There is a peculiar moment in every corporate emergency when the facts are still arriving but the questions have already formed. A reporter wants a statement. Employees are texting one another. A public official has heard a version of events from someone who heard it from someone else. The organization has perhaps twenty minutes to sound like it has been awake for hours.
Corporate Image has made a business out of those twenty minutes. Not only those minutes, of course. The Bristol, Tennessee agency designs websites, buys media, writes speeches, produces videos and plans events. But its most revealing service is preparation for the day when none of the normal calendar matters. Its public-relations page names the situations without euphemism: a workplace fatality, suicide, sexual harassment, a plant fire on Christmas Day. The firm develops a plan in advance and keeps staff available around the clock because a binder cannot anticipate the next sentence.
That distinction - between a plan and the judgment required to use it - explains much of Corporate Image. Founder Jon Lundberg came from broadcast news. He had been an anchor and managing editor before starting The Corporate Image in Virginia on March 2, 1993. Two years later, the company moved to Bristol. The newsroom lesson traveled with it: information does not become useful merely because it is true. Someone must decide what matters, who needs it and how fast it has to move.
“Every good PR program begins with this question: Who do you think you’re talking to?”
The product is an ordered sequence
Most agency menus are nouns: strategy, content, design, media. Corporate Image’s is more interesting when read as verbs. Listen. Map the audience. Prepare the speaker. Make the thing. Put it where the right people will see it. Watch what happens. In a routine campaign, that sequence prevents wasted ad spend. In a crisis, it prevents the chief executive from improvising policy into a microphone.
The communications chain
The firm starts crisis work with risk scenarios and a custom playbook. Then come message development, stakeholder planning, media training and walk-throughs. During an incident, the emphasis shifts to speed, candor, reassurance and empathy. The useful idea here is almost comically portable: prepare decisions, not just sentences. A draft statement helps. A named decision-maker, a verified phone tree and agreement about which audiences come first help more.
One message, fewer handoffs
Corporate Image is a public-relations company joined at the hip to Corporate Marketing, its digital marketing and advertising division. Between them sit media relations, crisis counsel, executive speechwriting, event planning, SEO, paid search, audience targeting, website development, branding, print, video and analytics. The argument for this breadth is not that every client needs everything. It is that the strategy does not have to be translated repeatedly from one vendor to the next.
The portfolio makes the point better than the menu. There are municipal websites, annual reports, a visitor kiosk, law-firm branding, casino commercials, a food-truck design and a video starring a raccoon mascot. Corporate Image says one sponsor-recruitment production helped attract more than $56 million for a charitable golf event. These are not variations of one deliverable. They are variations of one problem: make a particular audience notice, understand or act.
A regional firm with an unusually serious beat
Its customers are the sort of institutions that cannot communicate in vibes. Manufacturers have safety records, technical products and plant communities. Utilities have ratepayers and regulators. Municipalities have agendas, public meetings and residents who remember yesterday’s promise. Health-care organizations, banks, universities, law firms and nonprofits carry their own vocabulary and their own ways to get a sentence expensively wrong.
Corporate Image translates among those worlds. Its public archive includes work for Mullican Flooring, General Shale, Domtar, Washington County Service Authority, King University and Public Entity Partners, alongside county governments and regional attractions. This places the firm between a local press office and a national integrated agency. It can reach national outlets, but its more defensible advantage is proximity - knowing the regional reporters, civic institutions and industrial context before the first briefing.
The latest personnel decision is a small clue about the culture. In September 2026, the firm promoted Marty Engle, a 27-year veteran, to director of AI and creative services. The job adds evaluation and integration of AI tools to his creative leadership. Lundberg’s explanation was cautious: AI becomes most valuable when paired with people who understand creativity, strategy and clients. For an agency founded before the modern web, it is a sensible position - adopt the new machinery without pretending the machinery has met the client.
Thirty-three years, four useful turns
There was no disclosed venture round, roll-up or dramatic pivot. The visible story is steadier. A young firm renovated space downtown, outgrew it, then converted a deserted and highly visible building into a new headquarters in 2011. It accumulated regional PR awards - twelve in 2018 and six in 2019 - while the work widened from conventional media relations into web, targeting, measurement and production. The channels changed; the premise stayed put.
The useful part is coherence
Corporate Image’s model is strongest when an organization has multiple audiences, a complicated subject and enough ongoing work to reward institutional memory. A manufacturer announcing an expansion while answering community questions can use the same strategic spine across the press conference, employee memo, website, paid campaign and video. Fewer handoffs mean fewer opportunities for the message to mutate.
It is less naturally suited to a company shopping for one standardized commodity at the lowest possible price, or to a global assignment that demands owned offices and native teams across many countries. An integrated relationship also requires access: leaders have to share awkward facts early, show up for training and let the agency challenge the first draft. If management wants a decorative press release after every decision is final, most of the value has already been refused.
The memorable line on Corporate Image’s home page is that what people think depends on what they hear, see or read. True enough. The operational corollary is better: what people hear, see or read depends on what an organization managed to decide before the clock became loud. Corporate Image has spent three decades selling that head start.