Crises

We’ve just advised a company in a case that shows how fast you sometimes need to act to address a reputational crisis – and the devastation that can follow if you don’t. I won’t name the company so as not to pile on more misery, but this was a relatively new leisure firm running a UK-wide roadshow of family events. Problems arose when it had to cancel ...

A new study of 400 PR professionals has highlighted how often reputational crises hit organisations - despite what many would like to believe - and how speed of response is an increasingly difficult challenge. On the positive side, the research ....

We’ve just completed a crisis communications project for Compare Holiday Money — the UK’s biggest foreign exchange comparison website — which had come under the spotlight of BBC TV's Rip Off Britain. The company was hit by problems when one of the foreign exchange companies it listed took a number of customer payments last June, then disappeared without issuing any currency — leaving dozens of holiday-makers thousands of pounds out of pocket. The Compare Holiday Money team had ...

What a blunder for Persimmon CEO, Jeff Fairburn, to walk off camera this morning when politely asked by the BBC about his £75M bonus. Clearly his bonus wasn't what he intended to be there to talk about. And, having been awarded some while back, it isn't news. But - as the biggest ever paid in ....

It's striking that today's resignation by TSB CEO Paul Pester seems to be down at least as much to his public handling of the bank's IT problems as the IT problems themselves.  Since first suffering huge operational problems in April when migrating customer data to a new platform, TSB has still not got all its IT systems back on track. Many customers' finances have been thrown into disarray as they've been unable to access their accounts and had money go missing. There's no doubt the IT problems have been enormous. But it's also apparent that ...

Oxfam’s reputational debacle continues to unfold following the prostitution scandals in Haiti and Chad. What do you think we can learn from this about how to behave in a crisis? Five points jump out at me ....

I received a bizarre crisis enquiry the other day. Is it just me, or is this an extremely strange way for an international airline to ...

Last week gave us another astonishing media interview - with more lessons of what not to do. Irish channel RTE interviewed John O’Keeffe of the Garda Representative Association about an investigation which found the Irish police have been falsifying breath test data. O’Keeffe looked calm enough, but ...

See the cringe-worthy interview with Tim Bell on Newsnight yesterday? Bell was interviewed by Kirsty Wark about the fall from grace of the Bell Pottinger PR firm he founded because of the shameful campaign it ran to stoke racial hatred in South Africa. It seems incredible that a figure with 50 years in the PR industry ...

The fallout from the Grenfell Tower crisis continues unabated and has hit senior levels of Kensington & Chelsea Borough Council - with angry accusations of an absence of leadership and more heads rolling.