Communicating in Extreme Crises: Lessons from the Edge

This book is an evidence-based approach to handling common, extreme crises. Extreme crises involve strong moral outrage; moral outrage creates situations where traditional crisis communication advice no longer is effective. These extreme crises create unique demands for crisis managers. Moreover, much of the traditional advice and crisis key performance indicators (KPIs) no longer apply.

Validated through research, the book establishes the nature of extreme crises, the optimal crisis response for such crises, and the KPIs (outcomes) crisis managers need to measure for extreme crises. It serves as a guide for how to communicate effectively during extreme crises and provides advice based upon experimental research that validates the effectiveness of the crisis communication interventions. Readers do not require prior knowledge about crisis communication and crisis management as the book contains summaries of crisis communication and management before exploring the more specialized topic of extreme crises. Chapters include extended case studies, examining communication within such events as the Westpac money laundering, VW emissions and COVID-19 crises.

Communications in Extreme Crises will be of direct interest to scholars of crisis communication in public relations, corporate communication, strategic communication, organizational communication programs and management.

Elina Tachkova is a postgraduate researcher at Texas A&M University, USA. Her research focuses on crisis communication and especially the concept of ’scansis’, the unique intersection between an organizational crisis and a scandal, which is a new theoretical concept in crisis communication research.

W. Timothy Coombs is the George T. and Gladys H. Abell Professor in Liberal Arts at the Department of Communication at Texas A&M University, USA. His primary research area is in crisis communication, where he has been developing and testing the Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT) which provides theory ground and empirically tested strategic advice for the selection of crisis response strategies.