SILENCE In PR Crisis Is Not A Strategy. It’s A Brand Suicide.
There is an unspoken playbook in Pakistani brand management that everyone follows without writing it down. When a crisis hits – like a labor issue, product failure, social media backlash, or an employee speaking out – the usual reaction is to say nothing. They call legal teams and PR agencies, try to kill the story, and wait for the news to die down.
While understandable, this approach only makes things worse in today’s social media age.
Over the past weeks, we have reviewed documented brand crises in Pakistan from 2015 to 2026 across various sectors. The pattern is clear and troubling: Pakistani brands are not just mishandling crises; they are repeating the same mistakes over and over, paying high costs, and not learning from them.
Silence is not neutral. In the social media era, silence is itself a statement and the public fills it with the worst possible interpretation.
Aurora Magazine’s industry column Ad Mad Dude captured the mentality precisely: “The Pakistani belief that killing a story will kill the crisis, local PR agencies and their clients cling to this idea like it’s a life raft. The problem with killing a story doesn’t silence the noise; it amplifies it.” The column discussed a real case involving a Pakistani mobile wallet company. When a journalist looked into its billing practices, the company responded not with facts but with legal threats and blocked access. The journalist published the story anyway. The brand lost on both the facts and the attempt to suppress the story.
This is not a one-off incident; It follows a pattern. Pakistan’s unofficial crisis response goes like this:
a) Deny,
b) Deflect to a third party,
c) Go silent,
d) Issue a forced or insincere apology only
e) Threaten critics with legal action,
f) Quietly remove the content without acknowledgment, and then
g) Wait.
Most Pakistani brands have yet to show that honesty, speed, and genuine accountability can work better as an alternative. The research gathered here suggests the cost of not demonstrating it is rising quickly.
One Well-known example is Khaadi. In May 2017, the fashion brand fired 32 workers for demanding the statutory minimum wage. Complaints included 14-hour shifts, 1,500 workers sharing three bathrooms, no employment contracts, no social security registration, and a female worker who reportedly tried to take her life after being penalised for an unscheduled lunch break. Khaadi’s first official response called the allegations a “conspiracy” and “hearsay.” When pressed further, the brand claimed that the workers belonged to a third-party vendor. This excuse fell apart when The Express Tribune revealed the vendor was essentially a Khaadi-owned entity created after workers began organising. The brand’s PR agency reportedly deployed paid social media activists to post pro-Khaadi content without disclosure. The public spotted this fake support, further amplifying the backlash.
Under public pressure, Khaadi signed an agreement. Months later, conditions got worse. Only 115 of approximately 3,000 workers had been enrolled in the EOBI social security program. Human Rights Watch cited the case in a 73-page report on labour practices in Pakistan. The case became a Palgrave Macmillan academic study. What started as a manageable labour dispute became a permanent mark on one of Pakistan’s most recognisable fashion brands, not because of the original crisis, but because of how the brand chose to respond to it.
KHAADI 2017
THE INCIDENT: Labour abuse allegations: below-minimum wages, 14-hour shifts, union-busting, worker hospitalisations.
THE RESPONSE: Denied as ‘conspiracy’. Deflected to a third-party vendor. Deployed undisclosed paid social activists. Signed agreement under pressure, then failed to implement it.
THE COST: HRW report. Academic case study. Permanent reputational association with labour exploitation. Sale controversies compounded the damage in subsequent years.
The 2025 Engine Pakistan case brings a new issue: Using silence in response to a rights violation. Model and content creator Ayesha Tahir discovered that the clothing brand had used her face in AI-generated promotional ads for a collection she never modelled for and never agreed to. They put her face on another model’s body and ran these images in both organic and paid advertising.
She attempted to resolve it privately, but Engine did not respond. She went public. Celebrities like Hania Aamir, Miss Universe Pakistan Erica Robin, and Romaisa Khan spoke out and brought attention to the case. Engine’s reaction was to quietly remove the images from its platforms without any statement, acknowledgment, or apology. The brand lets other voices, the model, the celebrities, and the media shape the story and its meaning. At the time of writing, no official response has been issued. The engine left the narrative to its critics and stepped away.
ENGINE PAKISTAN 2025
THE INCIDENT: AI-generated images using a model’s likeness without consent, used in paid advertising.
THE RESPONSE: No response to private outreach. No public acknowledgment. Silent removal of images after public outcry.
THE COST: National media coverage across major publications became a cautionary case in AI ethics and consent. Narrative entirely controlled by critics.
Multinationals operating in Pakistan have used more advanced versions of a silence strategy, taking advantage of weaker regulatory enforcement to avoid accountability that would be unavoidable elsewhere.
Nestlé Pakistan offers three separate case studies across a decade. In 2018, a forensic audit submitted to the Supreme Court revealed the company had extracted 4.43 billion litres of groundwater between 2013 and 2017, paying virtually nothing to any government. 28% of the waste was unexplained. Nestlé blamed the losses on the reverse osmosis process but could not account for them. The brand essentially waited out the controversy, and despite the Punjab Water Act 2019 being enacted as a regulatory consequence, enforcement remained minimal. In 2024, Swiss nonprofit Public Eye found that eight of nine Cerelac products sold in Pakistan contained added sugar, while European versions did not have any. Pakistan stayed silent, and Nestlé Pakistan remained silent. The company’s stock price dropped less than one percent and recovered within days.
The most tragic impact of Nestlé’s silence was on people. In February 2025, former factory worker Asif Javed, employed for 16 years, fired in 2016 for trying to form a union, set himself on fire outside the Lahore High Court after a nine-year legal battle. Nestlé had kept appealing judgments it had already lost. He died on March 1, 2025. Nestlé’s Human Resources called the claims”completely unfounded” and cited ongoing legal proceedings. The company had not reached out to his family. The widow confirmed this. Protests erupted outside the Lahore High Court and Nestlé’s headquarters. International labour groups called for an ILO investigation. Throughout, Nestlé Pakistan’s communications team offered no meaningful response.
The post-October 2023 pro-Palestine boycott movement brought the silence strategy to its most visible failure. Coca-Cola, Pepsi, KFC, McDonald’s, Nestlé, and Unilever were all targeted. A Pulse Consultant survey across 12 major Pakistani cities found that 83% of respondents supported boycotting multinationals perceived as complicit, and 79% confirmed active participation. Boycott sentiment was highest among upper-income consumers and among women, the primary household purchasing decision-makers.
Every targeted brand chose the same strategy: silence. Not one issued a direct response to the boycott movement in Pakistan. When Coke Studio Season 15 launched, the YouTube channel was flooded with negative comments and boycott calls. Coca-Cola’s response was to moderate the comments, a form of digital suppression that was itself noticed and reported. KFC endured the most extreme consequences: at least 20 attacks on outlets across four cities in April 2025, 178 arrests, and the death of one employee shot near Lahore. KFC’s parent company, Yum Brands, did not respond to requests for comment on the arrests. The death of an employee did not produce a public statement. The silence was total and in its totality, it communicated something far more damaging than any statement could have.
Why does this keep happening? The straightforward answer is uncomfortable.
PR budgets in Pakistan account for three to eight percent of total marketing budgets. There are no dedicated university programmes for public relations. The profession has learned mostly by handling press releases and organizing events, not by managing reputational crises in real time on fast-moving platforms that outpace any agency’s approval process.
Academic research supports what we see in practice. A study by researchers at NUST and COMSATS, surveying 400 Pakistani consumers, found that effective crisis communication significantly reduces the brand damage after mistakes. On the other hand, staying silent or denying the problem makes things worse. The study also showed that religiosity makes the negative effects stronger; highly religious consumers are less likely to forgive and retain trust. Pakistani brands face an environment where silence costs the most, yet they keep responding in ways that increase those costs.
Pakistani brands are operating in precisely the environment where silence is most costly and responding with precisely the strategy that costs the most.
The alternative is simple, but demands institutional courage that Pakistani brand management has yet to show consistently. It requires five key steps:
1) Responding within hours, not days;
2) Acknowledging what happened without hedging;
3) Explaining what is being done about it;
4) Following through visibly;
5) Keeping the crisis as closed until the affected parties, customers, workers and partners confirm it is. None of this is new. For thirty years, crisis communication experts everywhere have advised these steps.
What is different now is the cost of not doing it. The social media era has fundamentally changed the power dynamic between brands and the public. Information moves faster than any suppression effort. Screenshots are permanent. Silence is legible. When a brand goes dark, the audience does not conclude that the brand has nothing to say. It concludes that the brand has something to hide. That conclusion, once formed, is significantly harder to dislodge than anything the original crisis produced. As Ad Mad Dude puts it plainly, with a directness the industry rarely manages itself:
“Brand equity is not built by throwing money at big events with dull speakers or buying your way out of bad press. It’s built by fostering genuine connections, admitting when things go wrong, and most importantly listening.”
Sadly, this lesson is still mostly theoretical in Pakistan’s advertising world. The examples here show that the time to keep it theoretical has passed.
