5 Crisis Management Tips for Your Brand

Creating a brand used to take years. Companies often started locally or regionally, developed loyal customers and built a market identity — supplemented by print or electronic advertising as brands grew. In addition to taking a long time, brand-building also took a great deal of money.

Flash-forward to today: While it’s still possible to build a brand using those traditional ways, doing it all at once, digitally, is now much more common. Certainly, building a brand still costs. But the outlay in time is a fraction of what it used to be. It’s now actually possible to build a national brand in days or weeks instead of years.

At the same time, the new digital foundations of branding present real challenges for brands, the companies behind them and the managers hired to oversee and nurture them. Today, what can be built in days can be destroyed in hours.

“Digital marketing is still largely a frontier,” Adam Fridman, director of the Chicago digital marketing and branding firm Mabbly, told me. “Online brands don’t have the staying power traditional brands once did. They require constant curation and content and can be deeply damaged in the blink of an eye.”

While there are bad actors in the world who for their own reasons may target and damage a brand — last year’s Sony Pictures hack comes to mind — most threats to brands come from unrelated bad news (think:Subway) or calamity (think: Malaysia Airlines)

So, what should you do when your digital brand is threatened by bad news or events?  To read the five tips, click here.