You can't control your circumstances. You can control the response. That was the through-line of PR in 2018 — and the brands that responded well built reputation capital they're still drawing on.

Which brand handled a crisis best?

Starbucks. When two Black men were arrested inside a Philadelphia store, the CEO didn't hide behind legal. He apologized, met the men, closed 8,000 stores for a day of racial-bias training, and made the fix part of the brand. Speed. Ownership. Structural response.

Which brand made silence the strategy?

Nike, with the Kaepernick campaign. It said one thing loudly, took the earnings hit for 48 hours, and let the stock — and the sales — do the rest. A textbook case in choosing your audience and letting the noise pass.

Which campaign moved the most units?

IHOP flipping to IHOb for a burger push. Ridiculed on Twitter. Wildly effective in the drive-through. Attention, correctly monetized, is still PR's job.

Which executive stood out?

Satya Nadella at Microsoft. He kept rebuilding the culture story — humility, growth mindset, enterprise dominance — and by the end of 2018 Microsoft had passed Apple in market cap for the first time in eight years. Communications compounded into valuation.

What did 5WPR take from 2018?

5WPR ran consumer, tech, and reputation programs across the same 12-month window. The pattern was clear: brands that treated communications as an operating function — not a marketing accessory — outperformed. Brands that outsourced their voice underperformed.

What still applies in 2026?

  • Speed beats polish in a crisis.
  • Silence is a valid tactic — if the audience you care about isn't the audience making the noise.
  • Culture stories, told consistently, compound.
  • Every 2018 PR win now shows up as a citation inside ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. That is where the reputation is stored now.

Ronn Torossian is the founder and chairman of 5W AI Communications, the AI Communications Firm. He is the publisher of Everything-PR and the author of two best-selling editions of For Immediate Release.