'Perspectives' is a Telum Media submitted article series, where diverse viewpoints spark thought-provoking conversations about the role of PR and communications in today's world. This Perspectives piece was submitted by Adam Harper, Founder & Managing Partner at Ashbury.
Tariff-driven market volatility means it’s time for financial communications teams to be more influential than ever. The companies that will achieve the best outcomes during this period will be those that are very proactive in understanding and managing risk, but which don’t freeze and just stop communicating.
Guarding reputation and influence through purpose-led communications
The tariffs are causing serious volatility and uncertainty in markets. My experience through other periods of dislocation is that normally rational people in financial institutions can start to panic because the experience is so far out of the ordinary.
And when they panic, they often start doing things - or wanting to do things - that are logical in a narrow way but are just bad ideas from a reputational perspective.
For example, people on a bank’s trading desk might want to make an optional announcement warning the market that they may not be able to fulfil an obligation to provide prices for a certain structured product because of a lack of underlying liquidity. It makes sense at one level because it appears to protect the bank from a potential criticism that it stopped providing prices without warning. In reality, of course, it’s not a good idea. That announcement would pour more fuel on the flames in a volatile market and should be avoided if at all possible.
Now more than ever, then, reputational risk management is a top priority for comms leaders in the financial sector. A statement or action that could pass by unnoticed at most other times is more likely to explode at a time like this. That means comms leaders have to be more vocal and visible than ever, wielding all the influence they can while keeping a cool head.
And these times are interesting because they force comms leaders to ask important questions, like what should I actually be taking a view on? Is it just my company’s communications strategy, or should I be making an argument to management on what the firm is doing with its clients and products, or how it’s engaging with regulators or investors? Where exactly are the limits of my influence?
My view is that, if you can understand the issue and have a thought-through opinion on it, then your stakeholders need to hear that. There should be no limits to your influence, although you will certainly come up against people from other disciplines with different views and you won’t have everything your own way. Any organisation that isn’t listening to its reputational specialists right now is needlessly increasing its risks.
Navigating stakeholder relations, trust building, and brand reputation
On the risk management side of the equation, comms teams need to be mapping these rapidly evolving risks and ensuring that they are ready to respond quickly when necessary. This is especially true of rumours, which proliferate in times of anxiety and can snowball fast, as we have seen with several digital bank runs in recent years. False rumours need to be met immediately and decisively with clarity and facts now; you can’t just refuse to dignify them with a response, which used to be the received wisdom.
In these uncertain times, though, there is also opportunity to build reputational equity. Audiences are naturally looking to brands they trust for expertise and guidance. That can create a lot of scope to use insight to build up a firm’s reputation and reassure its clients.
So it’s essential to understand what is most relevant to a given audience at this time. If you have good data on that, it’s easier to anticipate reputational risks and to connect with your audiences’ interests. At Ashbury, we’re making increasing use of our partnership with InferenceCloud, which provides AI-driven tools and insights, to ensure that clients’ communications strategies are relevant to their audience’s immediate and long-term interests.
What we’ve been seeing in some of the analysis we have run recently is that audiences are focused on what these changes mean for them in terms of long-term opportunity, as well as shorter-term challenges. For example, InferenceCloud data shows that export diversification to markets other than the US is top of mind for Asian companies and that institutional investors in the Middle East are engaged by discussions on increasing their investments in the US as well as about increasing their exposure to other regions. These kinds of insights can open up a lot of productive engagement opportunities.
Adam Harper is the Founder & Managing Partner at Ashbury, a technology-enabled strategic communications consultancy. Adam set up Ashbury in Hong Kong in 2020 to help financial sector clients and corporates engaging with financial audiences build intelligent reputations. The agency has since expanded to Singapore, Dubai and the UK to continue supporting organisations from global banks to FinTech companies in driving impactful comms in technology and sustainable finance.
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