Why Some Brands Survive a PR Crisis, and Others Never Recover

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In August 2016, Samsung had a problem.

Galaxy Note 7 phones were catching fire. Not occasionally, regularly. Airlines banned them. Governments issued warnings. Samsung recalled 2.5 million units. The brand took a hit of somewhere around five billion dollars. By any measure, this should have been the end of the Galaxy Note line.

It wasn't.

Within two years, the Galaxy S8 had the highest pre-order numbers Samsung had ever seen. The Note line came back. The brand not only survived but also recovered faster than almost any analyst predicted.

Meanwhile, some brands faced far smaller crises and never came back. A bad batch of products. A founder tweet that went wrong. A customer service failure that went viral. And the brand just… never recovered the trust.

The difference isn't the severity of the crisis. It's what the brand did in the hours and days immediately after it.

This edition is about that difference and what it tells us about how brand trust actually works.

Every brand crisis has the same basic structure, regardless of how it starts.

Something goes wrong. The public finds out. People form an opinion quickly, often before the brand has even responded. And that initial opinion, formed in the first few hours, becomes the lens through which everything the brand does afterward gets interpreted.

If the brand's initial response is defensive, people look for more evidence that they're defensive. If the brand's initial response is honest and accountable, people look for more evidence of that. The first response doesn't just shape perception, it shapes how subsequent actions are perceived.

This is why the brands that survive crises almost always have one thing in common: they got ahead of it.

Getting ahead of a crisis doesn't mean issuing a press release before the media does, or posting a carefully worded statement drafted by a legal team.

It means being the first to acknowledge that something went wrong, in plain language, without hiding behind qualifications.

When Samsung's phones started catching fire, they took an unusual approach for a company of that size. They didn't minimise. They didn't initially blame third-party batteries and wait for the news cycle to move on. They issued a full recall, stopped sales globally, and eventually ran a campaign, "What Matters Most," that acknowledged the failure directly and showed what they were doing to fix it.

That transparency is what made recovery possible. Because trust isn't lost when brands make mistakes. Trust is lost when brands respond to mistakes badly. Customers are remarkably forgiving of errors. They are almost entirely unforgiving of dishonesty.

Compare that to Snapdeal in 2015, when actor Aamir Khan made comments about feeling unsafe in India, and Snapdeal, which had nothing to do with his comments, became the target of a boycott because he was their brand ambassador. Instead of responding clearly and calmly, the brand let the situation escalate, removed its face from their campaigns without explanation, and seemed to disappear from public communication entirely. The optics of retreating made things worse than the original situation.

The denial. "We have no evidence of any issue with our product." This response works if the evidence doesn't exist. It destroys trust if the evidence does. And in the internet era, evidence usually surfaces. Every brand that has tried to outrun a real problem with denial has made it worse.

The non-apology. "We're sorry if anyone was offended." This is the PR version of "I'm sorry you feel that way." It acknowledges nothing, takes no responsibility, and signals to everyone watching that the brand isn't actually taking the issue seriously. It performs accountability without any of the substance. Customers can read it immediately.

The silence. Some brands go quiet during a crisis, hoping it passes. Occasionally, it does. More often, the silence gets filled by other voices, angry customers, journalists, competitors, and the narrative gets written without any input from the brand. Silence cedes the story.

Every brand that has survived a meaningful crisis and come back from it did some version of the same thing.

They acknowledged the problem specifically, without qualifications. They explained what happened honestly, even when the explanation was uncomfortable. They committed to a specific action, not a vague promise. And they followed through on that action visibly, so there was something concrete for people to point to as evidence of change.

In India, Zomato has faced several crises over the years, from delivery partner treatment issues to customer discrimination complaints. What's kept them recoverable each time is a combination of CEO visibility and specific commitments. Deepinder Goyal engages directly, often on social media, often without the sanitised corporate voice. That directness is what keeps the door open to recovery, even when the initial response isn't perfect.

The founder's face in the crisis matters enormously. A statement from a communications team feels like damage control. A statement from a founder sounds like accountability. Same words, completely different reception.

Most brands think about crisis communication only when they're in a crisis. That's too late to build the infrastructure you need.

The brands that recover quickly from crises are the ones that have already built goodwill in their community. Their customers wanted them to come back because they already had a relationship worth defending. The crisis became something that happened to a brand people cared about, not the final proof that the brand had always been untrustworthy.

This is why the community moat we talked about in previous editions isn't just about growth. It's about resilience. A brand with 100,000 loyal customers who believe in the mission will survive things that a brand with 1,000,000 indifferent customers will not. Loyalty is a buffer.

Build the goodwill before you need it. Communicate honestly before a crisis forces you to. Because the trust you've deposited over the years is exactly what you'll spend in the days after something goes wrong.

See you at the next edition, Arindam