In late December 2022, Southwest Airlines collapsed under a winter storm. Over ten thousand flights were cancelled in a single week, due to both severe weather conditions and a flawed scheduling system. Crews were stranded in various cities, and passengers slept on cold, terminal floors while their luggage piled up in disorganized mountains across the country. The communications team of Southwest did what communications teams do in a crisis. Statements were issued by leading figures, and executives appeared on cable news to express regret and outline the path forward. None of this stopped the turmoil that these individuals had experienced. The story dominated headlines for weeks, and the reputational damage outlasted the operational recovery by more than a year. In this scenario, the communications team did not fail. They were sent to solve a problem that communications could not fix.
The Conventional Framing
Most organizations treat reputational risk as a communications discipline. There is a communicative function, a crisis playbook, a specific procedure for managing issues, and other systems in place depending on the team. The implicit theory underneath all of this infrastructure is straightforward. Reputation is what people say about you, and what people say about you can be managed by managing what you say. This framing makes a quiet assumption. It assumes that the gap between how an organization behaves, and how the public perceives that behavior, is a communications gap. It is a simple problem of messaging or tone.
Most of the time, this is not the case. The gap in question is more behavioral in nature. The organization is doing something that its stakeholders find objectionable, and no amount of work from the communications team will close the distance between the action and its reception. The press release cannot retract the layoff, and the CEO’s apology cannot undo the impact of poor decisions made by their company. The error this framing produces shows up everywhere in corporate life. Ultimately, it traces back to the failure to distinguish between cosmetic and structural reputational risk.
The Reputational Distinction
Cosmetic reputational risk is real, and it is genuinely fixable through better communications practice. It includes the tone-deaf marketing campaign that sounds offensive within certain cultural contexts, and the slow response time to an unfolding incident on social media. It also includes the poorly worded statement during a crisis, and the social media post that lands wrong because no one stopped to read it twice. These are real failures, and competent communications teams handle them well when given authority to do so. When Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) ran out of chicken at their United Kingdom locations, resulting in the closure of 700+ locations, a massive crisis ensued. The franchise’s communications team quickly improvised, and ran a full page newspaper ad that rearranged their logo to read “FCK”, along with an apology. Here, a self-deprecating and honest approach proved to be quite effective, turning a potential reputational hit into a viral marketing win within 48 hours. That is cosmetic reputational risk handled correctly.
Structural reputational risk is something else entirely. It stems from the core essence of what an organization is, and the actions it takes. It manifests as a business model that depends on practices stakeholders find increasingly objectionable, or operational decisions that prioritize short-term metrics over stakeholder relationships. It can also include behavioral issues among leadership that lead to incidents in which communications teams become the clean-up crew. These cannot be fixed through communications practice alone. The communications team can only manage the optics of an underlying problem it has no authority to address.
Perhaps the best example of structural risk is Amazon. For several years, Amazon has spent considerable resources on communications about worker safety, compensation, and benefits. However, their communications on these matters deviate significantly from the reality. The company is known for poor labor conditions in its warehouses, which have often made headlines. The reputational problem persists because it is structural, with injury rates and turnover figures being easily measurable and publicly accessible. No amount of public speaking or marketing initiatives will mitigate this problem, unless it is met with genuine structural change.
This produces the diagnostic question that every executive should ask when a reputational problem emerges. Is this cosmetic, or is this structural? The honest answer will determine whether communications is the right tool to deploy. Most organizations skip the question because the honest answer is uncomfortable. It is almost always at least partially structural, and the fix is typically more complex than just rewriting that press release.
Why Do Organizations Reach for the Wrong Tool?
Communications teams are asked to fix reputational problems because they are the only function with the word “communications” in their name. There are three structural reasons organizations default to the cosmetic frame, and all three are about institutional design rather than individual judgment.
The first is an asymmetry of authority. Communications teams typically report to executives who can be embarrassed by bad press, but have no formal authority over the operations that cause these underlying problems. The communications team is given the responsibility to manage their company’s reputation without being given the authority to address what is damaging it. A communications director will not have full leeway in influencing the broader actions of an organization or reversing past mistakes. They can only describe what others have done.
The second is an asymmetry of speed. Communications can be deployed in hours. A statement can be drafted by lunch and live by dinner. Meanwhile, operational changes can take months or years to be fully actualized. When a crisis is unfolding and the news cycle is measured in minutes, communications becomes the only lever available. It is not the right lever, but it is the only one that can be pulled in time. This produces a recurring institutional pattern in which the organization knows the underlying problem requires structural change and reaches for the communications response anyway, because the structural response cannot move at the speed of the crisis.
Career incentives also play a significant role in organizational responses to reputational risks. To acknowledge that a reputational problem is structural is to acknowledge that someone in operations or leadership made decisions that produced said problem. That conversation, although necessary, could implicate colleagues and suggest the necessity of internal accountability. Treating the problem as a communications failure can aid in avoiding accountability, and it allows people to keep their jobs. The communications team can take the blame, a new playbook can be established, and the underlying decisions that caused the problem remain untouched.
The cumulative effect is that organizations build elaborate communications apparatuses to manage reputational risk while leaving the actual sources of risk in place. The apparatus then fails predictably, not because communications practitioners are bad at their jobs, but because they were sent to fix the wrong thing.
What Does Better Practice Look Like?
If the conventional framing is wrong, the alternative is not to abandon strategic communications. It is to position communications correctly within a broader system that takes reputation seriously as a function of organizational behavior. Four practices distinguish organizations that handle reputational risk well from those that do not.
First, treat reputational risk auditing as a governance function rather than a communications function. Audits should examine operational, financial, and strategic decisions for their reputational exposure before incidents occur, not after. Crucially, the audit needs to be empowered to recommend changes to operations, not just changes to messaging. An audit confined to communications recommendations will produce communications recommendations regardless of where the actual risk lives.
Companies should also be able to discern cosmetic risk from structural risk in real time. When something goes wrong, the first analytical step is the diagnostic question. Communications responses should be calibrated to cosmetic problems and deployed quickly. Structural problems require different responses that can guarantee operational changes, leadership decisions, and in some cases public acknowledgment that the underlying behavior is changing. In the event of structural risk, this is a better course of action than focusing on messaging alone.
Organizations must also build out stakeholder maps that include adversaries. Most organizational stakeholder analysis focuses on the audiences leadership wants to engage. Sophisticated analysis includes the audiences that are more prone to scrutinizing the organization regardless of whether it chooses to engage with them. This could include activists, journalists, organized advocacy groups, and even competitors. These are the audiences that surface structural risks before management does. An organization that maps only its friendly stakeholders is mapping only half the field.
Lastly, it is important to treat reputation as a leading indicator of strategic health, not a lagging indicator of communications performance. If an organization’s reputation is declining, the first hypothesis should be that something is wrong with an underlying behavior, not the communications around it. The communications data is downstream of the operational reality. Reading it as a leading indicator of strategic health means asking what the organization is actually doing that is producing the reputational signal and addressing that, rather than calibrating the messaging around it.
What Could Southwest Have Asked?
Return to Southwest Airlines in December 2022. Imagine a leadership team that asked the diagnostic question early, before the apology video was recorded. Was this a communications problem or a structural problem? The honest answer was visible in the operational data months earlier. The flaws in their scheduling system had been flagged internally, and the crew tracking infrastructure was known to be inadequate. The communications response, however well executed, was applied to a structural failure that communications could not repair. A different response that included operational acknowledgment, public commitment to specific systemic changes, and the immediate authority to make them, might have shortened the reputational arc considerably. It would not have been a communications response. It would have been a structural one. Although communications functions are essential, they should be adequately distinguished from reputational risk management. Organizations that conflate the two without acknowledging the structural problems that create reputational risk will keep being surprised by incidents they thought they had handled.
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Raymond Puentes 