As 2 million fans showed up to celebrate an NBA Championship win at a New York City Knicks parade on June 18, global hospitality company Convene suffered a loss. Upon scaling Convene’s One Liberty Plaza location to surmount the orange-and-blue-clad crowd, a Knicks fan peeled the letter n off of Convene’s sign, hoisting it over her head in triumph as bystanders cheered. Among the crowd were members of Convene’s global marketing team, who were on-the-clock to film social media clips of the Knicks celebration. Immediately, video evidence of the letter removal was sent in the team’s Slack channel as a “joke,” Convene’s SVP of brand marketing, Jacque Riley, told PRWeek.“It moved quickly from an internal joke to thinking, ‘hey, this is something we should use on social media.’ If we were laughing about it that much, we thought we should share the laugh with the Knicks fans out there,” Riley explained. Within 90 minutes, social media staff posted the mishap to its Instagram account with the caption, “Knicks is spelled with a ‘K,’ folks!” With the help of a Gen Z staffer, Convene’s graphic designer revamped the brand’s logo so the n dangled below Convene’s remaining lettering. View this post on InstagramA post shared by Convene (@convene)Convene’s rebranded profile picture became clear as the brand replied to a portion of the 900 comments piling under its Instagram video, praising the company for “great marketing” and “legendary PR.”“Marketing team, great job. Responding to this unintentional harm with grace and fun,” one commenter wrote, while another commenter advocated for a social media manager pay raise, citing Convene’s new profile picture. With 481,000 views, 18,000 likes and 4,000 shares as of June 22, Convene’s Knicks-mishap Instagram video is the company’s top-performing post, prompting a 23% spike in followers, Riley said. Following the Knicks NBA Championship win on June 13, five New York City school buses were set ablaze or smashed, five police officer cars were damaged and 63 arrests were made citywide, according to NYPD reports. Convene, which operates 40 global locations and was founded in 2009, didn’t dwell on the damage. Despite losing three signage letters during the Knicks parade, the hospitality group’s global marketing team executed a swift rebranding strategy — and created social media buzz doing so.PRWeek spoke with Riley, who helms Convene’s global, in-house marketing team of 10 staff, about her Knicks parade reflections.What was your process in responding to the fall of the n?“We’re comfortable in our skin as members of the NYC community — we’re able to jump in on a joke on parade day and have a little bit of fun. In some ways, our team was joking, ‘hey, is the universe telling us to rebrand?’We could tell that the letter falling was not intentional; she never intended to cause harm. It was just a funny moment in our Slack channel, and I’m proud of this team for mobilizing and running with it. My main takeaways for PR and marketing minds are to cultivate playfulness and speed while removing layers and obstacles. It was natural for us to react with a little giggle, and that has served us really well.”How did you emphasize Convene’s brand identity with this moment?“It felt intuitive. We knew automatically that this was a funny moment of levity. Gathering is what we’re all about, and that connection that can only happen in real life when people are together and excited by something. We try to create spaces that facilitate that, where big ideas can happen, where big news is shared. We love being the room where it happens.In this case, it felt like all of NYC was our backyard. Being well-positioned along that parade route, we were able to jump in and play with our neighbors in a way that felt like “joshing” — sharing the moment with whoever is standing in the parade line next to you. The fact it was about community was really meaningful to us, and also why we were able to respond so quickly.”How did you pull this off entirely in-house? “With the global size of our business, we’re still a scrappy team, and that played a part when we were joking around in the Slack channel the day of the Knicks parade — that’s really the origin of this. We have a tight enough group with enough trust among us — even in a short time — to post some jokes. Everyone is so busy, and this team is no exception — we’ve got launches and campaigns and board decks on our to-do lists. In this moment, we decided to play, have fun and take a breather to be part of the world around us. Everything else could wait until Monday. This team has trust from me, and also our CEO. I sent him a text, telling him, ‘we’re going to play with this.’ He said, ‘rock on.’Small, in-house teams can do big, cool things. Not overthinking was key in this — we weren’t running it through any focus groups. We just thought it was funny and we knew the brand and our audience well enough.”How will Convene keep building on this moment? “We’ll definitely do a Convene 101 on social media — some of the funnier commenters wrote, ‘we don’t know what you do, but we love you now.’ Now, we can tell those commenters about the fact we’re a meetings and events company and that we have standalone meetings and events space. It’s a lot for people to get their heads around — the global nature of what we do.We hosted over 2 million people in our spaces in 2025, but nobody necessarily knows — Convene is more under-the-radar than a hotel brand. So we’re excited to bring humor and storytelling to describe who we are. We’re thinking of specific messaging and outreach for new followers who came to join us along this ride. The city is still abuzz with the FIFA World Cup, so there might be some moments to celebrate with our fellow New Yorkers with a few targeted NYC offers.”This story first appeared on PRWeek U.S.