Perspectives: The Gulf’s communications moment: Why now is the time to lead with purpose

There is a particular psychological condition that develops in senior communications leaders over time, and nobody talks about it because it looks too much like competence.

It rarely appears in job descriptions or competency frameworks. But it quietly shapes how organisations think, behave, make decisions, as well as how we think about ourselves.

Our profession trains us to anticipate failure. We are taught, often implicitly and through hard experience, to read the room before the room knows it has a temperature. To feel the tremor before the quake. But the organisations we serve still need us to be capable of belief, momentum and possibility, and somewhere in the gap between those two truths, a lot of us have quietly lost our footing.

The competency nobody questions

Modern communications leadership has always revolved around institutional threat interpretation.

• What if this leaks?

• What if this offends people?

• What if activists organise around it?

• What if the media reframes it in ways we cannot control?

For senior communicators, this kind of thinking is not paranoia. It is a core competence, and in many ways, it has rightly been rewarded as such.

But there is a point at which healthy vigilance begins to distort institutional behaviour in ways that are difficult to see from the inside, because from the inside it still looks like diligence.

Spun out

Institutional trust was already eroding before many of us arrived at the table. The scepticism was real, the scrutiny was justified, and the pressure on organisations to protect themselves from an increasingly unforgiving public environment was entirely understandable. But as the Edelman Trust Barometer continues its steady annual decline, I sometimes wonder how much of that erosion we have since built ourselves. Whether the old art of spin has, quietly and over time, spun the web we now find ourselves increasingly caught in.

We are what we rehearse

Ultimately, organisations become what they rehearse. And organisations that rehearse fear long enough eventually struggle to distinguish discomfort from danger, criticism from crisis, and the raised eyebrow from the burning building.

I want to be honest here: I don’t have clean answers to this, and I’m not writing from the outside looking in. I have been and continue to be rewarded for exactly this kind of thinking, incentivised to find the risk, name the threat, and walk into rooms as the person who could see what others couldn’t. I understand its seductiveness, because it works. It earns us a seat at the table in a way that few other professional postures do, and that feeling of being genuinely useful to leaders navigating real pressure is one of the main reasons I get up to go to work.

Which is perhaps why it is so difficult to notice when the thing that made us valuable has begun to make us and the organisations we serve, smaller.

The case for genuine accountability

When avoiding exposure becomes the primary organisational reflex, accountability starts to erode. Not through any conscious decision to evade responsibility, but because genuine accountability requires a willingness to be clearly and publicly wrong, and clarity has become precisely what these organisations fear most.

What emerges instead is the language of accountability without its substance: acknowledgement without admission, review without consequence, apology without change.

Into that vacuum our profession has enthusiastically poured the concept of authenticity. We have advised organisations to be more human, more genuine, more real. And they have listened, briefed agencies, approved strategies, and published content that performs authenticity with considerable production value while remaining perfectly, carefully, and strategically safe. Which is not authenticity at all. It is its most sophisticated impersonation, and audiences know the difference in their bones even when they struggle to articulate it.

The result is not dramatic scandal. It is something slower and more damaging: campaigns that lose their personality through endless risk management until what remains is technically inoffensive and completely forgettable, public statements nobody inside actually believes and nobody outside actually trusts, and organisations so focused on avoiding negative attention that they have been stripped of the distinctiveness that made them worth paying attention to in the first place.

It doesn’t happen often, and most leaders we work with are genuinely trying to do the right thing in genuinely difficult environments. But we recognise it when it does. Those moments when the organisation is so focused on managing the perception of a decision that the decision itself becomes secondary, and we are brought in to help bridge that gap rather than to challenge it. It is a role that can flatter our craft while quietly diminishing our purpose, and most of us who have been in this profession long enough have felt that tension from the inside.

Us at our best

Our role is not to eliminate risk from institutions. That is impossible, and the pursuit of it is its own kind of damage. Our role is to help organisations navigate uncertainty without becoming psychologically captive to it, and sometimes that means being the person in the room who says that the greater risk is not the one everyone is currently afraid of.

That takes judgement, perspective and the kind of confidence that comes not from certainty, but from experience. And it is, I think, the most valuable thing our profession has to offer when we are at our best.

An organisation that optimises exclusively for reputational safety may well protect itself from backlash.

But it will also, quietly and incrementally, protect itself from relevance.

Matthew (Matt) Thomas is Founder and Chief Catalyst at Stake: The Reputation Company, a Melbourne-based consultancy working across brand, reputation, communications, and public affairs. He has advised some of Australia’s largest private companies and has worked extensively with global organisations localising their storytelling and narratives for Australian audiences. His experience spans consumer, government, health, infrastructure, technology, and corporate reputation, including advisory work at all levels of government in Australia.

Matt’s work sits at the intersection of communications, behaviour change, and institutional strategy. He is also a contributor to the The Oxford Handbook of Social Purpose, writing on reputation, legitimacy, and the growing gap between organisational messaging and operational reality.

Read more from our columnists in The Earned View

Telum Media is all about creating connections between journalists and PR / comms practitioners. Key to that are the connections we forge with media outlets and newsroom leaders on the ground in each of our markets, and with PR leaders and industry bodies.

Today we launch The Earned View - a curated collection of senior industry figures, sharp operators, and KOLs from across the Middle East and Asia Pacific, who have earned the right to pen regular columns on their chosen areas of expertise.

From Acorn Strategy’s Kate Midttun in Dubai to The Savage Company’s Chris Savage in Australia, Ashbury Communications’ Adam Harper in Singapore to PRINZ CEO Susanne Martin in New Zealand, each of our 12 columnists will bring a thought-provoking mix of analysis, opinion, and practical advice to Telum Media’s PR News pages.

We kick things off with Matt Thomas, Founder and Chief Catalyst of Stake: The Reputation Company, writing on the hidden cost of risk in his strategic communications and reputation column. 

As brands increasingly look beyond campaigns and paid reach to foster deeper audience connection, community-building has become a growing focus across marketing and communications. Telum Media spoke to Charissa Guan, Founder and Managing Partner of bSIDE, about the role of PR in sustaining brand communities, the importance of authenticity in values-led messaging, and why long-term trust and belonging matter more than short-term visibility.

With bSIDE being an integrated marketing and communications agency, how do you see the specific role of PR and communications in building and sustaining brand communities, particularly alongside marketing and brand functions?
PR and communications have always been about building reputation and creating meaning. It's not just about coverage for coverage's sake or to merely hit arbitrary values like total reach or AVE. The goal of PR and communications has always been to help audiences understand why a brand matters, and to keep the story alive between the big moments.

To me, marketing drives discovery, while communications sustains emotional investment over time. When those two functions are misaligned, or worse, operate in silos - people notice. Especially for Millennials and Gen Z who spend a significant amount of their time online. They know inauthenticity when they see it. 

At bSIDE, we think of communications as the connective tissue between the brand and marketing funnels. It holds the entire community narrative together. It makes sure what a brand says publicly matches what people really experience on the ground. That coherence is what earns trust, and without trust, community is just another word on a brand deck.

For brands that have not historically leaned into values-led messaging, is it ever too late to start? And how should they begin this approach without appearing opportunistic or inauthentic?
I’d say it’s never too late, but brands need to tread carefully. The worst thing a brand can do, if it's never leaned into values-led messaging, is announce its values publicly. Our recent research on brand communities in Southeast Asia found that 27 per cent of respondents called out brands for using culture or social causes mainly as a branding exercise. That is community-washing, and people see through it immediately.

The rationale is that you can’t publish a manifesto and expect anyone to believe it if you haven't historically stood for something. So start internally and ask: What do you actually care about as a brand? Where is the evidence of it? For example, it could be reflected in how you treat your staff, who you partner with, or the decisions you make even when they come at a cost.

From there, surface those stories consistently without overclaiming. The brands that do this well don't necessarily sound the most polished, but their actions follow their words, and over time, that accumulation sticks and transforms. 

Once brands begin engaging with communities, participation in cultural moments and conversations often becomes inevitable. How can organisations contribute in ways that add genuine value rather than appearing performative?
When developing content, we should ask ourselves a simple question: are we adding something to the conversation, or just showing up in it?

I’d say the most common mistake is timing. Brands tend to enter cultural conversations at peak visibility - when the topic is already saturated and everyone has said the same thing. By that point, participation reads as opportunistic, not genuine.

The other issue I see is over-production. Community-driven cultural moments thrive on rawness. When a brand's contribution looks too polished and coordinated, it signals that it was made for the brand, not for the community.

What we tell clients is that restraint is a strategy. Not every cultural moment belongs to every brand. The brands we most admire have a clear point of view, which is informed by both branding and communications, and they are consistent about the conversations they choose to be part of. 

Community-building is often positioned as a long-term investment, yet many organisations still look for immediate, measurable results. How do you help clients understand the long-term value?
Building communities is a compounding investment, which means you cannot expect to see ROI in a day. However, the returns are real. Based on our research, people are 29 per cent more likely to visit a brand and recommend it when they experience a genuine sense of community with it. Do those numbers necessarily show up in the first quarter? Likely not. And that makes it a hard sell inside organisations where reporting structures reward short-term acquisition.

Here's what we’ve found actually shifts the conversation. Much like how the PR industry has had to reframe its impact, we do the same with building communities. We look at indicators alongside sales KPIs, such as repeat behaviour, referral patterns, and organic content. These are tangible results, in addition to commercial value. 

What role does storytelling play in fostering belonging, and how can organisations maintain that sense of belonging while still scaling and reaching new audiences?
Storytelling is how communities remember themselves. It is what transforms a series of individual experiences into a shared identity. When a brand tells the story of its community back to the members within it - whether through content, events, or shared language - it reinforces belonging without requiring everyone to be in the same room at the same time. 

Familiarity is one of the most underrated forces in community building. Not only does it lower the barrier to re-engagement, it creates emotional safety and turns interest into habit. The role of storytelling here is to make people feel genuinely seen through consistent voice, recurring formats, and small acts of recognition.

The scaling question is where most brands stumble. The instinct is to broaden - in order to reach more people, you diversify the message. But the brands that scale community successfully go deeper before they go wider. They strengthen their core, turn their most invested members into hosts and advocates, and let the community carry the expansion rather than force it.

Communications at that stage become less about broadcasting and more about equipping. Giving the community the language, stories, and moments it needs to grow itself. Because the best thing a brand can do for its community is to make it feel like it belongs to the people in it, not to the brand.