Crisis communication in the creative industry: Specifics of B2B and B2C communication of advertising agencies

Abstract

The article discusses the specifics of crisis communication in the creative industry, more particularly in the communication of advertising and creative marketing agencies on the Slovak market. The main focus is on the business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-customer (B2C) communication of advertising agencies. The content and the findings of the article are related to the author’s previous articles (Szabóová & Spálová, 2019; Szabóová, 2019) in which the author defines how creative employees or rather employees in advertising agencies perceive the crisis, maps the level and nature of the staffing and material provision of crisis communication in advertising agencies, etc. The author equally reflects on differences between the nature of crisis communication in the creative industry mapped by the author and between the anchoring of crisis communication by recognized and quoted experts (e.g., Chalupa, Chudinová, Vymětal, Bednář, and others) who perceive crisis communication rather as a field of management and crisis management of companies with an automatic transition to crisis communication with media. The article is comprised of selected findings and conclusions from the author’s dissertation (Szabóová, 2021) in which, based on the results of the research, the author defines the frequency of crisis communication, although not in general, but specifically in the B2B and B2C spheres in agencies, followed by the causes of the crisis in the observed spheres, tools of crisis communication, the specifics as well as the differences.