What happens when a crisis occurs?

Because Wilkinson Confidante advisers are already briefed on your organisation, stakeholders, and vulnerabilities, the response is immediate and strategic. There is no onboarding delay. This is the fundamental difference between a retained crisis communications consultant and a crisis PR agency engaged at the moment of incident.

Wilkinson Confidante | Reputation Management Retainer

Wilkinson Confidante is the retained reputation management and crisis communications consultant service of Wilkinson Group. It gives CEOs, internal PR, boards, and general counsel in Australia access to senior counsel before, during, and after a reputational event. Most organisations only think about reputation management after an incident has already occurred.

Wilkinson Confidante is built for a different kind of client. This is a client that understands reputation is built slowly and lost quickly, and that the organisations best positioned to manage a crisis are those with a trusted adviser already in place. To support this, Wilkinson Group Managing Director Peter Wilkinson brings 24 years of crisis and reputation management experience to every retainer, alongside a senior team with backgrounds in investigative journalism, financial services, political communications, and regulatory affairs.

How Confidante Builds Reputational Trust Over Time

Reputation is built one decision at a time, and it is far harder to rebuild once lost. Wilkinson Confidante applies our reputation management framework built on truth, transparency, and traceability as an ongoing retained relationship rather than a one-off engagement.

Note: Traceability is more than having good ethics, good policies, and a clean history. It’s about those things being auditable when it matters most.

What a retainer adds that a single engagement can’t: Wilkinson Confidante monitors stakeholder sentiment continuously across audiences, catching shifts in perception before they become reputational events. The framework is applied personally by Peter Wilkinson, who has led reputation management counsel for Australian CEOs and boards for 24 years the same adviser who built the framework is the one applying it to your organisation, month after month.

Peter Wilkinson, Managing Director and founder of Wilkinson Group, Sydney

Crisis Readiness, Built In Before the Call Comes

The time between an emerging issue and a full crisis is shrinking. Indeed, AI-generated information or disinformation can amplify and weaponise an incident within minutes. That’s why Crisis Preparedness means the intelligence is already live, the protocols have been tested, and the Crisis Management Team is already practised before an event occurs.

Wilkinson Confidante provides crisis simulation, tested responses and on-call senior counsel. When an issue or crisis breaks, the response is strategic, not a reaction.

Data breaches and cybersecurity incidents now represent some of the fastest-moving reputational crises in Australia. Wilkinson Confidante works with crisis communications consultant teams inside large organisations to prepare for this moment in advance.

When a data breach is confirmed, the external communications response is already prepared, regulatory disclosure obligations are understood, and senior counsel is available immediately. No organisation facing a cybersecurity incident should be drafting its first public statement at 11pm.

Crisis preparedness at this level is shaped by Mark Abernethy, whose background spans financial services, defence, infrastructure and resources sector communications.

Mark Abernethy, Senior Crisis Communications and Reputation Management Consultant at Wilkinson Group, Sydney

Issues Intelligence, Interpreted by Senior Counsel

Every significant reputational event, positive and negative, can be anticipated before it happens. Issues management is that discipline, and it is the discipline most organisations invest in last. As a result, Wilkinson Confidante provides early, continuous AI-powered monitoring across media, social, regulatory, and broadcast channels.

This covers narrative tracking, sentiment analysis, and disinformation detection, all interpreted by senior issues management counsel in Australia to distinguish genuine reputational threats from background noise. After all, any organisation can buy a media monitoring subscription. What Wilkinson Confidante provides is 24 years of crisis and issues management experience that turns raw data into a decision. The organisations that arrive at a crisis late may have monitoring. They probably lack interpretation.

That judgment is exactly what Vessa Playfair brings to every retainer, drawing on more than 30 years across financial services and corporate communications, including 16 years as Head of Corporate Affairs and Communications for a Big Four professional services firm.

Vessa Playfair, Senior Corporate Communications Advisor at Wilkinson Group, Sydney

AI and Experience: The Combination No Algorithm Can Replace

AI compresses the time cost of broad and deep intelligence-gathering, monitoring, and analysis. However, what it cannot compress is judgment.

There are capabilities that cannot yet be automated:

• Ethical assessment of a novel situation
• Empathy after a governance failure
• Discernment in ambiguity: the experience to distinguish an issue that will define a person.

This interpretation is provided by senior advisers including Duncan McNab, whose background spanning policing, investigative journalism and government affairs gives him a rare read on how a regulatory or reputational issue is likely to unfold.

Duncan McNab, senior crisis communications and reputation management advisor at Wilkinson Group, Sydney

The Trust Environment

Organisations navigating this environment well share one characteristic: a trusted adviser already in place before an event arrives.

The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer (34,000 respondents, 28 markets) records a world retreating into an insular trust mindset. Only 32% of respondents globally believe the next generation will be better off. Boards and CEOs are expected to act as trust brokers. Most are failing.

The Reuters Institute Digital News Report, June ’26: “Within the news ecosystem, an apparent paradox emerges between behaviour and attitudes. There is continued change in news consumption in favour of social media, video networks and, more recently, AI. At the same time, concerns about trust in news, about misinformation, and about the wider impact of these platforms are all increasing.”

Roy Morgan data confirms Australia is in structural distrust: consumer confidence has remained below the neutral mark for over three consecutive years – the longest such period this century.

The OECD Framework identifies that public trust is fostered when institutions demonstrate competence, values-based decision-making, and good governance. Key drivers include reliability, responsiveness, fairness, integrity, and openness. Other factors include the perceived capacity to address complex global challenges and citizens’ sense of participation in decision-making. Importantly, the OECD’s Australia-specific analysis confirms these dynamics hold domestically.

Frequently Asked Questions

Wilkinson Confidante is a retained reputation management and crisis communications consultant service provided by Wilkinson Group. It gives CEOs, internal PR, boards, and general counsel in Australia ongoing access to senior counsel across three disciplines: reputation building, crisis preparedness, and risk intelligence.

Wilkinson Confidante is designed for CEOs, internal PR, boards, general counsel, and corporate communications directors who want a trusted crisis PR and reputation management consultant already in place before a crisis occurs.

Issues management requires more than monitoring. Any organisation can subscribe to a media monitoring service. Wilkinson Confidante provides 24 years of issues management counsel applied to that intelligence every day, distinguishing genuine reputational threats from background noise, the same judgement that sits behind Wilkinson Group's work as a crisis communications consultant.

Yes. CEO reputation management Australia is a core component of every Wilkinson Confidante retainer. Peter Wilkinson works directly with managing directors and CEOs to build and protect personal and organisational reputation over time, complementing Wilkinson Group's standalone reputation management consultant service.

Yes. Wilkinson Group is based in Sydney at Level 26/1 Bligh Street, and provides retained reputation management consultant and crisis communications consultant services to organisations across Sydney and Australia.