Honest brand messaging during crises: communication principles from retail marketing practitioners

This study examines how brands can communicate honest messages effectively during organisational crises, addressing a largely underexplored intersection between brand honesty and crisis communication. Drawing on interviews with 20 marketing practitioners, it identifies six principles of honest crisis communication: being open and proactive, proof-based, consistent and authentic, accountable and responsive, respectful and compassionate and resolution-focused. While these principles align with established concepts of transparency, truthfulness, authenticity, ethics and care, they also highlight three distinctive focal points: proactivity, respect and resolution-focused messaging. Together, they conceptually signal the importance of collaborative relationship building in crisis communication. That is, proactively engaging stakeholders, treating them with respect and working with them towards constructive resolutions. This collaborative-relationship insight illustrates the potential utility of Situational Crisis Communication Theory for designing crisis messages that are both honest and relationally effective. The qualitative findings from this study require further validation, as they are based on a purposefully recruited but small group of retail practitioners with experience across fashion and non-fashion domains. Applying these insights to sectors facing different types of crises – such as higher education – will help test how universal the proposed principles are across crisis contexts.