The news cycle doesn’t wait for legal review. It rewards whoever frames the story first, and that puts PR teams in a position they’re unprepared for: communicate before you know what’s true or stay silent while someone else fills the space.
Indian corporate PR has long defaulted to silence in the early hours of a crisis. The instinct is reasonable. Say nothing until you know what happened, because a wrong statement is worse than no statement. The problem is that silence is itself a statement. It tells journalists, investors and the public that the company has no answer, and other people will provide one.
Zomato has generally handled this better than most. When controversies have broken around delivery partner conditions or platform fees, the company’s founders and communications team have been quick to acknowledge the issue publicly, even before they had a full picture. That acknowledgement isn’t an admission. “We’re aware, we’re looking into it” is not the same as conceding a point. It occupies the narrative space before someone else does. The complete response, with facts and context, comes later. But the company is already in the conversation.
The harder version is when the facts are genuinely unclear internally. A system outage, a supply chain disruption, an allegation still being verified: these demand communication before the company knows what it’s communicating about. HDFC Bank’s 2020 system outage is a clear case. The bank’s services went down on a high-transaction day, and customers couldn’t access their accounts or make payments. The initial communication was slow and vague. Customer complaints amplified across X (formerly Twitter), some accurate and some not, and the story became about both the outage and the bank’s silence. A faster, more direct acknowledgement, even without a resolution timeline, would have given the bank some control over the framing.
The structural reason this keeps happening is that PR teams sit downstream of legal and compliance on anything sensitive. Getting a statement approved during a fast-moving situation means moving faster than those approval chains normally allow. Companies that handle real-time crises well have pre-solved that problem. They know who can approve what level of statement in what timeframe. When something breaks, they’re not starting from scratch on the internal process while the story runs without them.
Marico is a company that’s been deliberate about this. Their communications function has clear escalation protocols that distinguish between situations requiring holding statements, partial responses, and full responses, with pre-approved templates for common crisis categories. When raw material price volatility has hit their margins and triggered analyst concern, they’ve moved quickly to acknowledge the pressure and frame the response, rather than waiting for the next earnings call to address what markets were already pricing in.
The practical framework is tiered response. The first communication, within the first hour or two, is acknowledgement without conclusions: “We’re aware of reports about X and are looking into it.” The second tier, a few hours later, shares what’s known and what’s still being established. The third is the complete, fact-checked response. This requires discipline at each stage to not say more than you know. But it avoids both failure modes: the hasty statement that turns out to be wrong, and the silence that lets the story be written entirely by others.
Speed and accuracy operate on different timelines. You can be fast on acknowledgement and careful on substance, as long as you’re clear about which you’re doing.
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