Strategic Communications
In today's intricate media, business, and political landscape, effective communication is essential for engaging with customers, employees, investors, and policymakers. Business leaders are not only confronted with significant financial, regulatory, and reputational challenges but are also presented with opportunities to foster growth and resilience within their organizations. To navigate these complexities and achieve favorable outcomes, a strategic and proactive approach to communications is imperative. Our strategic communications services are designed to assist leaders in capitalizing on opportunities while mitigating risks during both transformational and disruptive periods. We collaborate with corporate executives, boards of directors, law firms, and public sector entities to tackle their most pressing, business-critical challenges that demand a diverse set of communication skills and integrated strategies. Our team of senior strategic communications consultants specializes in crisis management, market disruption navigation, competitive positioning, commitment articulation, and maintaining operational permissions. By leveraging our industry expertise, interdisciplinary experience, proprietary research, and data insights, we aim to clarify your organization's positions, engage relevant stakeholders, and ensure that your messages reach the appropriate audiences at the optimal time. With decades of experience in various areas, including financial communications, crisis communications, transaction and M&A communications, corporate reputation management, public and government affairs, and data-driven design and digital strategy, we are well-equipped to support your strategic communications needs.
Corporate Reputation
Organizations operate in a complex and globally interconnected landscape where information is difficult to control, perceptions develop quickly, and issues move rapidly. These changing market forces and external disruptors make reputation management critical for organizations that want to operate effectively and remain competitive. Whether you need to reposition your company, build its profile as a market leader, or attract or retain talent, rely on ‘Communicators’. Our multi-stakeholder campaigns build confidence, enhance positioning and elicit action among key stakeholder groups. We help organizations define and promote their corporate narrative and elevate their brand when threatened by internal or external challenges.
How We Help
Building and maintaining reputation require management of immediate and critical issues while staying focused on broader business strategy. Any effort to position a company must consider the needs of regulators, shareholders, employees, customers, and peer organizations, while providing an authentic and credible narrative that gives stakeholders a reason to believe.
Stakeholder Identification, Mapping & Engagement
Your company’s communications campaigns focus on communicating with hundreds, if not thousands, of stakeholders who can directly or indirectly impact company decisions. Our clients rely on our structured, research-based approach to communications — identifying, mapping and prioritizing stakeholders to create tailored messages that elicit their support. We help you address the key stakeholder questions that most affect your company’s reputation and enterprise value.
Messaging & Organizational Positioning Strategy
Telling one, consistent story provides more control over how an organization is perceived by stakeholders, improves brand recognition, and aligns employees. Developing and achieving alignment on messaging requires a holistic approach that’s often a challenge for most organizations. Various functions tend to develop their own messages for different stakeholder groups. We help clients establish a unified narrative and message framework that addresses key issues among all stakeholders. We enable you to get functions working together, eliminating dissonance that dilutes your company’s reputation or damages credibility with investors, partners, customers and other stakeholders. Work with us when you need help developing a positioning statement, corporate narrative, mission statement or purpose statement, company vision, or organizational core values.
Environmental, Social & Governance Strategy
We help our clients establish strong environmental, social and governance (ESG) profiles aligned with their unique company mission that improves their visibility and strengthens relationships and reputation among key stakeholders. Our advisors and industry experts guide you to develop or enhance your company’s ESG profile, including:
- Conducting a research-driven assessment to identify and assess strengths, weaknesses, gaps and opportunities in how the company is telling its ESG story
- Demonstrating your company’s overall positioning, and spotlighting innovative solutions to complex, societal challenges
- Drawing increased attention to specific business initiatives or key markets
- Cultivating interest in your company’s stock by socially responsible investors
- Enhancing your company’s social license to operate with partners, regulators, customers and other stakeholder groups
- Providing guidance on the adoption of relevant sustainability reporting frameworks and standards
- Prioritizing key areas of disclosure, defining key performance indicators, establishing goals and targets, and developing a comprehensive and cohesive ESG narrative that aligns with a company’s mission and values
- Developing the sustainability report and relevant webpage to serve as central hub for all key ESG disclosures and updates on sustainability performance
Executive Communications & Thought Leadership
Whether it’s a speech, an op-ed, a blog post or an interview, executive communications can impact your company’s reputation and enterprise value. Our executive communications practitioners have improved the profiles of some of the most prominent companies by helping them craft their story and deliver it to the right audience with clarity, simplicity and passion. Turning leaders into thought leaders requires creativity and expertise. Our practitioners have both and have done it successfully for major organizations. We often work with clients to help CEOs and senior leaders enhance their positioning platform to better respond to the need for a more expansive set of communication skills, including:
- Providing a compelling narrative for what your company does and why it matters
- Explaining the implications of changes that are occurring in your company, your industry and in the economy for investors, employees, customers and other stakeholders
- Sharing your perspective on public policy or broader issues of economic, environmental or social concern
Reputation Research & Insights
Your organization’s reputation rests on the opinions of stakeholders such as investors, partners, employees, customers, policymakers and the public. We help our clients gain insights about these audiences by using a unique set of analytical tools to measure stakeholder sentiment and track progress based on reputational goals. We take a fact-based approach to developing, executing and measuring corporate messaging. It works by identifying current stakeholder attitudes to help you create optimal messaging and channels to convey it.
These insights enable you to address key issues for numerous audiences, including:
- Marketplace participants such as partners, customers and suppliers
- Internal audiences, including board members, executives and employees
- External audiences such as policymakers, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), public intellectuals, media members and other key opinion leaders
- Financial audiences, including analysts, institutions and retail investors
Media Relations & Intelligence
The definition of media is ever changing, including traditional media, such as print, radio and television; controlled media outreach achieved through advertising; and social media. Our dedicated team of media relations experts has decades of experience and relationships to provide strategic media counsel — whether traditional, controlled or social — whenever and wherever you need it.
When you partner with us, you tap into our extensive industry knowledge and contacts. You get continuous media intelligence on who’s writing what and who’s looking for sources. Ultimately, you benefit from our knowledge and contacts to bring fresh interview and partnership opportunities.
Media Training & Presentation Coaching
It’s critical to get your message across consistently, the first time, every time. Your organization’s reputation depends on it. To help you communicate as effectively as possible, ‘Communicators’ media specialists leverage our deep sector expertise and our understanding of the media, capital markets, government officials and other stakeholders. We’re able to prepare you for any communications challenge, particularly media interviews, presentations and crisis situations.
Whether you’re a CFO presenting to analysts and investors, a CEO making a presentation at an industry event, or a spokesperson managing numerous media interviews, we can help you effectively deliver your messages. C-suite, senior management and divisional leaders benefit from our comprehensive preparation sessions, conducted either on a one-on-one basis or in small groups. The end goal: elevating your personal communication skills, message development and comfort level.
Crisis Communications
Whether you anticipate a crisis or are blindsided by it, your corporate reputation and enterprise value hang in the balance. More than 80% of companies anticipate a crisis in the year ahead, but less than half feel adequately prepared. ‘Communicators’ crisis professionals coordinate with your management teams, legal and financial advisors to provide customized, coordinated, data-driven strategic counsel on all aspects of internal and external event-driven communications.
How We Help
Crisis Management: Prepare, Respond & Repair
When an organization faces a crisis, its reputation, license to operate and market value are all on the line. Whether it’s a government investigation, high-stakes litigation, a cyber attack or an operational incident, we help:
- Protect your organization’s brand, valuation and reputation
- Manage the crisis through active communications
- Ensure accurate representation of facts in the media and by other third parties
- Engage with stakeholders to maintain credibility and strengthen relationships
- Reduce legal and political consequences, working closely with legal counsel and other advisors
- Ensure business continuity by managing the crisis so you can focus on managing the business
Our crisis management professionals have a deep understanding of how different types of crises can impact your organization and how to mitigate those crises. Our team is comprised of experts who have worked in-house managing crises and as outside experts, doing crisis management consulting for organizations of all sizes and in all industries. When you work with us, we begin with a disciplined discovery process to identify your organization’s preparedness gaps and apply best practices and real-world insights. Our goal is to prioritize your organization’s crisis preparedness and response needs that include:
- Situation assessment
- Scenario planning
- Crisis communications management plan
- Stakeholder and media engagement plan
- Communications mobilization
- Training and testing
Litigation Communications
While litigation can be a natural progression of a crisis, it nevertheless can affect a company’s business prospects, impact its standing with key stakeholders, and create reputational damage that extends beyond the direct financial implications of a lawsuit. Conversely, stakeholders can affect the course of litigation and how a case ultimately is resolved. Our advisors help clients prepare and manage communications around legal issues, positioning their most persuasive arguments for their most important audiences. We seek to align our communications plan with your organization’s litigation strategy to resolve a matter with the most favorable legal, financial and reputational terms.
In providing informed, actionable counsel, we draw upon the combined power of our legal experience, industry expertise and success in senior communications roles. Our client and their outside legal advisors regard us as a trusted partner because of our deep sector knowledge, as well as our experience developed as practicing attorneys, communications directors, journalists, political advisors and corporate spokespeople.
We advise on areas including bet-the-company litigation, lawsuits with potentially significant reputational and/or operational impact, and the prioritization and advice on reputational risks within the litigation docket. When necessary, call on us to hold issues workshops to help you identify and prepare for potential litigation threats. Also, we help you deliver on tactical projects and initiatives, including foundational stakeholder assessment, stakeholder and opinion research, message development, media relations, third-party ally development, and digital, video and analytic services.
Cybersecurity & Data Privacy Communications
Cyber risk is an ever-growing threat for businesses in every sector and every part of the world. With data becoming more and more integral to day-to-day operations, the threat of a breach or any other type of cybersecurity incident has never been greater. Our cybersecurity and data privacy communications experts provide you with the strategic counsel and tactical execution needed to prepare for and navigate through these challenging events.
We work to help our clients understand their current vulnerabilities, most likely threats, and overall cyber incident readiness. We create executive-level protocols and a whole-of-business approach for activating incident response and crisis communications plans to minimize risks and impacts of cybersecurity incidents to the business. We also execute tabletop and simulation exercises, often in partnership with forensic, insurance and legal partners.
If called to assist you in responding to a live breach scenario, we partner with external counsel, forensic investigators, cyber insurers and your internal teams to ensure consistent and appropriate stakeholder communications across the board. We also understand that risk mitigation and reputation management extend beyond controlling the damage in the first 48 hours after a cyber incident. Clients look to us to help them positively position the steps they take after an incident to build a culture of security in the organization, protecting their relationships with their peers, customers, employees and other key stakeholders.
Financial Communications
Public companies and those preparing to list, face challenges of managing risk and maximizing opportunities during periods of change and transformation. Targeted communications strategies are critical to achieving successful outcomes, ensuring business continuity, and enhancing shareholder support. Our financial communications experts serve as trusted advisors to C-suites and boards of directors on a range of capital market events and issues they encounter throughout the corporate life cycle. Our team, consisting of former lawyers, bankers, investors, analysts, journalists, and policymakers, partners with clients to communicate with impact and deliver results that advance business objectives.
How We Help
Investor Relations Advisory
Clients seek our help to protect and enhance enterprise value as they navigate critical moments of change. We draw upon our deep sector and capital markets expertise to help our clients deliver a compelling equity story to the market, and attract and retain investment from high-quality shareholders. Grounded in research and best practices, our team can execute these programs in any financial market in the world. We partner with management and investor relations (IR) teams to design and execute results-focused IR programs by:
- Providing strategic counsel around IR best practices
- Driving broader interest and awareness in their equity story
- Developing impactful engagement strategies to gain full access to the capital markets
- Helping navigate complex, multi-stakeholder issues, transactions and events
- Creating and executing world-class (virtual) investor days
- Conducting customized perception research to track, measure and benchmark IR programs
Environmental, Social & Governance Advisory
In today’s rapidly changing world, companies must develop an environmental, social, and governance (ESG) program that is authentic, grounded in data, aligned with the company’s strategy and the needs of key stakeholders, and integrated across the organization. Through our research-based approach, we help our clients establish ESG reporting and sustainability objectives, map strategy to social purpose, provide enhanced disclosure on key non-financial risks related to ESG, and engage effectively with relevant stakeholders and influencers. Our advisors and industry experts help companies through their unique ESG journey by:
- Evaluating current ESG programs, policies, and industry best practices to assess potential risks and opportunities
- Providing guidance on the adoption of relevant sustainability reporting frameworks and standards
- Prioritizing key areas of disclosure, defining key performance indicators, establishing goals and targets, and developing a comprehensive and cohesive ESG narrative that aligns with a company’s mission and values
- Developing the sustainability report and relevant webpage to serve as central hub for all key ESG disclosures and updates on sustainability performance
- Amplifying messages through engagement with key stakeholders including investors, customers, and employees, as well as influential third parties, such as rating agencies and proxy advisors, policymakers and regulators, and community leaders
Restructuring & Financial Issues
Companies, boards of directors, lenders, creditors, and buyers rely on our strategic communications and change management services as they prepare for, execute, and emerge from financial and organizational restructurings. They lean on us as a single source of support for what’s needed to manage change through the restructuring process, including media relations, employee and external stakeholder communications, culture evolution, labor relations, and HR planning.
In pivotal moments, we help clients meet their key objectives:
- Preserving business continuity. Our experts understand restructuring processes from workforce reductions and legal requirements of in-country consultation schemes to bankruptcy process and support you with internal and external communications, engagement and enablement strategies, plans and execution that reach all target audiences, enabling you to stay focused on vital priorities
- Position-based advocacy and focus. We are well versed in counseling companies, creditors and other stakeholders on all issues specific to restructuring. We apply our media relations and governmental affairs expertise to help clients advocate and articulate issue-specific views and ensure accurate and balanced media coverage
- Protecting credibility. Rely on our communications advisory that’s focused on preserving stakeholder support and safeguarding credibility. We assist with creating relevant narratives and enabling organizational leaders to keep their promises
- Laying a foundation for the future. We help you engage stakeholders by articulating a compelling vision for the future and conveying it through clear messaging that also provides transparency on restructuring plans. After restructuring actions are announced, we work alongside leadership teams to define and communicate their go-forward strategies and manage change as they move toward their future states
Communications strategies are tailored to your organization’s specific needs, and can include these services:
- Communications strategy development, including overarching messaging creation and announcement execution planning
- Pre-announcement scenario planning, including leak mitigation and response strategies and post-announcement contingency planning
- Message and media training for leaders and key communicators
- Proactive and reactive media strategies and engagement
- Briefing of key regulators, government officials and influencers
- Investor relations outreach and inquiry management
- Training of procurement, sales and accounting teams, as well as supplier and customer call center management
- Creation of print, digital and in-person communications tailored for stakeholder audiences and channels
- Translation, video production, website and graphics development, and coordination of meetings and calls with company and advisers
- Post-event stakeholder research highlighting current perceptions, threats and opportunities
- Ongoing positioning programs and thought leadership
- Employee engagement and change management
Public & Government Affairs
Escalating tensions between governments, civil society organizations, international institutions and multinational firms have significant implications for publicly traded and private companies. As they pursue growth strategies against increasing market pressure, technological disruption, public scrutiny, and political unpredictability, leadership must remain vigilant of the political risk to operations and reputation. They must constantly assess political landscapes to manage and mitigate risk when events materialize and threaten value. Increasingly, these events impact the reputation and character of executive teams, boards of directors, and the company itself in other arenas, including capital markets, commercial markets and courts.
How We Help
With a team of hundreds of specialists in every major financial and political capital in the world, ‘Communicators’ advises executive teams, boards of directors, and their legal, financial and public affairs advisors in leveraging public affairs and government relations strategies to meet the demands of this political reality. Clients lean on us to help them engage with their stakeholders’ agendas, deliver results, and protect value. We are totally equipped to advise clients in the areas of regulatory and legislative change, transactions requiring government approval, arbitration and litigation with governments, and government investigations. Engage us for expert assistance with:
- Integrated media: Communications has become democratized — information and opinions are no longer in silos. Decision makers and influencers are guided and informed through multiple sources: newspapers, magazines, broadcast and cable news, online news sites, owned media and social media. We are expert at developing multi-stakeholder and multi-channel communications strategies to ensure client reputations remain intact by consistently producing and promoting content to reach critical audiences.
- Civic engagement: Policymakers depend on a network of external advice to govern decision making. The NGO community, academics, political peers and the private sector, among others, all contribute to a chorus of opinion and counsel. We effectively deliver messages to these key stakeholders through direct engagement and the media to build consensus and momentum toward smarter, more effective policies.
- Direct advocacy: In every regulatory center, our specialists directly engage with elected and appointed policymakers to inform the decision-making process, sharing perspectives and data on the implications of suggested policies at key inflection points. Often, these policy discussions are occurring across borders and jurisdictions, and our firm reaches governments in mature and emerging markets to deliver results. We are also experienced in reviewing the government affairs functions of large multinationals, helping clients build capacity and ensure they are fit-for-purpose and in line with latest best practices.
- Policy research and political intelligence: Clients rely on our firm’s best-in-class capacities in research and intelligence to help them develop and deliver optimal arguments that lead to winning outcomes. Our capabilities include public opinion research, social media and sentiment analysis, economic studies, political intelligence, as well as content development to translate comprehensive research into clear arguments to strengthen alliances, persuade the undecided, and counteract adverse arguments.
Transaction Communications
Transactions play an integral role in the life cycle of most companies. When done well, they provide tremendous opportunities for growth and transformation. However, they also carry significant risk that can disrupt a business and threaten the performance and survival of even the world’s largest organizations. This is particularly true for complex transactions, as well as those within highly regulated industries. To help you successfully manage these complex events, we leverage collaborative capabilities, scale, global reach, and relationships to create communications strategies that enable you to navigate the risks to accomplish your business goals.
How We Help
Our multidisciplinary, integrated firm draws upon our decades of experience and knowledge of best practices, global marketplaces and trends to provide our clients comprehensive communications solutions in large events such as:
- Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) — friendly and hostile
- Divestitures/spin-offs
- Mergers of equals
- Hostile defense
- Initial public offerings (IPOs) and special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) mergers
- Distressed situations
- Clients rely on us to deliver tailored, comprehensive multi-stakeholder communications strategies that address all stages of a transaction, from planning to announcement day support to integration. Our firm works across every sector, and across private-to-private, public-to-public, private-to-public and public-to-private situations.
M&A Communications
Achieving a successful outcome in M&A requires companies to navigate regulatory complexities and engage key stakeholders and influencers to reduce risk issues that can interfere with the successful completion of a transaction. To assist with this, we deliver comprehensive communications strategies that cover every stage in the deal life cycle, from pre-announcement planning to post-merger integration. Both public and private companies in all industries rely on our counsel across a wide range of M&A scenarios — from cross-border transactions to transformative deals to hostile takeover defense. Rely on our expert support with:
- Anticipating and addressing potential deal risks and communications challenges
- Preparing messaging that demonstrates the strategic and financial rationale that underpins the transaction
- Driving positive deal sentiment across stakeholders, while minimizing shareholder dissent and activism
- Reinforcing value propositions through financial media engagement
- Advising on regulatory process across multiple jurisdictions, enhancing certainty of close
- Counseling on proxy advisory engagement to optimize the shareholder vote outcome
- Developing a focused change management and communications plan
- Supporting integration management office in all internal and external communications efforts
IPOs & SPACs
We help companies of all sizes successfully navigate their entry into the equity markets — from the development of a clear and compelling equity story to the preparation of the IPO road show and the engagement with all critical audiences. Most importantly, we help companies establish the communications infrastructure needed to operate successfully as a public company. Rely on our support for:
- Sharpening the equity story and preparing management team to ensure they are battle-tested for investor engagement
- Preparing management and company for the new communications paradigm as a public company
- Integrating communications to ensure consistency of message across stakeholders and influencers
- Anticipating, planning for, and mitigating potential risks that can impact the business and management credibility
- Managing the transition in the shareholder base following the IPO to drive the optimal ownership mix
Communications & Insights
Today, organizations in every industry know that a digital communications strategy is crucial for influencing corporate decision-makers and policymakers and bolstering corporate reputation.
The stakeholders who determine your organization’s success are online, and the competition for their attention is extreme.
To influence these decision-makers in this fractured media environment and digital age, every industry needs a comprehensive digital communications strategy that helps them understand and respond to rapidly shifting narratives with content that resonates with the right audience.
It’s not enough to know who your target audiences are. You need to know how to reach them effectively to inform, inspire and influence. We collaborate with clients across all industries, media and markets to advance their business objectives.
A precise approach to digital communications designed for maximum resonance:
- Data-driven: We take data-driven, audience-first approach to help organizations craft compelling narratives, reach decision makers where they are and drive positive business outcomes.
- Audience-led: Our custom solutions enable clients to identify and understand priority audiences using data and insights and develop strategies for engaging with them through the most opportune and powerful paid and organic channels.
- Results-focused: We don’t stop at strategy. We also help businesses and organizations execute multichannel and multifaceted campaigns and measure the outcomes of our audience-focused tactics to ensure our approaches remain optimized and agile.
Our research shows that corporate stakeholders are increasingly expecting leaders to be present online.
The communications landscape is constantly in flux. Understanding and reaching target audiences with the right message on the right platform has never been more critical. Our team’s focus on understanding how messages resonate, what formats make them more consumable, and where they will most likely be received helps hone a strategy that is based on data and insights, not intuition or speculation.
We have extensive expertise in understanding the impact of change management processes on stakeholders, and there are not many bigger change management processes than a company-wide digital transformation.
Solutions
Integrated communications rooted in research, data science and subject matter expertise
- Digital & Social Media Reputation, Governance and Strategy: To influence key stakeholder audiences, you need integrated design, content and digital strategies that reach, resonate and inspire desired actions. We work across the digital communications ecosystem to advance business objectives, from helping companies design optimal digital channel architecture to internal governance and workflows to channel- and campaign-specific social media strategies.
- Creative, Content & Campaigns: Whether crafting a digital content strategy, brand strategy, campaign ideation, or digital media design, our creative and content team works alongside ‘Communicators’ subject matter experts to ensure your communications program is equipped with impactful and on-message creative and content. We look at the entire user experience to tailor creative formats and communications to audience mindsets while connecting these experiences to your core narratives.
- Communications Amplification & Measurement: We help clients determine where their audiences spend the most time, tailor messages and deliverables to each platform, and develop holistic digital and traditional advertising campaign strategies across channels and touch points. To track effectiveness, we identify KPIs aligned with business and/or communications objectives and design a methodology for measuring and reporting against those KPIs, such as an online dashboard or reputation scorecard.
Research & Insights
We work with you to define the right type of audience for your research and the most effective methodology to reach them. From strategic planning and audience research to evaluating stakeholder awareness and perceptions, our team of industry experts helps clients better understand, leverage and measure the dynamics driving reputation, sentiment and public policy discussions.
Stakeholder Communications
Our sophisticated approach to stakeholder engagement and reputational analytics equips businesses with the knowledge and tools to navigate their digital journey successfully. Our collection of data, AI and advanced analytic tools is the foundation for platforms that allow us to analyze risk, opportunity and the overall success of digital transformation projects among complex and varied stakeholder groups.