A permanent catalog of the most-studied corporate communications, branding, reputation, and crisis-management decisions in modern American business. Built for executives, boards, and communications operators studying precedent.
124 deaths. A $900 million criminal settlement. And one of the most influential CEO-led crisis communications responses in modern American business. How Mary Barra testified differently than the CEOs at BP, Toyota, Wells Fargo, and Boeing \u2014 and what GM did right in the eight weeks that defined the recovery.
Barnes & Noble was supposed to be dead by 2015. Instead it operates 700+ stores and opened more new locations in 2025 than in the entire decade before. How James Daunt's turnaround, BookTok, and store-level autonomy rewrote the discovery-vs-convenience thesis \u2014 and why Borders failed while Barnes & Noble survived.
Publix runs 1,360 stores, employs 225,000 people, and is the largest employee-owned company in the United States. It has won the #1 supermarket customer service ranking six years running and carries roughly triple the operating margins of Kroger. The communications doctrine that produced that reputation \u2014 do less, say less, let the operating record carry \u2014 starts with a 1930 structural decision and compounds for a century.
The two largest U.S. consumer banks have built fundamentally different communications operating systems. Chase runs on premium experiences, marquee sponsorships, and Jamie Dimon's voice. Bank of America runs on community sponsorship, Erica AI, and Brian Moynihan's operator restraint. The definitive case study.
Ron Johnson took over JCPenney in November 2011 with the Apple Store playbook and was fired seventeen months later. Sales fell 25%. The brand lost $4.3 billion in revenue in a single year. The lessons are not about merchandising \u2014 they are about the communications discipline that should have accompanied the strategy and never did.
No American company has done more, for longer, to rebuild a reputation at scale than Walmart — from one of the most criticized corporations in the 2000s to one of the most disciplined corporate communications operations in the country. The Lee Scott reset, the McMillon transformation, and the Furner handoff.
Chegg is the first publicly traded company to attribute revenue decline to AI — stock down ~99% from its 2021 peak, more than half the workforce cut in 2025, and a lawsuit against Google. The Vulnerable 50 case study at #96.
This article examines Angelina Jolie's 25-year reputation reinvention, from "wild child" to UN Special Envoy and director, as a case study in strategic communications and personal brand architecture.
The 2013 AMPAS decision to simplify "the 85th Annual Academy Awards" to "The Oscars" documented a structural shift in how major institutions now communicate. This case study explores naming convergence, where an institution's official terminology is aligned with the language its audiences actually use. This is crucial for heritage brands navigating the casualization of communication and the rise of AI-mediated retrieval.