Originally published May 2021. Updated June 2026.

A mishap and a crisis are different categories of problem — but the line between them is thin, and the wrong response converts the first into the second. A customer-service blunder is not a crisis. A mishandled customer-service blunder that escalates into media coverage, social amplification, and named-entity citation inside the AI engines is. The discipline is recognizing which one you are in, fast — and operating accordingly.

Each gets navigated differently

A communications crisis is severe enough to impact more than marketing and PR. Leadership commits to public statements. The crisis communication plan activates. Established brands with deep pre-incident corpus, trained staff, and retained outside counsel absorb the shock. Emerging or smaller brands without those reserves can be killed by a single mishandled disclosure window.

A mishap is one customer, one channel, one resolution. A crisis is many stakeholders, multiple channels, and a corpus that the AI engines will retrieve for years. See The Foundation of Crisis Communications in 2026 — Two Clocks, One Response for the operating frame.

PR crises take many forms

Inventory shortages on a hyped product. A poorly drafted executive tweet. An employee behaving badly on or off the clock. A regulatory inquiry. A data breach. A safety event. A board dispute that leaks. The trigger is wide. The mechanic is the same: a brand event becomes a named entity inside the engines.

The internet is forever — and in the AI era, the engines are the index. Degrading, rude, or dismissive customer responses live on inside the retrieval corpus. Deleting them does not remove them from ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, or Google AI Overviews. The deletion itself often becomes corpus material. See What to Do When an Old Crisis Resurfaces.

A PR crisis can hit a company hard even when the trigger is not the company itself — a negative event in the industry forces the brand to address it, or be defined by silence. Brands should monitor crises across their sector and learn from how peers handle them.

Always have a plan

A dedicated response team and a pre-built plan are the only two structural advantages a brand gets going into a crisis. Speed without strategy makes things worse — see Everything-PR on why speed is no longer the advantage. The brands that win the disclosure window get there with reliable facts, named spokespeople, and a single voice.

One voice matters. Conflicting messaging from different parts of the organization reads as disingenuous. Depending on the category of crisis, specific departments may need additional staff or media training before the cameras arrive.

Every employee connected to the response needs role clarity. Transparency internally is critical — partial information leads to mistakes in external messaging. Mistakes compound the original problem.

Promises matter. Do not commit to actions the organization cannot deliver. Apologize when an apology is warranted. Follow up with the individuals directly affected. Document what changed to prevent recurrence — and put that documentation into primary-source corpus the engines can retrieve.

Related reading

Ronn Torossian is the founder and chairman of 5W AI Communications, the AI Communications Firm. He is the publisher of Everything-PR and the author of two best-selling editions of For Immediate Release.