Brand Under Pressure — Zuriel Foods' 5-Day Reputation Crisis

A four-round, advanced corporate-brand and crisis-communication simulation set inside Zuriel Foods Plc., a listed Nigerian FMCG (NGN 84bn revenue, 2,300 staff, #2 seasoning brand at 24% share) built since 1991 on one promise: "Nourishing Nigerian families." On Thursday 14 May 2026 a consumer influencer alleges the flagship seasoning hides an undeclared additive; the video hits 2.4M views in 18 hours, #ZurielExposed trends, two retail chains (31% of modern-trade volume) delist, week-one sales fall 22%, 89% of mentions turn negative, and the corporate-reputation tracker drops from 72 to 51 in 72 hours. The firm's own lab needs 5 days; the response must be locked first. Playing the Brand Director with a NGN 600M contingency budget, you treat the corporate brand as socially constructed (Otubanjo) and manage the coherence between projected identity, actual substance, and stakeholders' construed image. Round 1 — diagnose the crisis as a coherence failure, locating the gap between the stated 'all-natural' identity, the permitted-but-undisclosed additive (the say-do gap), and the construed image, and separating a genuine substance problem from a perception problem. Round 2 — align the identity before communicating: defend 'all-natural' and reformulate, reframe to 'safe, transparent, trusted' with full disclosure, hold and contest on facts, or reposition around heritage — and decide whether substance must change to make the new identity true. Round 3 — allocate the NGN 600M across a menu (CEO statement, independent third-party lab certification, influencer & retailer re-engagement, paid corrective advertising, a transparency microsite with batch traceability, frontline briefing), sequence it against the 5-day window, choose spokesperson and tone, and keep messages consistent across consumers, retailers, the NAFDAC regulator, employees and investors — because inconsistency itself signals evasion. Round 4 — the facilitator reveals the lab result (clean or a minor confirmed deviation) and you must hold a coherent repositioning that rebuilds reputation over a quarter without erasing 35 years of equity, then pitch the board and a skeptical journalist. The math rewards substance-before-message, credibility (certification, traceability) over reach, stakeholder coherence, calibrated response under uncertainty, and trust repair even when vindicated — and punishes the five classic errors: messaging over an open say-do gap, premature defiance, divergent stakeholder messages, buying reach instead of proof, and panic repositioning. Final KPIs: Reputation tracker (0–100), Perceived Consistency (0–100), Sales Recovery (% vs pre-crisis), and Negative Share-of-Voice (%, lower better).