
4 Times a PR Firm was Needed to Manage a Crisis Situation
The sad news is that the four situations listed below - could have been handled better from the very beginning.
AI communications & PR intelligence for crisis communications.
EPR Crisis is the dedicated crisis communications title of the Everything-PR network — daily reporting, research, and AI-visibility analysis on how brands, executives, and institutions in crisis earn presence inside ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews.


The sad news is that the four situations listed below - could have been handled better from the very beginning.






Raptor Strategies, a Washington DC public relations and consultancy firm, was started by David Bass in 2009.

Austin & Associates has been hired as the public relations firm for Dr.

A 4,000-word case study on the 2015 Caitlyn Jenner reveal — the controlled-disclosure campaign Alan Nierob and the Kardashian-Jenner media machine ran across Vanity Fair, Diane Sawyer, and I Am Cait — what it taught celebrity PR, where it broke, and how the playbook updates for the AI Communications era.

From the 2001 Fake Sheikh tape to her 2023 elevation as Duchess of Edinburgh, Sophie's 22-year reputation arc is the textbook long-horizon repair case.

In Australia, Belle Gibson is a household name, dominating media coverage.

Sard Verbinnen & Co is one of the most influential firms in the U.S. corporate crisis and special situations market. Founded 1992 by George Sard and Paul Verbinnen. Now part of FGS Global, the KKR-majority-owned strategic communications platform.

Between 2014 and 2024 Kangana Ranaut executed the most extreme brand pivot in modern Bollywood — from three-time National Film Award winner to sitting Member of Parliament for Mandi. The 2015 PR-firm feud was the early signal.

State-level digital and radio campaigns to promote citizen preparedness have become a meaningful operational layer in how DHS and state homeland security offices actually reach citizens. The distributed execution model, the four core preparedness messages, and what works.

Reputation isn't a vanity metric. It's a measurable input into hiring cost, pricing power, M&A valuation, and customer acquisition cost. The business case for treating reputation as input, not expense.
Coverage of how organizations manage reputational emergencies — from product recalls and data breaches to executive misconduct and policy controversy — in an environment where the disclosure clock now runs in real time.
Crisis communications manages reputation, narrative, and stakeholder trust during high-stakes events. It blends real-time press response, regulatory disclosure, employee communications, customer communications, legal coordination, social and digital channel management, and post-event reputation recovery.
The window between incident and public expectation has compressed. Social platforms surface events within minutes. Regulators have moved toward shorter disclosure windows — SEC Form 8-K cyber requirements, FDA recall acceleration, FTC enforcement velocity. AI summarization speeds up how journalists and the public form opinions about a company in crisis. Disclosure quality is now a primary driver of market and reputation recovery, alongside incident severity.
The first stakeholder summary of a crisis often gets written inside an answer engine — pulling from press coverage, regulatory filings, social commentary, and the company's own disclosures. Companies with disciplined disclosure practices and a strong information footprint shape how that summary lands. Companies without one get framed by their critics and adversaries.
Breach response and post-incident communications. Product recalls. Executive misconduct. Regulatory enforcement events. Activist short-seller campaigns. Workplace controversies. Litigation-adjacent crisis. Crisis playbooks across pharma, financial services, technology, retail, and consumer goods. Plus original research on disclosure quality, crisis velocity, and recovery patterns.
Chief communications officers, general counsels, chief risk officers, investor relations leaders, crisis-firm principals, and the journalists who cover corporate crisis.
Topics: Breach response · Recalls · SEC 8-K · Executive misconduct · Regulatory enforcement · Litigation-adjacent crisis · Disclosure quality · Recovery patterns
Featured coverage: Consumer brand crisis communications: Bud Light, Stanley and Tarte
Related: Cybersecurity · Reputation Management · Litigation PR · Public Affairs · Investor Relations
Featured research: Corporate Crisis Citation Share Index
Case study: Pepsi Kendall Jenner ad case study