Crisis Playbook Series
Your guide to building resilient brands under pressure
Every brand faces pressure—these playbooks help you respond with clarity and resilience.
Every brand faces pressure—but not all pressure looks the same. The Crisis Playbook Series is a modular toolkit designed to help organizations navigate four distinct types of reputational risk: Operational Disruption, Economic Pressure, Cultural Scrutiny, and Tech/Ethical Risk. Each playbook equips leaders with diagnostic tools, case snapshots, and actionable strategies to assess how well their brand’s identity, messaging, and behaviour hold up under stress.
Whether you're managing a system failure, responding to pricing backlash, addressing social controversy, or confronting ethical concerns around AI and data, these playbooks offer a clear path forward. Grounded in behavioural insight and built for real-world use, the series helps teams move from reactive damage control to proactive trust-building—turning moments of crisis into opportunities for credibility and leadership.
At the heart of each playbook is the Pressure Test Grid—a behavioural diagnostic that evaluates how your brand’s identity, messaging, and behaviour perform under scrutiny. Rather than treating crises as isolated events, the grid helps you anticipate how consumers interpret fairness, transparency, and accountability across different stressors. It’s a simple but powerful tool for spotting weak signals, aligning internal decisions with external expectations, and ensuring your brand’s response feels credible—not just reactive.
Free playbooks
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Economic Pressure
Economic Pressure arises when pricing decisions, layoffs, or profit-driven moves trigger public backlash. The playbook guides teams in balancing financial necessity with empathy, using transparent messaging and values-driven framing to maintain trust during tough trade-offs.
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Cultural Scrutiny
Cultural Scrutiny surfaces when a brand’s actions clash with social values, norms, or public sentiment—often around inclusion, representation, or political alignment. This playbook equips leaders to clarify intent, engage critics constructively, and rebuild credibility through authentic behaviour.
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Operational Disruption
Operational Disruption occurs when systems, services, or logistics break down—whether due to outages, delays, or internal failures. This playbook helps brands respond swiftly, communicate clearly, and restore reliability while reinforcing their identity as dependable and accountable.
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Tech/Ethical Risk
Tech/Ethical Risk emerges when AI, data, or digital systems raise concerns about fairness, privacy, or accountability. The playbook offers tools to assess ethical alignment across identity, messaging, and behaviour—helping brands respond with integrity and lead with values.
Premium playbooks
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AI Risk
The AI Risk Playbook helps brands safeguard consumer trust by diagnosing how AI missteps—such as bias, opacity, privacy breaches, or unsafe outputs—can erode perceptions of fairness, transparency, and accountability. It offers behavioural insights, scenario-based response strategies, and practical tools to anticipate risks, communicate with empathy, and reinforce credibility through visible safeguards and trust-centered design.
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Gen Z Scrutiny
The Gen Z Scrutiny Playbook helps brands navigate the fast-changing expectations of Gen Z—a generation defined by its cultural influence, digital fluency, and strong values around sustainability, inclusivity, and social impact. It offers behavioural diagnostics, response strategies, and real-world scenarios to manage backlash, trend fatigue, and performative activism, turning generational volatility into a trust-building advantage.