Crisis communication as strategic communication: process and insights

A crisis disrupts the pursuit of organizational goals. Crisis communication creates temporary goals required to navigate this disrupt to strategy. Moreover, crisis communication helps to reformulate new strategy once a crisis is resolved. This chapter explores how crisis communication connects with strategy and strategic communication. The first section explicates the connection between crisis communication and strategy. The second section highlights key tasks related to crisis communication including building agility and creating crisis messages. The final second elaborates on the contingent nature of crisis communication by considering important factors that affect those contingencies including the timing of the crisis response, the crisis type, the rhetorical arena that forms around a crisis, and the emotions evoke by crises. The chapter provides a picture of how crisis communication fits with strategic communication and why contingencies fit better with crisis communication that a focus on best practices.