Stories by Katie Paine

Measurement guru Katie Paine provides her take on Boeing’s (737 Max 8) and Samsung’s (Fold phone) crisis-management strategies. Her verdict is that neither company did a good job, though the negative implications seem to be lighter for Samsung.

Veteran PR guru Katie Paine looks at the crisis responses of the New England Patriots and the Chinese company Huawei. She gives neither one of them a passing grade.

2018 was a blockbuster year, but only if measured in the number of boneheaded moves brands and executives made time after time. The surfeit of poor crisis responses has provided myriad lessons that should be used in 2019, Katie Paine argues.

Last month in these pages there was a discussion of how quickly brands and organizations should react to PR crises. An immediate reaction is rarely advisable, although in situations where public safety is

Often organizations try too hard to either capitalize on hot news topics or avoid them altogether. Neither strategy is particularly effective. Our resident crisis and measurement guru Katie Paine takes a look at Burger King’s whopping disasters overseas and how the EPA’s attempts at staying out of the headlines have backfired royally.

Katie Paine looks at how two crises were handled. Sanofi’s Twitter retort to Roseanne Barr’s shot at Ambien for allowing her to create insensitive tweets and Purdue Pharma’s missteps at the outset of the situation and its close-lipped handling of the OxyContin-addiction mess. In the end, every compelling narrative needs a villain, Paine writes

Brands and organizations can rest on their laurels no longer. Even darlings of the media and Wall Street, such as Tesla, are prone to crises these days. Katie Paine looks at how Tesla and founder Elon Musk and the White House Correspondents’ Association handled recent crises.

Katie Paine compares crises at Oxfam and KFC in her regular Image Patrol feature. In this edition she explores how transparency and even humor can be prime tactics for managing crisis.

Katie Paine takes a look at what’s ahead in 2018 and sees a sobering return to reality, with more realistic measurement leading the charge. She also sees more bots in our future as well as fewer choices for those companies seeking help with measurement.

Our regular crisis measurement guru Katie Paine considers crises of 2017 and selects the crisis of the year. Can you guess which brand has the dubious distinction? Hint, the brand was handed an awful situation, partly through its own negligence, and then sat on the situation for several weeks before announcing it to the public.