The planned, coordinated approach a company uses to communicate during a significant negative event — a data breach, a product recall, a public controversy — aimed at maintaining trust and providing clear, accurate information under pressure.
Why it matters
How a company communicates during a crisis often has a larger, longer-lasting impact on its reputation than the underlying incident itself — a fast, transparent, well-handled response can preserve trust, while a slow, evasive, or inconsistent one compounds the original damage.
In a sentence
"We had a crisis communications plan ready before the outage even happened, which meant the first public statement went out within an hour instead of being drafted from scratch under pressure."
Related terms
- Often confused with: Reputation management (crisis communications specifically addresses an acute, ongoing incident in real time; reputation management is a broader, ongoing practice of shaping public perception, which includes but isn't limited to crisis response).