How to Prepare for a Brand Crisis Before It Happens

What We Need to Grow, Episode 081: Pocket Presence. A Founder Talk conversation with Jeanne Meyer. Cleaned for readability; the words are the speakers' own.

A Conversation with Jeanne Meyer, Founder and Advisor of Authentic Intelligence

Caleb Pedosiuk: Martha Stewart, Toys R Us, EMI Music, Uber, Potato.ai. You've got a huge list on your website, brands you've worked with. Strategic counsel, communications. It was some insane number of organic impressions you just saw on the Martha Stewart campaign. So you are no stranger to comms, to helping strategically. I would love it if you could please introduce yourself, share a little bit about Authentic Intelligence, your company, and what you're working on right now.

Jeanne Meyer: Sure. Jeanne Meyer, and I like to say that I build, protect, manage and fix reputations when the stakes are really high and you just need it handled.

Authentic Intelligence is essentially, I'm a sole advisor. At one point or another I have worked as an interim leader for other agencies. I'm often the one who parachutes in to help with a crisis, or quite literally to fill in for somebody when they have a need.

And I also work as an advisor to in-house communications leaders, where some of the skills that get them there into that leadership seat are not what they need to succeed as a leader. I'm there to help guide them through circumstances that might be brand new, whether it's public company communications, which can be very tricky, or crisis situations, or frankly just navigating the politics of a big organization.

And then the third thing that I do, and this is where my practice is really starting to get interesting and to take off, is I counsel emerging executives on their own communication. How they show up, whether it's on a podcast like this, in a boardroom, on a Zoom, in a media interview, on a panel, on a keynote. I help them make sure that everything they're communicating lands with impact. That comes in the form of several different things. It's not just what they say, it's how they say it, it's their comportment, how they listen. Active listening is a huge part of being a great communicator.

So those are the primary things that I do. You would activate me in a time of crisis when you just need a sounding board and somebody to guide you, and to fill in on the agency level when there's a leadership need.

Caleb: So if we pictured a target person. You know, they talk about Venn diagrams, so we picture the three circles. Let's say this is someone in this seat, a decision maker who has the right role, the right fit. And then if we have another sphere, it's like, hey, they're in a season, an era, call it even a crisis, where that's now where they're at, where they overlap with you. Do you feel like most of them know that they need your help? Are they out there looking and being like, hey, I need a Jeanne, or is it that most of them are just kind of flailing prompts at Claude to try to navigate it?

Jeanne: You raise an interesting point. The answer is, it's a little complicated. So let me just take it one by one.

I do crisis management. You'll notice that I don't necessarily market myself as a crisis manager, and the primary reason for that is no one thinks they need a crisis manager until they're in the middle of it. So it is certainly something I speak about, I share knowledge about, I'm there to advise in these situations. Just today I got introduced to a company that needs crisis management, and I have a call with them tomorrow. So it's probably not burning that much, because we can wait till tomorrow. But I was referred to them by one of many agency partners that I have in place who know that I'm their go-to.

For crisis management, I do think that many companies sometimes try it on their own, and I have been there to back cleanup, and they've gotten it wrong. And sometimes they know right away that they need help. So there's no cookie-cutter situation. But yes, I have been there before the crisis happens, and it's the best situation to be in. When you see something coming and you're not sure what to do, to circumnavigate it or just frankly defuse it before it actually becomes a thing. And again, sometimes I'm brought in to back cleanup when somebody tried to fix a problem and they made it worse.

Caleb: I have a few things popping up in the back of my mind, different examples I've seen where brands have had a fumble, where there's been a PR issue. I saw one recently. This is probably much smaller scale, not the enterprise level, but there was a restaurant that had very small seating. They seat something like eight people and it was very, very high touch, high experience. And they automatically require a 30% tip, which gets applied before the meal. So someone wasn't aware of this. They went in, they left a one-star, and then they were really upset because they had this situation.

But the way that the restaurant dealt with the situation ended up attracting that person who was already upset. There wasn't any saving face. They just butt heads in the way they dealt with it. And then that got shared, and a bunch of people, so it attracted another thirty one-star reviews, and it starts ballooning in the wrong direction.

I'm not an expert in this at all, but I have heard people talk about how when someone's really upset, when they're livid and offended, rightly or wrongly, it is also an opportunity for a brand or a company to actually demonstrate their humanity, or demonstrate how they view those situations. It actually becomes an opportunity, when people would think that no, when it's sunny and blue sky, that's the time when your brand gets to be known as for the people or whatever. But no, it's actually when the crap has hit the fan, it's all over the place, it stinks. That's the time that people get to see your true colours as a brand.

Jeanne: Yes, 100%. And it's interesting. In a situation like the one you mentioned, the fact that so many of us are living in such an extremely online world is kind of interesting, because crises behave differently in an extremely online world. It moves much quicker. The velocity of it can be ferocious, and you don't have as much time to act.

Sometimes you also need to understand how to read the signal, so that you're not overreacting but you're also hitting the right note. And yes, empathy goes a long way. Being a mensch goes a long way. Sometimes you almost need to go directly to the offended party and make things right, take that offline, and let the rest of it diffuse, or let that person be the one who's the messenger as to why, yeah, they're pretty good people, or this is why it happened.

But again, every situation is different. The speed, the velocity and the signal all behave very differently, which is why you can't go to Claude and say, fix this crisis. Love you, Claude. You can't do that with a large language model. You can get informed, but you really need to bring human seasoning and judgment to a crisis situation to properly figure out how to make the first best move. And again, it's very rare that a crisis is something you can solve and tie a bow on it and hand it back completely solved. Usually it's a series of steps and moves. It's like a big chessboard.

Caleb: So let's say you step into a situation. I'm trying to imagine the order in which certain things need to happen. If you step into something and they don't have a clear, this sounds really formal and rigid, but brand values. What does the brand stand for? What does the company stand for? What feeling do people get out of a brand? If those things aren't in place, or they're confused, and it's all just primarily numbers-driven organizational KPIs that are overseeing departments and whatnot, it's really quick to try to navigate and understand, well, what signal has been confused? Something's wrong. The instruments are not out of tune, but what key are we playing in, people?

If we think of a brand guide or guidelines or values as the music sheet that the orchestra should be playing, before you start fixing where's that sound coming off, who's off or whatever, you need to have that. So do you find you have a sort of sequence you take them through? Do you have a protocol, like, hey, first and foremost, have we nailed these pieces?

Jeanne: Well, you're touching upon something that's important. I of course believe that it's super important.

Just as a company would pay a great deal of money to have insurance, that same organization, particularly one that's scaling up, should invest in some crisis preparedness. It's risk management.

What I think is very important is that brands, particularly emerging brands, have a crisis playbook. If you're an e-tailer, or if you are a physical retailer, certain things could potentially happen. Somebody could choke. I was at a restaurant once where somebody caught on fire because they got a flaming shot. There's physical injuries, there's allergies, there's who knows. There's all manner of physical things that could occur. And then with e-tail there's a lot of people who could wage an online war against you if they weren't happy with their interaction with the brand, whether it's disinformation or going on Reddit or YouTube or whatever it is.

So the point is that as a brand leader you do need to envision the worst-case scenarios and actually plan out what you may need to do. The first things are foundational. Yes, it is so important to understand your brand values and your mission and vision for the company. But the other layer that's really important is how you manifest that in your key messages as a brand. How do you talk about your brand to the public? A vision or a mission is going to inform those messages, but they're not the same thing.

So you need to have that playbook, that hymn sheet that you describe, in place as a matter of course. Who are we as a company? What do we think we're going to be in the next year? I used to say five years, but now year. And what's the hymn sheet that my organization can and should rely on to talk about our company? The data points in between it can move and change, but again, you need consistency there.

And then the other thing in a crisis situation is that the minute you know it's happening, there will be a point where you know you need to confront it publicly. Or it's been made public, whether it's from you or it just happened, and it's important to get out and acknowledge that you know there's something going on.

You're not expected, nor should you try, to say we've got it solved and here's what we're doing. But an important thing is to put a pin in it, acknowledge that this is happening. As soon as we became aware of it, we began an investigation, and here are the following actions we are taking now. That is an important part of being a leader in a crisis.

And then that is when the real work happens, to really do the investigations, understand how it may be impacting the business, the stakeholders. Consulting legal and finance and all of the other folks within an organization is super important too.

And again, one of the things I counsel is read the signal. Don't overreact necessarily. Sometimes you will encounter a very vocal minority, and the temptation is to get out in front and tell the world something happened when only a tiny fraction of people accused you of something. You could be forced into responding to a negative and planting a negative idea in the minds of your audience when you were completely innocent. You see where I'm going with this?

So every situation is different, but yes, having the foundation of brand vision and values is super important, and having the foundational key message pillars. What are those four things you always want to get across when you're communicating about your brand? Whether you're a marketer or a comms person or a salesperson or biz dev or anyone. Accounts receivable, they all need to know what your brand stands for and how to communicate about it, no matter who their stakeholder is.

But from there, you really have to read it. It's like being on a football field. A good comms leader is going to have what football fans know as pocket presence. Do you know what pocket presence is?

Caleb: That's what my kids come up and ask me if I have when I come home from a trip. Pocket presents. Just maybe not the same.

Jeanne: It's a curveball that I just gave you, different sport. But with football, pocket presence is that 2.5 seconds or less that a quarterback has to figure out what to do after they get the snap. Am I going to throw? Am I going to run? Am I going to hand off? How do I avoid getting sacked? Should I make a run for it?

And you need to bring, as a quarterback, all the experience you have brought to that day, that moment, to make that decision. You have to have peripheral vision. You have to see around corners. You have to understand how to read the field. And the same is true sometimes of a crisis situation. You really have to understand how to size things up quickly, not to overreact, but how to acknowledge where things stand.

Usually it is a good idea, but like I said, every situation is different. Sometimes you want to overcommunicate what's happening in a crisis. Sometimes less is more, especially if it's tied up in a legal matter. You do well to keep whatever it is you are saying kind of short and sweet, because that can really impact any kind of legal situation. If that makes sense.

Caleb: I checked out some of the stuff that you're doing. I know there's retainer engagement, some clients have you on retainer, but you also do this thing, you do a sprint, which I think is a really interesting approach. We've seen sprints done before that are really helpful, because sometimes, especially at the executive level, or you have some key talent on the team, they're like, I have this amount of time to focus on this and I need to get it. And once you get up to speed you want to keep that going to a certain point. You don't want to have it be a trickle across every week for a quarter or whatever.

So I feel like you have some of that. I think you have one in November of this year, 2026. Do you touch on these? You mentioned brand pillars and other pieces. Do you find that you go through an umbrella of a lot of this stuff, or would this not be the spot for it?

Jeanne: Well, I do different kinds of engagements, and my November sprint is about leadership communication. So yes, that gets covered in the upcoming session that we have in November.

But in general, I work with clients in three different ways. I sometimes am engaged on retainer, especially with big enterprise companies that have complicated procurement and vendor processes. So I'm there, I'm on speed dial, I'm of service against a defined scope. Sometimes I'm just enlisted to do a project. Could be creating a crisis playbook. And sometimes I am enlisted to do a leadership communication workshop for a whole team, which sometimes is a two-day affair where it's a whole group session, and then I do a lot of one-on-one training with different executives, again to help them communicate with greater impact. Everyone's got their thing that they need to work on.

And so that is the nature of my November sprint. Not everyone has the corporate resources to spend on two days of training, or the time, but many, many people have that need. There's huge demand for it. People want to have greater confidence speaking. They want to stop hedging and apologizing and really get to the point. Being taken seriously is a big demand that people have, especially when they want to advance in their career.

So the sprint is called Level Up How You Show Up, and it is a four-session sprint that includes two group sessions and two private coaching sessions.

And I've developed an app called the Gravitas Gauge, which I customize for every scenario, and it's something you can use to practice. So if you speak into the app, it will actually hear your cadence. Are you doing uptalk, where everything you say ends in a question mark, thus undermining your credibility? Are you speaking too fast? Are you trailing off? And then it hears things like filler words. Really, actually. There's so many that we all have. It will flag when you use a filler word, and then it will catch you if you're apologizing.

We've all been there. I'm sorry, but can I just say. Or, to be honest. It's just a verbal tic that many people have. But if you say candidly, to be honest, if I'm being truthful, it would suggest that everything you said before that isn't entirely truthful. So it catches those things, and then it grades you, and then it suggests corrective action you can take. So all that comes in the sprint. It gives individuals access to a taste of some of the more in-depth corporate training that I do.

Caleb: Very cool. November, I'm just looking here, November 18th, the agenda is mindset and pocket presence, and then November 23rd, your intro, your message, your plan. And it looks like the Gravitas Gauge app comes with it. And then you get two live one-on-one sessions with you for thirty minutes each. Very cool. I love offers and seeing where people land with them. I think that this is really cool.

Well, what would you say for people that are curious, wonder if this is a fit for them, where is it best to follow along with you? Would it be LinkedIn, or what's best?

Jeanne: Yeah, LinkedIn is the best place to follow me. I'm really generous with giving advice nearly every day. I try and share some pearl of wisdom that will help you do a better job with your life or your job. And I'm also on TikTok. I'd say that LinkedIn is probably the best platform.

I did want to offer for your audience a discount to my sprint. If you use the code COMMUNITY, you'll get 25% off of the sprint training.

Caleb: Awesome. Well, thank you very much, Jeanne. Very good to hear from you and what you're working on. In an age where generative AI has just cranked the dial, it's kind of unhinged, with people able to communicate and so much of what sounds there, people are like, oh, it just sounds like AI, and they don't necessarily have language for it. It just sounds like this beige version of everything in human history. How important it is to be able to have signal. And as you find those strengths, whether at the executive level, or understand your role, to be able to sharpen that and really be tuned well. What an important thing to have right now.

Jeanne: For sure. I'd like to say that the new luxury is human interaction, human touch. Truly, truly the most luxurious thing that you can have. Nearly priceless.

Caleb: 100%. Jeanne, nailed it.