An incident is live, or you can see one coming. A product recall, a data breach, a leaked document, redundancies about to be announced, a regulatory decision going the wrong way. The story will move within hours. Handled badly, one day of headlines can undo years of reputation and unsettle the people your business depends on: customers, staff, investors, regulators. Handled well, a difficult story becomes evidence that your organisation tells the truth under pressure.
A crisis communications agency exists for exactly this window. Crisis communications is the work of deciding what an organisation says, to whom and in what order, while the window is still open; an agency brings the judgement and the media handling to do it at speed, so you shape the story rather than chase it. BIG puts senior people on that decision from the first call. Our roots are in crisis and reputation work, advising CEOs and boards when the stakes are whole-business. BIG is also an integrated PR, marketing and digital agency, so the response can run across media, social, internal and stakeholder channels at once.
Our crisis work runs across retail, healthcare, hospitality and consumer brands, from household names to organisations most people have never heard of. We name clients in conversation rather than on this page. A crisis engagement is rarely something an organisation wants advertised. The discretion we extend to them is the discretion you would want for yourself.
Call it crisis management, crisis PR or issues management: the support falls into three situations, each with its own tempo.
A live incident compresses every decision. We join fast, bring order to the first hours and stay until the story is contained.
Some crises publish their own schedule: a court ruling, a difficult set of results, a restructure, a planning decision. Foreseeable pressure is a planning problem, so we treat it like one. Where the challenge is sustained message alignment across audiences, our corporate communications team carries it; this page is about the sharp end.
The cheapest crisis is the one you rehearsed. Preparedness turns a 3am phone call into the execution of a plan.
Crisis work resists the case-study format. Success is usually measured in what did not happen: the resignation nobody demanded, the contract that survived, the second week of coverage that never arrived. Where clients allow us to tell the story, we will.
Our roots are in crisis and reputation work, counselling CEOs and boards through moments that put the whole business at risk. That heritage shapes how we weigh every judgement call, including the everyday public relations decisions that stop small issues becoming large ones.
The person advising you in hour one is experienced enough to tell you something you may not want to hear. No handoff to a junior team once the retainer is signed.
The measure we accept is whether trust held: with customers, staff, investors and the media who will still be covering you next year. Statement volume is activity; trust is the outcome.
Glasgow, Aberdeen and Manchester, with sector experience across the industries where incidents carry regulatory weight.
The best time for this conversation is before anything is wrong; the second-best time is now. Get in touch through our Glasgow, Aberdeen or Manchester office. If the situation is already live, say so when you call.
In the first hour of a crisis, establish which facts you can verify, agree a single spokesperson and issue a short holding statement showing you are aware and acting. Brief your own staff before they read the story somewhere else. Do not speculate about causes or say more than you know. The first hour’s job is to buy time for a considered response without leaving a silence for others to fill.
On a live incident, work starts with the first phone call: establishing facts, agreeing a holding position and sequencing who hears what. How fast the response lands depends on how reachable your decision-makers are and whether a plan already exists. Clients with preparedness retainers move fastest, because protocols and draft statements were written before anything happened.
A preparedness programme identifies the scenarios most likely to hit your organisation, writes the plan that covers protocols, roles and draft statements, trains the people who would front the response and then tests all of it in a live simulation. The point is to make the hard decisions calmly in advance, so they are not being made at speed under pressure.
Yes: BIG offers crisis communications retainers. A retainer combines preparedness work, such as planning, training and simulation, with priority access when something breaks. Agreed protocols mean the response starts from a plan we both already know, with no time lost on background. Retainers suit organisations whose sector, scale or public profile makes an incident a matter of when.
Speaking to journalists during a crisis is usually the right call, on your terms. Refusing to engage reads as evasion and hands the story to other voices, while an unprepared interview can create a second crisis. The working answer is a short, accurate statement, a briefed spokesperson and clear limits on what can be said while facts are being established. Media training matters more in a crisis than at any other time.
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