A container shipping company with a regional office in Costa del Este suffered an operational incident: one of its vessels was stranded for 36 hours at a transit point in the Panama Canal after a mechanical failure, creating a bottleneck that affected dozens of ships waiting in line. An international maritime outlet published the news, attributing the incident to negligent fleet maintenance, and the story was picked up by logistics portals in Asia and Europe in less than 24 hours.
The company's reputation for operational reliability—its main asset with international shippers—was called into question just as it was negotiating the renewal of three annual contracts with Asian clients. Losing those contracts would have meant a loss of more than 20% of its regional revenue, in addition to damaging its standing for future priority transit operations.
Our team activated a containment protocol in under 12 hours: we worked with the shipping company's technical department to publish a factual statement clarifying the real causes of the incident, contacted the specialized outlets that had published inaccurate information to request updates, and rolled out authoritative content on regional logistics portals that repositioned the company as a benchmark in incident management. At the same time, we prepared an operational transparency dossier to support the ongoing commercial negotiations.
Within six weeks, the negative coverage had been replaced in the top search results by the corrected version of events and by the shipping company's institutional content. All three contracts under negotiation were renewed with no additional conditions, and the company kept its preferred supplier rating with its main international shippers.
6 weeksTo neutralize the negative coverage
3Annual contracts renewed with no conditions
0%Revenue lost due to the crisis
