I've been doing brand strategy for long enough to have developed a pretty solid crisis communications instinct. Something goes wrong, you assess, you respond with empathy, you take action, you rebuild trust over time. It's a playbook. It works. Or it did, until this year made every playbook irrelevant.
2020 broke crisis communications because the crises stopped being discrete events and became ambient conditions. You can't 'respond' to a crisis that doesn't end. You can't 'get ahead of the story' when the story is everything everywhere all at once. Pandemic, recession, social justice uprising, political chaos. There's no returning to normal because normal doesn't exist anymore.
What I'm seeing work instead: brands that stopped performing response and started just... being honest about not having answers. The ones that said 'we don't know either, here's what we're doing today' earned more trust than the ones with polished crisis statements that read like they were written by a committee of lawyers.
The old crisis playbook assumed a finite event: something happens, you respond, it passes. The new reality demands ongoing presence: something is always happening, and your brand's response isn't a moment. It's a posture. How you exist in permanent uncertainty is your brand now.
The new reality demands ongoing presence: something is always happening, and your brand's response isn't a moment. It's a posture.
I'm writing this from my apartment where I've been for months with Truffles and Barnaby as my only colleagues. The pandemic made everyone's crisis personal and domestic, which is maybe the most brand-relevant insight of all: global and intimate simultaneously, which is exactly how good brands should feel.