When a brand is in trouble, silence is expensive

The crisis is never just the crisis

By Kirimi Mbogo

A customer posts a video. Within hours it has acquired a life of its own. By the time the company’s communications department has agreed on the wording of a statement, the internet has already written the story for it.

Kenyan brands are discovering an unpleasant truth about crises: the product failure, billing dispute, data breach or executive indiscretion is often only the beginning. What consumers remember is what happened next.

A recent study of 100 Kenyan brands found that 60% had experienced some form of crisis. Social media accounted for 68% of crisis cases reported or spread through social platforms on X alone. The report’s authors put the problem with characteristic bluntness: “bad news travels at a bullet’s speed.”

Companies can therefore no longer afford to regard crisis communication as the public-relations equivalent of calling the fire brigade.

The fire is already public.

What matters is whether the company can persuade customers that it knows where the extinguisher is.

Trust is particularly unforgiving in Kenya. The 2025 Brand Trust Report by Glass House PR found that 87.75% of respondents considered trust extremely or very important when deciding which brands to engage with. The sample was predominantly young and urban, with people aged 18 to 44 accounting for 85% of respondents.

Mary Njoki, founder and chief executive of Glass House PR, offered a useful diagnosis at the report’s launch: “Trust is the new currency in Kenya; Kenyans are no longer swayed by advertising or celebrity endorsements.” Consumers, she said, reward brands that deliver “quality, transparency and human-centered service” and punish those that do not.

That is a harsher market than the one many marketing departments still imagine.

Advertising can create familiarity. It cannot manufacture credibility once customers believe they have been deceived.

The first mistake in a crisis is therefore often linguistic. Companies reach for euphemism. An outage becomes an “incident”. A billing error becomes a “technical challenge”. A security breach becomes an “isolated matter”. Someone, somewhere, is apparently always “looking into it”.

Customers know what this means.

They have been told nothing.

The better response is less theatrical. Establish what happened. Say what is known. Say what is not known. Explain what customers should do. Give them a person or channel through which they can obtain help. Then update them when the facts change.

This sounds obvious. Corporate behaviour suggests otherwise.

The 2024/25 100 Kenyan Brands Report found that 35.1% of brands caught in a crisis either did nothing significant or took no substantial action. A quarter issued a press release or public statement. Only 2.7% acknowledged the problem and took measures to reverse or remedy it.

The numbers are revealing because a press release is often mistaken for a response.

It is not.

A statement explains what a company wants the public to know. A response changes what the public experiences.

If a bank’s system fails, customers need their transactions restored. If a retailer sells defective goods, the refund mechanism matters more than the chief executive’s expression of regret. If a telecoms operator suffers an outage, customers are more interested in restored connectivity than in a paragraph about “unforeseen circumstances”.

The distinction between communication and correction is where reputations are won.

Kenyan research on online crises at Zuku, for example, found that service reliability, billing discrepancies and customer support were recurring sources of reputational damage. The study also observed a shift in the company’s crisis responses from denial and scapegoating towards justification, apology and compensation as negative sentiment intensified.

There is a lesson here for companies far beyond telecommunications.

Consumers do not expect perfection. They do expect recognition.

That is especially true because digital platforms have altered the economics of corporate silence. A complaint once travelled from customer to call centre, perhaps to a newspaper. Now it can travel from customer to X, TikTok, WhatsApp groups and television before the company’s lawyers have finished debating whether the word “sorry” creates liability.

The lawyers will object.

They usually do.

But excessive legalism has its own cost. A statement so carefully sterilised that it sounds as though nobody at the company has ever met a customer can deepen rather than contain a crisis.

The problem is not merely Kenyan. African markets are becoming more connected, more urban and more digitally mediated. A consumer in Lagos, Nairobi, Johannesburg or Accra can expose a service failure to thousands of people without the assistance of a newsroom. The old hierarchy of information has become distinctly less hierarchical.

That changes the job of the chief executive.

During a crisis, leadership is partly an exercise in reducing uncertainty. Customers want to know whether their money is safe, whether a product is safe, whether their data are safe and whether anyone inside the organisation is actually in charge.

The chief executive does not always need to appear on camera. But someone credible does.

More importantly, the company needs to keep speaking after the first news cycle has moved on.

This is where many crisis plans become rather thin. They are designed for the first 24 hours, when the real reputational damage may take weeks or months to assess. The Kenyan Brand Trust research found that 71.9% of brands surveyed measure customer complaints and resolution metrics, while 40.6% use social-media sentiment analysis.

Those measurements are useful, but they should not become another corporate dashboard whose numbers nobody acts upon.

The harder metric is retention.

Do customers stay? Do they complain again? Do they recommend the company? Do employees trust management enough to report problems before they become scandals?

A crisis is often a lagging indicator of a deeper organisational defect.

The public sees the broken product. Management should be looking for the broken process that produced it.

That may mean changing a supplier. Rewriting a customer-service procedure. Compensating customers without making them beg. Removing a faulty product from shelves before a regulator demands it. Publishing the results of an internal investigation, where appropriate. None is particularly glamorous.

All are cheaper than pretending the problem is smaller than it is.

There is also a peculiarly African dimension to this. Many businesses depend heavily on reputation within tightly connected communities. Word of mouth can be extraordinarily powerful; so can word of warning. A customer who has had a bad experience does not require a large advertising budget to tell everyone they know.

The old distinction between customer service and corporate reputation is therefore becoming obsolete.

They are the same thing viewed from different ends.

A company can spend millions on a campaign promising that it listens. Then ignore 300 customers complaining about the same fault. The campaign will not save it.

The customers will.

Or they will not.

The brands most likely to survive the next crisis will not necessarily be those with the largest communications teams. They will be those with the shortest distance between discovering a problem and fixing it.

That is a question of management, not messaging.

The statement still matters. So does the apology. But neither is a substitute for restitution, transparency or reform.

In the end, consumers are not particularly interested in whether a company has a good crisis manual.

They want to know whether, when things go wrong, the people running the business are prepared to tell the truth and put matters right.

Everything else is copy.