Preparing for the inevitable: Strategically navigating negative publicity in the contemporary business landscape

Abstract

In the contemporary business landscape, the effective management of negative publicity stands as a critical challenge for organizations seeking sustained success. This prompts a crucial inquiry: How should firms handle different instances of negative publicity? This article presents a strategic and comprehensive review of existing approaches to navigating the complexities of negative publicity. While not rooted in an empirical study, this work contributes to the literature through a systematic literature review encompassing 63 peer-reviewed journal publications spanning from 2008 to 2022. We find that effective management of negative publicity depends on a dual-focused strategy: On the one hand, firms must deploy proactive measures to prevent the effects of a negative event; on the other hand, they need to enact strategies to promptly respond to a negative event once it transpires. Therefore, we propose a framework capturing the pre- and post-negative-publicity strategies that firms can adopt in situation-specific contexts. Within this framework, we establish connections between these strategies and two types of negative publicity (value-based and performance-based), along with the sources of negative publicity situations, identifying customers, employees, and the company itself as critical triggers.