Kim Kardashian x UPDATE: Criticism as Storyline

"Formulated by a team of leading experts, none of whom are me."

That line comes from Kim Kardashian's campaign for the beverage UPDATE, and it is the key to one of the smartest product launches in recent years. Not because of its reach. Because of how it is built.

The spot doesn't hide its sender's vulnerabilities. It turns them into the script. What about her is real? What does she know about product development? Every question you could throw at her is asked in the film before anyone else can ask it.

In crisis communications, this move is called stealing thunder: naming your own weakness before someone else does. The research has been unambiguous for decades. A self-disclosed weakness is perceived as less serious than the same weakness uncovered by a third party. And whoever speaks first sets the vocabulary and the frame of the debate.

What is remarkable about the UPDATE campaign is not that it uses the principle, but how consistently. It doesn't answer one critical question — it stages the entire catalogue.

The second mechanism is less conspicuous and at least as important. The campaign claims competence exactly where it can be proven, and visibly delegates the rest. The expertise sits with the team; the sender supplies brand and story.

Translated into corporate communications: a statement that claims more than the company can prove is not protection — it is the next vulnerability. Credibility comes from the precise line between what you can do and what you buy in, have verified, or simply don't know.

The third mechanism is the most uncomfortable one, because it cannot be produced at short notice. The campaign works because its sender has spent years publicly building a narrative the spot can connect to. The self-irony reads as confidence only because the audience knows the backstory.

For companies, that means: the story that carries you through a crisis has to exist before the crisis. Whoever starts telling it mid-crisis is telling it into a vacuum — and the vacuum wins.

The mechanisms work without a global celebrity because they don't rest on fame but on sequence: who names the sore spot first?

Every company knows the situations where that question comes up. A recall. A plant closure. A compliance investigation. An unresolved succession. In each of these cases there is one question the company would rather not be asked in public — and precisely that question decides the outcome.

Composure begins where a company names its own sore spot first, instead of hoping nobody finds it.

One caveat belongs in the picture: stealing thunder applies to questions of perception. A real defect gets fixed, not communicated. The campaign can afford its irony because the product behind it works. Communication doesn't replace substance; it orders it.

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Laura Montag advises companies and executives in crises, proceedings, and special situations. View services