandal is vital.
Accidental Association – Businesses can sometimes be accidentally associated with controversy. Drinks supplier Fevertree suffered online abuse in 2024 when seeming to sponsor the Republican National Convention. The company went into crisis communication mode to explain it was a supplier for the venue, not the party.
Political Alignment – Indeed, the Fevertree crisis was a perfect example of a brand being seen as being politically aligned. This can cause polarization of a target audience, even if the alignment is wholly accidental. Musicians, for example, often try to distance themselves from politicians who use their songs.
Influencer Crises – Much like employee scandals, it's hard for brands to control influencers. You may have influencer agreements or celebrity endorsements that include a behavioral policy. However, if an influencer/celeb does something that negatively affects your brand – such as Kanye West and Adidas – then you need to enter crisis mode and effectively communicate your way out of the hole.
In This Guide
What is Crisis Communication?
Developing a Crisis Communication Plan
Pre-Crisis Preparedness
Response to an Active Crisis
Communication During Crisis
Post-Crisis Analysis and Recovery
Case Studies and Examples
Tools and Technologies in Crisis Communication
>> Refer to the Cision Crisis Communications Toolkit.
What is Crisis Communication?
Crisis communication is a subset of crisis management that focuses on the flow of information during a challenging situation. In public relations and marketing, crisis communication refers to dealing with issues that could potentially harm an organization's reputation.
You might issue your communications through various means, such as social media, traditional media interviews, press releases, and website statements. In instances surrounding financial crises, a company may need to issue a statement to a stock exchange.
Effective crisis communication increases transparency, builds trust, and ultimately preserves your organization's reputation.
There are many ways to do it right, but the correct response to a crisis situation is to:
Be timely and accurate when spreading information
Be consistent and clear in all messaging
Be compassionate and display an empathetic tone
Difference Between Crisis Communication and Crisis Management
Before we go any further, let's quickly focus on crisis communication and crisis management. They are different, even though they are often used interchangeably.
Crisis communication primarily deals with the flow of information and focuses on preserving an organization's reputation. It is a subset of the crisis management process, which is the overall strategy to handle a crisis, from addressing issues through to mitigation and resolution, and eventually planning for the next crisis.
While crisis management focuses on strategic actions to handle the crisis, crisis communication deals with conveying the right messages about these actions to stakeholders.
Developing a Crisis Communication Plan
The reputational risk that comes with badly-handled crisis management plans is severe. Therefore, as part of an overall strategy to tackle crises, it's important to create a robust crisis communication strategy.
At its core, your plan outlines the strategic steps, key messages, and communication channels that will be employed to inform internal and external stakeholders of what's going on.
The four main components to your plan should be:
Crisis definition: Identify what constitutes a crisis for your organization. Is it a few bad reviews on a highly-rated review site? Or is it a celebrity endorsement agreement that turns sour? Understanding what triggers a crisis response ensures a timely and appropriate reaction.
Roles and responsibilities: Assign specific roles and responsibilities to your crisis management team. This will probably involve your head of communications and other senior employees. This will allow for quick decision-making and efficient execution during a crisis.
Key messages: Develop pre-approved messages that are clear, accurate, and empathetic. You might take the approach not to say anything other than a brief statement. You might choose to go big when a crisis arises and get in front of it. These messages should address your organization's stance, next steps, and expectations for resolution.
Approval process: Streamline the process for reviewing and approving messages before they're released to prevent miscommunication and confusion. You can use software for preparing ahead, such as Brandwatch for planning social messaging in a crisis, or CisionOne for spreading press releases to appropriate media outlets.
Stakeholder Identification
The next part of your plan is to identify key internal and external stakeholders who need to be aware of your crisis.
Say, for example, a sports team has a star player who directly criticizes the team's main sponsor. Your crisis communication team needs to know who to speak to within that sponsor's organization to ensure they are aware you are dealing with the problem.
Internal stakeholders typically include employees, management, and other members of the organization, while external stakeholders can range from customers, investors, and partners to the media and public.
Keep a list – whether it's on a Google spreadsheet or on a crisis management platform – and be sure to refer to it when you need it.
Communication Channels and Templates
Finally, it's worth preparing for a crisis by establishing the correct channels and templates to help you act fast.
Consider what channels you'll use to send messages. This could be everything from email and website statements, to press releases, news conferences, or simply statements on social media.
Whichever you choose, it's important to set expectations of what you would communicate to the outside world, and how.
In our example of the sports team with its rebel superstar, it might be that the coach is required to hold a press conference to alleviate concerns and smooth over the relationship with the sponsor.
Pre-Crisis Preparedness
The best way to handle problems when a crisis occurs is to be ready for it – and, thankfully, preparing for public relations disasters doesn't have to be difficult. It simply requires a bit of thinking into how you deploy your communication.
Your crisis communication plan is your protection against reactionary actions. It helps you anticipate what your crisis management team will need to say when issues arise.
Part of this preparedness is to conduct risk assessments and run training exercises, so employees know what to do and when.
Here's a quick look at both of these factors:
Risk Assessment and Prevention
Crisis response is a lot easier if you know what issues may arise ahead of time. Conducting a thorough risk assessment will help you pinpoint potential threats and vulnerabilities in your current systems and processes.
You can do this by simply creating a shareable document that details each corner of your business.
Look at things like:
Employees
Industry Reputation
Brand Strength
Financial State
Location
Stakeholder Partnerships
Celebrity/Sponsorship Agreements
Identify potential risks from each of these areas of your business, and how this could impact your reputation. From here, you can plan your public responses to issues as they arise.
>> Want more help? Check out the Crisis Comms Checklist and start to build your plan today.
Training and Simulation
Effective pre-crisis preparedness also requires training. You can plan all you like for a crisis but when it arises, there's no guarantee you'll deliver on your plan.
Training for crisis scenarios helps insure against failures in the moment. This could be as simple as researching communication best practices, or hosting workshops for everyone in an organization.
Don't be scared to run simulations either. Businesses are required to practice fire drills so employees know where to go in the case of an emergency. Well, why not do the same with a simulated comms crisis?
You can assess employee communication during crisis situations and understand if a quick response at a moment's notice is achievable.
Response to an Active Crisis
So, you have your crisis communication plan and have simulated a few instances where employees need to respond to problems. That's the pre-crisis phase complete.
Hopefully, you never have to use the plan.
Now it's time to look at what happens if you do need to enact your communication plan.
An active crisis needs a template response so everyone knows what's happening and when. The people allocated to the response must use clear, concise language when disseminating information.
For example, your first acts may be to:
Inform all key stakeholders of the situation
Issue a brief statement acknowledging the issue
Allocate responsibilities to those in the crisis management team
Your immediate response doesn't necessarily need to resolve the crisis. After all, proper crisis communication is about swiftly acknowledging problems, explaining the situation, and then moving forward.
In many instances it might not even be your team that needs to handle the actual crisis, only the communications fallout from it.
Communication During Crisis
Indeed, remember that this guide is about crisis communications, not crisis resolution. There's naturally a lot of crossover to this, but you might not be responsible for deal with the core problem.
For example, when Tesla recalled its Cybertrucks for a fourth time in 2024 over product malfunctions, the communications team had no responsibility to fix the actual issues. Their job was to ensure the media – and therefore the public – was fully informed of the problem and how the company’s service team would fix it.
Doing crisis communications is a lot simpler when you have a template to follow, as we have discussed above. Your initial response should keep stakeholders calm to start, but you'll need to provide further communications until the issue is resolved.
So, what are these further communications? Let's take a look:
Deliver Real-Time Updates and Transparency
Real-time updates and transparent communication is incredibly useful during a brand crisis. Not only does it show you are on top of the issue, but it can prevent further questions being asked.
In effect, you control the narrative.
To do this, your team needs to have up-to-date information of how your organization is handling the crisis. You therefore need a smooth channel of communication between the problem fixers and the comms team.
Assuming you have that, your team can confidently send out accurate messages and, as we said, control the narrative.
Use Social Media Effectively
Part of controlling the narrative is to use social media as part of a proper crisis communication effort. Social media is effective for spreading information but also attracts disinformation from other users, who may comment on your posts.
It's therefore crucial that you are clear in your social media messaging and leave no room for ambiguity.
For example, you might want to provide an update on an escalating crisis and explain that your product is being recalled but is not harmful for users. A clear statement here, perhaps with links back to your website, is what's required.
You can't manage how people interact on social media but you can present your facts correctly and direct them away from a platform, to where more information is present.
Use Quotes in Press Releases
Issuing press releases during crises is effectively a statement update that the media can use to help write or broadcast a story. It's hard to know how the media will interpret your news release.
The use of quotes is a great way to focus the issue and ensure your facts come across correctly.
A smart strategy is therefore to allocate a spokesperson to oversee the crisis response strategy and document the facts in quotes. It's a lot harder to distort facts that are attributed to a real person.
Prepare Your Communications Exit
Finally, your crisis management plan requires some thinking of how a brand emerges from the problem. Communicating this is difficult. If your company or brand was involved in something where the people affected were seriously hurt or even died, then your communications need to be sympathetic and serious.
Equally, your crisis response may have succeeded in alleviating concerns and even flipped the narrative to show how much your company is working to resolve the issue – such as in the Tylenol crisis response.
You might emerge from the problem with a strengthened brand reputation.
Whatever the crisis, be ready to 'wrap up' your communications and get back to the day-to-day work.
Post-Crisis Analysis and Recovery
There are a lot of crisis management strategies and not all are effective. Once a problem has been resolved, your crisis communications team should be tasked with analyzing their performance.
This isn't about looking at the impact of the actual crisis. Instead, we're focusing on the communications around it, and how your team handled it.
Examining Crisis Impact
The first step in the post-crisis analysis is to understand the extent of the crisis. How bad was it? Who did it affect, and what are the consequences?
A brand might have protected its reputation by walking away from a celebrity endorsement after the celebrity committed an offense. This is probably the smart thing to do. But what if a product malfunction was responsible for someone's death? The brand impact here could be devastating.
It's important, then, to look at data pulled from your crisis communication actions. How were your press releases, updates, and social media posts received? What was the sentiment around this messaging? Was it helpful or counterproductive?
Be prepared to look deep into the data using software such as Brandwatch, Mention, or CisionOne to discover the true impact of your crisis communications plan.
Future Preparedness
The reason you need to analyze your data is to bullet-proof all future crisis communication plans.
Remember when you developed your original plan, you looked at how competitors handled their crises? Well, now you have your own data to work from.
Post-crisis communication audits should look at the following factors and consider what changes or upgrades are needed:
Roles and responsibilities: Did those who were allocated responsibility for enacting the crisis communication plan do a good job? If not, why not?
Contact information: Was your directory of internal and external stakeholders correct? Did you speak to the right people in your emergency response, and did you collaborate with the correct people during and after the crisis?
Escalation procedures: What happened when the problems got worse? Were you able to properly escalate your crisis communications plan and broaden its impact to meet the scale of the issue?
Training and simulations: How was your employee communication throughout the procedure? Were employees fully trained and prepared? Or do you need to run more simulations for when a crisis occurs?
Being able to assess your response and understand its failings will help you develop a more comprehensive crisis communication plan in the future.
Case Studies and Examples
Crises in business happen all the time. Whether they be public relations disasters that take time to resolve, or small brand issues that can be smoothed over if you act quickly - no two crises are the same.
Below are three of the most famous instances of when a crisis occurred and how the communications team acted as part of the overall response.
Notable Crisis Communication Scenarios
Johnson & Johnson's Tylenol Crisis (1982): Johnson & Johnson immediately responded to the tampering of its products by recalling all Tylenol products from the market and launching an extensive public awareness campaign.
Johnson & Johnson's response was swift, transparent, and proactive. The company didn't hide. It understood the possible risks associated with such an alarming crisis but was able to respond quickly.
Not only was it effective during the height of the scandal, but its follow up crisis messages helped it regain the public's trust and establish a standard for future crisis communication efforts.
BP's Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill (2010): BP faced major backlash after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, one of the largest environmental disasters in history.
Initially, BP's response was ineffective due to a lack of transparency and accountability. However, they eventually accepted responsibility for the spill and took steps to remediate the damage.
BP implemented new safety measures and was vocal in its post-crisis communication.
Its response serves as a cautionary tale in crisis communication management.
Domino's Pizza YouTube Crisis (2009): A video surfaced on YouTube showing Domino's employees tampering with food.
Back in 2009, this was a big scandal. Today, these sorts of viral videos can cause public relations problems but are usually swiftly dealt with.
If you encounter such an instance, do what Domino's did. The CEO quickly issued an apology video and ensured that the workers involved were terminated. This response helped to immediately reestablish trust in the brand, demonstrating the power of prompt and sincere communication.
Tools and Technologies in Crisis Communication
Now let's look at the software available to managers and employees responsible for overseeing a crisis communication plan. The typical crisis situation for a brand is a problem that develops online or in traditional media. It's therefore worth using a platform that can oversee a universal response to an issue.
Software Solutions
Being able to deploy a crisis communication plan effectively requires a platform that everyone can work from. In the traditional media landscape, software like CisionOne is ideal for monitoring TV, newspaper, radio, podcast, and online brand mentions.
You can spot crises before they emerge and use the tool's networking database to send accurate, timely messages to relevant outlets.
Meanwhile, software like Brandwatch is ideal for those that include social media in their crisis management plan. Here, you can listen in to conversations and understand user sentiment towards your brand before, during, and after a crisis.
See what messages work for competitors when they have problems, and develop a more robust crisis management plan that reduces reputational risk on social media.
Whichever software you choose, the point is to keep everything and everyone in the same place. You can create your crisis communication strategy, share it with those who need to know, and enact it when the time comes. You can then pull in real-time data to guide you through your crisis communication and analyze everything at the end to help build a better strategy for next time.
The Last Word on Crisis Communication
Potential crises in business emerge all the time. It's the job of a crisis communication team to handle how a problem is perceived across the wider public, so the brand avoids being harmed.
When we talk about a crisis situation, it's not about dealing with natural disasters or health pandemics. We're largely talking about public relations problems where a business needs to act quickly to protect its reputation.
This spans everything from influencer controversies and bad social media campaigns, to malfunctioning products.
Use our above guide to build a robust communications plan that will aid your overall crisis management effort. Just one comprehensive document can be enough to outline who does what when a crisis strikes, and how to implement the correct comms.
When you're ready, why not explore the Crisis Communications Toolkit available at Cision?
