How to Fireproof Your Brand

This insights post is a summary of the original blog post published by Deveney. View the original post: How To Fireproof Your Brand

In the modern marketing world, brands need to have a crisis plan in place. A new product, commercial, or campaign launch can easily be derailed if you’re not prepared to deal with the worst. Even if you’ve created a brand vulnerability audit and planned ahead for every consideration, there’s still more to do.

One of the most crucial steps in crisis planning is called “mitigation”. Think of it as the act of not just identifying what could go wrong, but how you can actively prevent issues from happening. Ultimately, you can’t stop a crisis outside of your control, but you can build best practices to navigate tough challenges.

For brands interested in developing a crisis management response, Worldcom Partner DEVENEY has a four-step process that can help.

Step 1: Research

The process of fireproofing your brand starts with gaining total understanding of the marketing efforts being launched. From there, you’ll want to have discussion with key members of the brand’s launch team.

Step 2: Analysis

The vulnerability audit we mentioned earlier is leveraged here to help your brand be aware of the different crisis scenarios in your industry. This information is key for the overall strategy and your brand’s mitigation plan. Oftentimes this entails looking at other brands in the industry and creating a list of crisis response best practices to follow.

Step 3: Strategic Planning

This step is where your brand tries to figure out the best ways from preventing any crisis from occurring. Common strategies could include media training, creating landing pages, collaborating with legal counsel, building out a list of talking points for employees, and more.

Every crisis scenario needs to be discussed and analyzed to uncover which actions from your brand will be most effective. It’s also recommended to group crisis scenarios together. This will give your brand’s internal communication team a starting point to work from if an incident happens.

Step 4: Execution

The final step is launching a complete crisis mitigation plan, response guide for your brand, and a rule book for employees to follow in advance of product or marketing campaign launch.

To learn more about the details on how to fireproof your brand with a crisis mitigation plan, check out the full blog post: How to Fireproof Your Brand.

Get more Worldcom Partner insights on media relations or read about our crisis management services.