Crisis communication: what to do when something goes wrong

Crisis communication is how a company talks to customers, journalists, employees and partners when something happens that could damage its reputation: a faulty product, a mistake in an ad, a service outage, a misguided statement. Crisis management is the whole job: understanding the facts, solving the problem and communicating. The golden rule: facts first, then words, and words that are short, sincere and come with a concrete remedy.

What a communication crisis is

Sooner or later it happens to everyone. You can’t always avoid a crisis, but you can stop it growing because of how you respond. Communication is the visible part of crisis management.

Types of crisis

American scholar W. Timothy Coombs, with his Situational Crisis Communication Theory (2007), groups crises into three clusters, according to how much responsibility people attribute to the company:

Type	Examples	Perceived responsibility	How to respond
Victim	Natural disasters, sabotage, false rumours	Low	Inform, correct rumours, show what you’re doing
Accidental	A technical fault, a defective batch	Medium	Explain, apologise, put it right
Preventable	Serious human error, misconduct	High	Take responsibility, full apology, concrete changes

The more responsible the company is seen to be, the fuller the response must be: a real apology, a remedy, visible changes.

The crisis plan: what to prepare in advance

During a crisis there’s no time to decide who does what. The crisis plan is written beforehand and contains:

• the crisis team: who decides, who the spokesperson is, who gathers the facts, who monitors social media, who talks to the lawyers;
• everyone’s contacts, including out of hours;
• severity levels (for example 1 to 3) and what to do for each;
• template messages to adapt (delay, product recall, website outage);
• the list of channels: website, social media, newsletter, press releases;
• how to pause scheduled posts and campaigns quickly.

The 6 steps

1. Get the facts

Before speaking: what happened, to how many people, why, what can be done. Ask the people who know (warehouse, customer service, quality). Speaking before you know leads to wrong promises.

2. Stop what makes it worse

Cheerful scheduled posts, promotions, newsletters: check what’s going out in the next few hours and pause anything that would look insensitive.

3. The public message

Short and sincere:

• what happened, without minimising;
• an apology;
• the remedy for those affected;
• how to contact you;
• if needed, what you’re changing so it doesn’t happen again.

4. Reply to everyone

Same core message, personal words. Don’t hide criticism. How to handle comments is explained in community management.

5. Talk to journalists

• Reply by the deadline they give.
• Use only verified facts.
• Name a spokesperson and a contact.
• No “no comment”, no speculation, no blaming others.
• Remember that nothing is truly “off the record”.

6. The wrap-up

Once the crisis is over: the facts, what was done, what worked and what to change. The wrap-up updates the crisis plan.

How to handle a social media storm

A social media storm (often called a shitstorm) is a sudden wave of negative comments. What to do:

1. Don’t reply on impulse: facts first, even if it takes an hour.
2. Pause scheduled posts.
3. Post a short message if the facts need time: “We’ve read your comments, we’re looking into it, update by 6 pm.”
4. Don’t delete criticism: only hide insults, spam and personal data.
5. Answer real questions personally, not with the same copied text.
6. Measure: negative comments per hour, mentions, branded searches. When they drop, the acute phase is over.

Two real cases to study

• Tylenol (1982): in the United States some packs of Johnson & Johnson’s painkiller were poisoned by someone outside the company. The company recalled about 31 million bottles, communicated openly and relaunched the product in tamper-evident packaging. It’s still the most quoted case of successful crisis management.
• The Ferragni-Balocco pandoro (2023): Italy’s competition authority (AGCM) fined Chiara Ferragni’s companies over €1 million and the confectioner Balocco €420,000 for advertising that suggested buying the cake funded a hospital, when the donation had been made earlier and was a fixed amount. The case shows how unclear communication can turn into a crisis, and how much the timing and tone of an apology matter.

An example

At the fictional tea shop Five Leaf about 40 matcha kits arrived with a broken whisk. Comments multiplied, a creator mentioned it in her stories and a journalist from a tea magazine asked whether all the kits were faulty.

The response: check with the warehouse (40 kits, transport damage, the rest fine), pause the day’s promotion, a message with an apology and a free new whisk for everyone, a personal reply to every comment, a message to the creator, a reply to the journalist with the facts, the remedy, the new rigid case and the spokesperson’s contact. The article that came out spoke of a “quick and transparent response”.

In Peacchy’s Brand and Social Simulations you can handle this crisis step by step.

The rules on communicating correctly about sustainability are in greenwashing and green claims.

Sources

• W. Timothy Coombs, «Protecting Organization Reputations During a Crisis: The Development and Application of Situational Crisis Communication Theory», Corporate Reputation Review, 2007
• Antitrust fines Chiara Ferragni and Balocco over the pandoro (Open, 15 December 2023, Italian)