Survival from a business crisis depends on how quickly and effectively you respond or, equally important, how well you foresee and act on a potential crisis. If you’re facing an issue that could become a crisis, don’t wait, says Dwayne Alexander head of Alexander PR which set up Company Crisis as a service.
The common denominators in successfully navigating any business issue come down to regular communication, tone and timing.
“If you’re reading this and thinking ‘we have a few issues that could escalate’, that is your early warning system at work. The best time to prepare for a crisis is before you are in one,” says Alexander.
“These situations share a painful pattern. Issues that could have been managed proactively were ignored, minimised or handled without proper expertise or external unbiased support.
“We have had examples of leaders admitting they had known about ‘brewing employment issues’ for months but hoped it would ‘blow over’. Instead, they escalated into public Employment Relations Authority cases, which damaged the employer brand for some time and required a more intensive remediation strategy.
“By the time they call us, the narrative is set, trust is broken, and options are limited to medium / longer term recovery strategies,” Alexander says.
Businesses and their boards are facing more complex and unfamiliar challenges than ever before with often surprising and unexpected public reaction. The cost of ignoring warning signals and not being appropriately prepared is not just financial (though this can be substantial), but reputation, organisational energy, leadership focus and, often, market position may never fully recover or take years to change.
“There is crucial divide between those who plan and prepare early and those who wait until the fire is already burning. Either way, there are issue management and communication specialist companies like Alexander PR which can help,” says Alexander.
Manageable situations
Crisis management has evolved from the “golden hour” to the “golden 15 minutes” and success comes from leadership that recognises the warning signs and acts decisively.
“Speed and strategy go hand-in-hand,” says Alexander. “Managers who create a Ben Hur production by kicking the can down the road turn an issue into a crisis.”
Alexander PR set up Company Crisis as a service along with 0800 PR CRISIS, which is seeing a higher volume of calls lately. Unfortunately, not every call has an immediate resolution.
Organisations which snap into gear only after an issue is active, end up having to navigate many additional issues that have grown from inaction.
Look into your own company to spot imminent danger from situations like:
- Multiple unaddressed complaints which have gone viral on social media, piquing mainstream and industry media interest
- Regulatory investigations already underway with findings imminent and rumours circulating within your industry sector and via news sites
- Key stakeholders whom you suspect have lost trust – usually after months of poor communication, a lack of ownership and no clearly communicated pathway to overcoming the issue
- Legal proceedings have commenced, limiting the ability to take affected people on the journey before, during and after the issue.
The long road back
Failure to act quickly in a crisis can turn the solution into multi-year complex project. It is estimated that cultural transformation within a company after a crisis can take between three and five years minimum.
The lesson remains — what could have been a few weeks of strategic communication through early engagement and management, becomes a comprehensive overhaul touching every aspect of the organisation.
Recovery is not just about new policies –- it is about fundamentally changing how decisions are made, how communication flows and how accountability is maintained at every level.
“There is light at the end of every tunnel and those companies which commit to a consistent programme of communication, reap the rewards and regain the trust of existing and new customers while serving as a positive example of overcoming the odds and doing the right thing,” says Alexander.
Professional specialist support can and does help organisations which find themselves struggling to mop up after major and/or public crises.
Company culture
Crisis-damaged companies often discover their company culture was part of the problem. The transformation after a crisis requires leadership accountability and values realignment.
Boards must acknowledge their role in creating the crisis and commit to changing the systems that allowed issues to fester.
Corporate values need to move from proclaimed values to lived behaviours and include added employee re-engagement to rebuild trust with staff who have weathered the storm with you.
Digital shadow
Perhaps the most challenging aspect of modern crisis recovery is the permanence of digital reputational damage supported and enhanced by artificial intelligence (AI).
Today’s reality is that Google and its acolytes have a very long memory. Negative articles dominate first-page search results for years and require a sustained strategy of building positive editorial content to have any impact on pushing negative results down.
Crisis coverage outranks positive content due to engagement metrics and multiple negative results spread like the plague across news sites, forums and social media. Executive names are forever linked to company failures.
LLM challenge
A new frontier to navigate when battling crisis is how Large Language Models (LLM) like ChatGPT, Claude, and others are shaping reputation. Recent studies show LLM pull information from deep web sources, not just top Google results.
The key to maintaining reputation is make sure you develop a proactive and positive editorial strategy. Editorial articles are considered major trust sources for LLM.
AI responses about your company become “truth” for users who trust these tools, despite obvious shortcomings which can throw AI off the track. Then negative events, true or not, get embedded in AI training data, creating persistent bias. Traditional Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) tactics don’t influence how LLM perceive your brand.
Remediation journey
The path to reputation recovery requires first a content saturation strategy. This involves creating 10x more positive content than exists negative content, building authoritative sources that search engines trust and developing multi-platform presence across all digital channels. In other words, engaging in thought leadership to shift the narrative
Second is technical reputation management using advanced SEO to push negative results “beyond page 3”, optimising for both traditional search and AI discovery.
Create high-authority backlinks to positive content and “SERP fortresses” with multiple controlled assets.
Third, see the solution as needing years of consistent positive actions to rebuild trust and set the culture in your company accordingly. Transparency reports showing genuine change and
Customer success stories should be enhanced by third-party validation through awards, certifications, surveys and audits.
The timeline reality
- Phase 1: Crisis stabilisation and bleeding control
- Phase 2 : Cultural transformation and operational change
- Phase 3: Digital reputation rehabilitation
- Phase 4: Maintaining vigilance against reputation relapse
