Orchan Consulting | Asia Sdn Bhd

Most crisis management plans fail the moment reality hits. Here’s why your playbook is probably useless -- and what actually works when reputation is on the line. Crisis management plans look great on paper. Thick binders. Colour-coded tabs. Executive signatures on the front page. But when the fire alarm goes off? Most of those plans are about as useful as duit pisang. Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the majority of crisis plans fail the second they’re needed. Not because people don’t mean well, but because the plans are written for boardrooms, not for the chaos of real life. The Big Flaws We See Over and Over 1. Too Slow to Matter Plans are often thick binders or pretty PDFs that require endless approvals before anyone can act. By the time the press statement is “perfected,” the damage is already viral. 2. Too Sanitised to Be Believed Crisis templates are full of jargon and corporate-safe language. But in a real crisis, audiences crave honesty , not clichés. If your respons...

We talk a lot about “brand awareness” in Malaysia. Campaigns, events, social spends... everyone wants eyeballs. But let’s be honest: awareness is the easy part. What most brands can’t seem to crack is trust . And without trust, all that awareness is just noise. We’ve all seen it. A campaign goes viral, hashtags trend for a week... and then… silence. Or worse, the brand takes a hit when people start asking: “Okay, but do I actually believe them?” The Malaysian Trust Deficit Here’s the kicker: Malaysians are naturally sceptical. Years of over-promising (and under-delivering) have made audiences sharper, quicker to call out BS. Add to that the megaphone of social media, where one bad review on TikTok or a rant in a WhatsApp group can undo months of brand building. And let’s not pretend we haven’t seen brands get dragged in the comments -- sometimes deservedly, sometimes not. That’s the reality of reputation management in Malaysia today. We’ve sat with brands that had all the awarene...

Imagine this: a Kuala Lumpur campaign drops... AI-powered, human-driven, and impossible to ignore. It blends machine precision with heartfelt stories that spark chatter from Brickfields to Ipoh. The magic isn’t in the algorithm; it’s in the human instinct that makes people stop scrolling. That balance sits at the heart of a recent MarTech piece, “The 4 Ps of Marketing Reimagined for the AI Era.” It argues that Product, Price, Place, and Promotion are morphing into a fluid, data-fuelled reality. And we agree... with one caveat: you can’t automate authenticity. As a KL-based communications agency, we live this daily. Malaysia’s multicultural mix -- Bahasa Malaysia, Manglish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Tamil, indigenous voices -- forces us to ask tough questions. How do we harness AI in PR and marketing without flattening the cultural soul of a campaign? The MarTech conclusion makes perfect sense: AI is a collaborator, not a replacement. But let’s be honest; lean on it too much, and you end up...

A major Malaysian telco announces a flashy sustainability pledge on Earth Day: green filters, eco-hashtags, celebrity endorsement etc. Thousands of likes overnight. Weeks later, customers discover nothing has changed in their carbon-heavy operations. Cue viral thread, boycott calls, and corporate comms teams breaking into a cold sweat. In Southeast Asia’s hyper-connected markets, “performative” moments aren’t just awkward -- they’re career-enders.  Performative communication is smoke and mirrors; the virtue signaling without the virtue. The glossy press release that promises the world but can’t even deliver a paper straw. The diversity campaign launched for PR points, while the boardroom still looks like it’s stuck in 1985. Purposeful communication ? Stories rooted in intent, backed by action, delivered with consistency. And in a region where 25 million Malaysians (74% of the population) live online, the watchdogs aren’t asleep. One skeptical TikTok or WhatsApp rant can dismant...

Let’s call it what it is: planned obsolescence is when brands knowingly design products to break, fade, or lose relevance long before they should. It’s profitable, yes, but it’s also reckless. And in markets like Malaysia and across ASEAN, consumers are no longer turning a blind eye. The circular economy in Malaysia is shifting from policy chatter to boardroom reality. From the Green Technology Master Plan Malaysia to the Circular Economy Roadmap 2030 , governments are signalling that the throwaway economy is running on borrowed time. Brands that don’t adapt? They risk getting left behind by eco-conscious consumers in Southeast Asia who are demanding better. Why This Matters in ASEAN Globally, 92 million tons of textiles end up in landfills every year. Electronics pile up, appliances die early, and consumers pick up the bill, again and again. But in ASEAN, a region with young, fast-growing populations, the scale of waste is staggering. The good news: ASEAN sustainability str...