The Synthetic Crisis.

Brand crisis management was built for a world where the damaging thing was, broadly, true. A product failed, an executive said something, a factory did something. The playbook assumes you are responding to a fact.

Synthetic media breaks that assumption. A convincing fake video of a chief executive, a fabricated recall notice, a cloned voice on a customer call: none of it happened, and all of it can move a share price before lunch. Denial is slow, technical, and unconvincing, and by the time a brand has proved a negative, the audience has moved on with the wrong impression.

So the question I am working on is whether a brand can be prepared in advance. Not monitoring, not takedown requests, but whether the trust a brand has already built can be deliberately structured so that a fake fails to land.

The work sits on three foundations. Keller’s customer based brand equity model, for what brand strength is actually made of. Situational crisis communication theory, for how response strategy interacts with how blame is attributed. And inoculation theory, from persuasion research, for the idea that a small, early exposure to a weak attack can build resistance to a stronger one later.

The programme runs from 2026 to 2030 in the working professionals track, specialising in marketing management. Findings are being developed towards a journal publication.