When Marketing Becomes Crisis Communication

Sometimes the strongest evidence that your marketing strategy is working is your willingness to abandon it.

Marketing teams spend a lot of time planning editorial calendars, campaigns, social posts, emails, product launches, promotions and events. Carefully timed seasonal content is planned three months in advance. There's value in that discipline. A good marketing strategy shouldn't depend on waking up every morning and deciding what you're going to talk about that day.

But every editorial calendar contains an unspoken assumption: The world will look reasonably similar when this publishes.

Sometimes it doesn't. A product gets recalled, a natural disaster dominates the news, an major event changes what your audience cares about overnight, or, in the most extreme example of my career, a global pandemic suddenly makes almost everything you planned to say feel irrelevant.

That's when marketing becomes crisis communication. And the first question isn't necessarily: What should we say? Sometimes it's: Should we still say what we were planning to say at all?

When the Context Changes, the Message Changes

One of the hardest parts of crisis communication is that your original message doesn't have to be wrong to suddenly become inappropriate. Taco Bell faced this recently when a 2026 lettuce health scare and recall suddenly changed the conversation around its food.

Whatever was sitting on the marketing calendar before that news broke became secondary to what customers actually wanted to know: Is the food safe?

The normal promotional message might still have been perfectly good marketing a day earlier. The products hadn't suddenly become less appealing. The creative hadn't become less clever. The audience's priority had changed.

The same problem can happen when a crisis has absolutely nothing to do with your organization. Imagine you've spent weeks preparing an Earth Day campaign celebrating forests, nature and the outdoors. The creative is approved. The social posts are scheduled. The emails are ready. Then devastating California wildfires dominate the news.

Your campaign hasn't necessarily become factually inaccurate. But the context surrounding it has completely changed. Run the campaign exactly as planned and your brand may appear disconnected from what your audience is actually experiencing. That's the danger of treating an editorial calendar like a contract instead of a plan.

Sometimes the Warning Is a Missing Bottle of Hand Sanitizer

I worked in broadcast television when COVID arrived, and one of my clearest memories from those strange early weeks is remarkably mundane. I was standing in Staples looking for hand sanitizer. In early March 2020, we were preparing for Lollypop Farm's Tails of Hope Telethon at Eastview Mall. Events like this were an important part of local television partnerships. News could broadcast live from the event, introduce viewers to the organization and the people or animals being helped, and use the immediacy of television to encourage donations.

I was responsible for our station table and stopped at Staples to pick up coloring sheets. I also went looking for a bottle of hand sanitizer to put beside the colored pencils, as I normally would. There wasn't any. We still held the telethon. We managed to squeeze it in roughly two weeks before the COVID lockdowns began.

Then the entire live-event playbook disappeared.

What Happens When the Event Can't Happen?

COVID didn't just create an empty events calendar. The organizations we worked with still needed support. Golisano Children's Hospital still had children and families who needed care. Epilepsy-Pralid, Inc. still had a mission to fund. Organizations that depended on events such as Miracle Kids or the Chocolate Ball couldn't simply wait indefinitely for ballrooms, crowds and live television hits to return. Their missions hadn't stopped because their events had.

So we had to ask a different question: What was the event actually supposed to accomplish?

That's where crisis communication starts becoming strategy again. A fundraiser isn't valuable because people are physically standing in a ballroom. The event creates attention. It tells the organization's story. It introduces people to the mission. It shows donors where their money goes. It creates an emotional connection and gives people an opportunity to contribute.

Those things could still happen. They just needed a different vehicle.

Protect the Purpose, Not the Format

The station worked with organizations to rebuild some of those partnerships as 30-minute prerecorded programs. Instead of relying on live hits from an event, we gave organizations time to explain their mission, introduce the people they served, and show viewers what donations made possible. Then we could use the rest of the station's marketing ecosystem to support it. The packages could include promotional spots, emails, social media campaigns and at least one prime-time airing across all three stations.

It wasn't the Chocolate Ball recreated for television. That was the point.

Trying to replicate every element of the original event would have meant protecting the format rather than protecting what the event was designed to accomplish.

We identified the value television had originally brought to the partnership and found another way to provide it.

That's a lesson that extends far beyond COVID.

• A trade show gets canceled.

• A product launch gets delayed.

• A spokesperson suddenly becomes unavailable.

• A recall changes what customers need from you.

• Breaking news makes the clever social campaign sitting in your scheduler feel wildly inappropriate.

The instinct is often: How do we save the campaign?

Try asking: What was the campaign supposed to accomplish? Awareness? Donations? Leads? Education? Community participation? Customer reassurance?

Once you identify the actual objective, you have considerably more freedom to change everything around it.

The Editorial Calendar Is a Tool, Not a Commandment

This is where crisis communication can become uncomfortable for marketers.

We've invested something in the original plan. Time. Money. Creative work. Meetings. Executive approvals. Paid media. Maybe an entire campaign is already built in HubSpot and waiting to launch.

Scrapping it feels wasteful, but sunk cost isn't a communication strategy. Your audience doesn't care how many hours went into the campaign they're no longer interested in. They care whether you're useful now. That doesn't mean brands need to comment on every breaking news story. In many cases, they shouldn't.

Sometimes you rewrite the message, provide practical information, or postpone the campaign entirely. Sometimes that means replacing the format while protecting the objective. And sometimes the smartest communication decision is to stop talking for a moment and listen.

Speed Matters. So Does Judgment.

Crisis communication creates an uncomfortable tension. Move too slowly and your scheduled marketing can make your organization look oblivious. Move too quickly and you risk reacting before you actually understand what's happening.

That's why I don't think crisis communication begins with writing a statement, it begins with situational awareness. What happened? What do we actually know? What don't we know yet? Does this directly affect our employees, customers or community? Does our scheduled content conflict with what's happening? Are people expecting information from us?

And perhaps the most important question: Do we have something useful to contribute? Not every crisis needs your brand's perspective. But every significant crisis should make someone look at what's sitting in the publishing queue.

Marketing Strategy Isn't the Same as the Marketing Plan

Marketing loves consistency. Post regularly. Maintain your brand voice. Stick to the campaign. Follow the content calendar.

Those are useful practices when the environment around you is reasonably predictable.

Consistency of purpose matters more than consistency of execution. The Lollypop Farm telethon happened as planned. A few weeks later, that would have been impossible. The Chocolate Ball couldn't simply become a Chocolate Ball without a ballroom. The reason those partnerships existed hadn't disappeared. The audience still needed the story. and the nonprofit still needed support. The station still had the ability to connect the two. The format was the disposable part.

That's what I think good crisis communication requires: knowing what you're actually trying to protect. Sometimes it's accurate information. Sometimes it's customer trust. Sometimes it's a nonprofit's ability to reach donors. Sometimes it's simply recognizing that the clever social post you scheduled three weeks ago no longer belongs in today's conversation.

An editorial calendar is a plan based on what you knew when you made it. Strategy is understanding what should remain when that plan no longer works. And sometimes the strongest evidence that your marketing strategy is working is to throw it out.

When Marketing Becomes Crisis Communication