Cheryl Chung outlines how FMCG brands should navigate today’s high-stakes terrain of scrutiny, scandal and social fallout
Two years after Nigel Farage exposed Coutts’ decision to shut his accounts, igniting a fierce debate over “debanking,” political bias, and corporate accountability, the NatWest Group’s recent settlement with the Reform UK leader appears to draw a line under the controversy.
But the fallout lingers. The scandal has cost NatWest dearly with £7 million in severance payouts, a £3.2 million FCA penalty, and a reputational blow that turned a routine banking decision into a national reckoning over free speech, corporate influence, and who gets excluded from the financial system.
A fundamental shift
This case highlights a fundamental shift in how reputational crises now play out – not just in banking, but across all retail and FMCG sectors.
Gone are the days when scandals followed reasonably predictable scripts of operational missteps followed by damage control and gradual recovery. Today, even routine business decisions can detonate into full-blown culture-war battles. Companies no longer just face scrutiny around their operations, they can get dragged into ideological conflicts, branded as heroes or villains in narratives that spiral beyond their control.
The current landscape actively encourages controversy – social media algorithms thrive on outrage, while many traditional outlets increasingly dissect business decisions through ideological prisms. In this volatile environment, the old crisis playbook, where legal teams handled liability in isolation and PR crafted sanitised statements, is dangerously outdated.
Indeed, as PwC’s latest Global Crisis and Resilience Survey warns, organisations can no longer address complex and interconnected risks in silos. Companies must bridge the divide between legal, communications, and leadership.
BrewDog’s workplace culture crisis stands as another cautionary tale in crisis mismanagement against this backdrop, as well as demonstrating eventual course-correction. When allegations of toxic workplace practices erupted in 2021, the company’s initial combative stance, including defamation threats against whistleblowers, only poured fuel on the fire.
The turning point came when BrewDog abandoned its aggressive and heavy-handed defence. Behind the scenes, it resolved employment disputes discreetly, while publicly rolling out its “BluePrint” worker reforms and submitting to third-party HR audits. The dual-track approach of legal pragmatism paired with transparency and visible accountability helped to steady the ship. Yet for all BrewDog’s eventual damage control scars remain, highlighting that trust, once fractured, is slow to rebuild.
The new normal of crisis management
Such cases highlight that legal and PR strategies must work coherently from the earliest warning signs. That’s exactly why I partnered with Pannone Corporate – one of the UK’s few accredited specialist media law teams outside London – to launch Restore. The integrated approach offers a seamless legal and communications response, helping brands prepare for, manage, and recover from reputational crises before irreparable damage is done.
There are a number of common critical moments where this legal-PR interplay can prove decisive:
Managing investigative journalism
The moment a company receives notice of an impending exposé marks the beginning of a critical countdown. Legal teams must immediately assess the investigative claims for defamation risks, privacy breaches, or regulatory violations – weighing whether to challenge the story pre-publication or prepare rebuttals.
Simultaneously, corporate communications professionals are required to craft counter-narratives that address public concerns without conceding undue ground. Overly aggressive legal threats can paint a company as obstructive, while weak messaging may imply guilt and create soundbites for critics.
For example, when two national newspapers prepared damaging allegations against an FCA-regulated company, Restore’s legal experts issued detailed defamation warnings alongside the firm’s rebuttal – leading to the dilution of the allegations made and more balanced reporting. Meanwhile, communications specialists focused on correcting the subsequent inaccurate reporting by a global market intelligence agency.
Handling sting operations
Secret filming and undercover exposes represent a crisis scenario of a different magnitude. Suddenly, organisations aren’t just responding to allegations, they’re often operating in the dark.
Legal teams must move fast to dissect the methodology, searching for violations – whether it’s breaches of the Editors’ Code or data protection laws. Every irregularity becomes potential leverage. Meanwhile, corporate communications professionals should be preparing spokespeople to weather the incoming media hurricane.
The most effective responses combine two crucial elements: legal pushback on deceptive editing or unethical journalism on the one hand, together with PR providing counterarguments and wider context-setting that helps take back control of the narrative.
Deploying pre-publication remedies
Legal mechanisms like injunctions and privacy claims remain powerful options, but their deployment requires careful judgment. A contemporary approach favours calibrated escalation.
Direct engagement with editors to address factual inaccuracies or disproportionate claims should be the first approach. Many disputes can be resolved at this stage through constructive dialogue and evidence-based corrections.
Where significant breaches occur, formal legal notices may become necessary. But even then, success depends on parallel communications efforts that position the actions as defending legitimate rights and principled stands, rather than suppressing reporting. The messaging must emphasise transparency and proportionality to maintain credibility with stakeholders.
Dealing with intense scrutiny
Perhaps most challenging are crises that become political and financial flashpoints. What begins as a customer complaint can rapidly become a parliamentary inquiry. In turn, effective preparation now often includes the likes of drafting select committee testimony alongside legal submissions, and training executives to handle difficult encounters without appearing evasive.
In another instance the Restore team handled, the supply chain of one of the UK’s fastest growing fashion retailers found itself in the spotlight of media scrutiny.
In addition to managing the media response, we implemented an extensive stakeholder engagement plan, working with the board to shape announcements to the City and providing input into the group’s immediate and long-term response. In parallel, we helped prepare the business for appearances before three government select committees and designed a range of initiatives to rebuild trust with consumers and Parliament.
Minimising long term reputation loss
The final test lies in reputation repair, a process complicated by digital permanence. Traditional “apology and move on” strategies falter when past crises remain eternally searchable.
Forward-thinking organisations now combine legal closure (such as settlements with expiry clauses on commentary) with reputation management across multiple platforms (including careful management of how and when to engage in online conversations) and critically, measurable and authentic behavioural change.
As the Farage and BrewDog cases illustrate, today’s crises extend far beyond legal settlements or press releases. They persist – reshaping search results, influencing policy debates, and lingering in public perception.
Against this reality, approaches to reputation management can no longer involve isolated legal or PR strategies, they require close interplay between the two.
Cheryl is a renowned expert in crisis management who has worked with some of the UK’s most prestigious private sector organisations on the transformation of their reputation. She has represented numerous listed FMCG organisations including McDonalds, Boohoo and Heineken.
