The following is a guest piece written by Shannon Reedy, chief brand officer at Terakeet. Opinions are the writer’s own.
A brand crisis used to play out in predictable stages: a spark, a media cycle, a response, after which it dies down. In the era of artificial intelligence, that playbook has grow to be outdated, as demonstrated by the recent Campbell’s Soup controversy.
After an alleged executive conversation went viral, the fallout was swift and measurable. Beyond traditional media coverage, the narrative was quickly reinforced across AI platforms and engines like google, extending its reach and impact.
The incident reveals a brand new crisis-management reality. When AI becomes the first stop for information, a negative brand story spreads faster and lingers longer, and may dangerously represent “truth” for critical audiences like your employees, shareholders and customers.
It raises a critical query for brands: How do you respond when the algorithms are shaping the story faster than you may?
Brand havoc
In November, news surfaced a couple of lawsuit alleging that a Campbell’s executive made disparaging remarks about the company’s products, referring to them as “highly [processed] food” for “poor people.” The executive also allegedly claimed the brand uses “bioengineered meat” and made derogatory comments about employees.
In the aftermath, Terakeet’s evaluation found that Campbell’s experienced a surge to 70% negative news sentiment and page-one search real estate flooded with damaging narratives.
Anyone who searched the Campbell’s brand or its products would now be met with the story in distinguished Google features like the news feed, People Also Ask section and AI Overviews. Years of selling and branding were wiped away right away.
One of the biggest risks AI introduces is its inherent bias toward negative information. In the digital ecosystem, sensational or controversial stories attract outsized attention, and once they gain momentum, they’re quickly reinforced and amplified across platforms.
That’s exactly what happened with Campbell’s. Coverage spread rapidly across social media and traditional news outlets, making a flood of recent content that AI systems began ingesting and reinforcing.
The story drove a spike in searches around “3D-printed meat” and questions on whether Campbell’s uses real meat, and generative AI didn’t step in to correct the narrative. Instead, it surfaced fragmented context, pulling language from Campbell’s own website referencing “mechanically separated chicken,” which further muddied perception reasonably than clarifying it.
The consequences of a reputational event like this extend well beyond headlines. In addition to the immediate erosion of consumer trust driven by questions on product integrity, Campbell’s experienced a 7.3% drop in its stock price, per Terakeet’s evaluation. That translates to a drop of $684 million in market capitalization.
Consumer response followed quickly. Calls for boycotts emerged in response to the executive’s flippant remarks, underscoring how leadership behavior and executive visibility can directly influence purchasing decisions and brand loyalty.
The ripple effects are more likely to extend into talent and employer branding as well. Allegations surrounding the worker who recorded the remarks — and their subsequent termination and lawsuit — introduce one other layer of reputational risk. For prospective employees, these narratives shape perceptions of company culture, leadership accountability and psychological safety, all of which may impact recruiting and retention.
Be proactive, not reactive
The Campbell’s Company issued formal statements and published a press release on its website reaffirming that the ingredients utilized in its products are real. This traditional public relations response helped reintroduce factual information into the conversation, and early signals suggest that AI systems are already starting to reference the company’s clarification.
However, this alone just isn’t enough to reset the narrative now circulating online. Once controversy is widely distributed across news, social and search, it becomes a part of the data layer AI relies on. This makes online perception harder to correct after the fact.
Ideally, Campbell’s would have taken a more proactive approach, strengthening its search presence and narrative landscape before a crisis emerged. By publishing authoritative, clarifying assets prematurely, the brand could have established a stronger foundation. Brands which have strong owned digital assets in place effectively create a firewall that helps protect against misinterpretation when scrutiny inevitably arrives.
When page-one search results are fortified with credible, brand-controlled content, negative moments are far less more likely to dominate visibility or linger after the news cycle fades. Strong search foundations don’t eliminate risk, but they significantly reduce how long and the way loudly controversy echoes online.
Equally essential is ongoing monitoring of how your brand appears in generative AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. As more consumers turn to those tools for news and context, AI-generated summaries have gotten a primary touchpoint for brand perception. Ensuring accuracy in these outputs is a critical part of contemporary repute management.
Campbell’s experience underscores a broader shift in how brand repute is formed and sustained. In an environment where engines like google, social platforms, and generative AI systems collectively shape public perception, repute is not any longer something brands can correct after the fact.
The brands that can emerge strongest are those who treat brand visibility and their repute as a strategic asset, investing early of their online narrative clarity, search real estate and AI sentiment. Because once a story takes hold, the query isn’t whether it’s going to influence AI — it’s how your brand is consistently shaping AI outputs.
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