📝 When Brand Can't Save You 🧨

When your external brand story doesn't match your internal reality, you're not building a brand—you're setting the stage for a takedown. Here’s the real job of a brand builder during a brewing crisis: reflecting reality back to leadership, advocating for business change, and protecting your peace in the process. Included: a framework for reflecting brewing brand crises to business leaders.

👋 Hi, I'm Amanda. I'm a brand strategist and fractional CMO. I help founder-led businesses turn belief into brand—and brand into a strategic asset that works as hard as you do. I share weekly deep dives with actionable advice on brand building—plus interviews with the people in the trenches. I also work 1:1 with founders and teams. Book a chat here.

Who will love this

• 🔪 Anyone who’s been on the pointy end of a brand crisis

• 🖤 Brand managers trying to drive change from within

• 🛠️ Brand fixers brought in to clean up the mess

• 🚩 Marketers tasked with launching what their gut says isn’t ready

Today

Good morning 👋

Welcome to a series I’m calling Note to Self: specific deep dives on tactics you can file away on a very specific topic or conundrum. It’s based on the sweat (aka pitting out in client meetings), blood (figurative) and tears (literal) that have come with my own brand building experience.

Today’s topic: What do you do when you spot a brewing brand crisis?

As a marketer, I’ve been trained to think in headlines. Here are the ones you don’t want to have to write your way out of:

• Progressive investing fund exploits interns

• Sustainable skincare brand faces sustainability scandal

• Community coffeehouse faces union-busting backlash

This one’s juicy: It’s also linked to my biggest brand failure. I’ve only worked on one brand where employees outright refused to participate in a brand launch. And when I learned why—I agreed with them.

I can’t share the details. But here’s what I can share:

If what you’re saying externally doesn’t match what’s happening internally, you’re not launching a brand or a campaign—you’re lighting the fuse on a future crisis.

Let’s start with this:

If you feel resistance from inside during a rebrand or launch: pause. Ask what’s really going on. You might find the brand isn’t broken—but the business is.

Maybe you’re in the middle of something like this. Maybe you’re hoping to never face something like this. Either way, here’s what we’ll cover today:⚠️ What actually constitutes a brand crisis🪞 Your real job as a brand builder when the business is the problem📉 10 cautionary brand fails (and what we should learn from them)🧭 A framework to reflect reality back to leadership💡 Why internal brand perception is your early warning system

In this case, I wasn’t there to craft a brand story. I was there to hold a mirror up to the business, which sometimes is the real hard work.

Let’s get into it ✌️

Amanda

What is a Brand Crisis?

A brand crisis happens when a business violates the story it’s told the world. When people who believed in that story—whether employees or customers—feel betrayed. When what you say externally doesn’t match what you do internally, you’re not building a brand. You’re brewing a crisis.

It’s not just a bad headline. It’s the breakdown of belief.

The Role of a Brand Builder in a Brand Crisis

In my experience, in these situations as a brand builder, your job isn’t just to shape narratives. It’s to mirror reality back to leadership.

In a crisis, that means:

• Protecting the brand and its credibility.

• Representing the audience—internal or external—and their power to shape the business.

• Recommending business and brand action.

These type of crises are particularly relevant for:

• Mission-driven brands

• Ethical businesses

• Service-based orgs where customer experience = employee experience

Sometimes, the answer is: "We can't move forward with this campaign." Or even: "We need to fix the business first." Personally, I believe in trying. In saying the hard things. In providing a clear, principled POV. But I also believe in protecting my peace.

So here’s my own version of the Brand Serenity Prayer:

🙏🙏🙏

What’s at Stake? Top 10 Brand Fails

Most brand crises don’t come out of nowhere. The warning signs? Usually visible inside the organization long before the public ever sees them. These examples aren’t just cautionary tales. They’re case studies in what happens when brand and business diverge:

1. Pepsi & Kendall Jenner – Performed activism. Delivered backlash.

2. Uber (2017) – Culture crisis became brand crisis.

3. Volkswagen – Lied about emissions. Lost public trust.

4. Starbucks – Friendly brand, unfriendly labor practices.

5. Facebook/Cambridge Analytica – Privacy breach meets public outrage.

6. Peloton – Tone-deaf storytelling set off alarms.

7. BP – Branded as green. Behaved otherwise.

8. American Apparel – Aesthetic couldn’t save ethics.

9. Kashi – "Natural" wasn’t. Lawsuits followed.

10. Nike – Claimed to support athletes. Cut contracts when they got pregnant.

Your Brand isn’t Just What You Say

It’s what you do when no one’s watching. Until everyone is. Here’s the framework I use to mirror back a brewing crisis to a business:

1. Describe the behavior. "Right now, [concerning behavior] is happening."

2. Forecast the risk. "If this continues, we could see backlash—a headline, a whistleblower, or a viral thread."

3. Emphasize business impact. "Our credibility is tied to how we handle this. If trust erodes, growth stalls."

4. Recommend a path forward. "To protect both the business and the brand, I recommend [next action]."

Questions to ask yourself:

• Is what we’re saying externally true internally?

• How will an erosion of trust affect our business? Be as specific as you can (partners will pull out of deals, it’ll be hard to attract future talent, etc).

• Are employees proud of this brand? Would they share it with friends?

• What’s the worst headline someone could write about us right now?

• If that headline ran tomorrow, how would we respond?

• What would it take to get our internal house in order?

I won’t sugarcoat it: this is a hard position to be in. But when you’re working with executives—or anyone focused on the bottom line—it’s critical to translate brand damage into business risk.

A strong brand gives a business:

• Warmer leads

• Pricing power

• Demand generation

• Better retention

• More referrals

• Word of mouth

A crisis undermines all of that.

Brand is not a shield; it's a spotlight. It will illuminate what’s working—and expose what’s not. Our job is to make sure that what it reveals aligns with the values we claim, the experiences we promise, and the business we want to build.

Yours in brand building,

✌️ Amanda

Brand news 🗞️

• Pour one out for Joann Fabrics, who have closed all retail stores as of May 31.

• Absolutely vibing this Hettas brand work by Magnafire and the positioning: women aren’t just small men who wear pink, why are our shoes engineered this way?

• Loving this Active-ism campaign from Intrepid, a better for the world travel company and B Corp, who launched activist-led trips to U.S. National Parks in response to billion dollar budget cuts.

Call me, beep me 📞

If you liked what you read, keep the party going by:

• 👋 subscribing (button below) or connecting with me on LinkedIn

• 👩‍💻 saying hi or dropping a note in the comments!

• 🤝 sending this to a friend