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Financial sector reputation: conference blog from Stuart Maister
Wednesday September 23rd 09
When communications professionals from the financial sector get together to discuss reputation you know it's not going to be all sweetness and light. I guess only MPs are lower in the public's estimation, and that's largely linked to financial scandal as well.
So, what came out of the Communicate Magazine conference this week focused on rebuilding confidence in the sector?
Firstly, I felt there was a lot of defensiveness, and in some cases a sense of persecution. That's understandable since the tin hats are only gingerly being lifted to see if it's safe to emerge into the public domain. the whole financial sector has been damned by the media and public alike for the current crisis. One of the very interesting presentations was by the head of media relations at Goldman Sachs, not an organisation associated with humility and a sense of victimhood. She presented a series of headlines from the past year which painted a clear picture of the company being close to the devil, and it would be amazing if that didn't have a psychological impact on those involved.
Even the representative of the business media was defensive. Ruth Sunderland, the Business Editor of the Observer, gave a spirited and articulate defence of the role she and her colleagues had played in reporting the crisis, conceding only that perhaps they did not ring loud enough alarm bells or make the connections about the impending crisis that was also missed by regulators and companies. It was clear that, whenever in front of such an audience, she too had a tin hat handy as the blame culture knows no boundaries.
And then we heard a presentation from three people involved in the hedge funds industry...
Actually, that's why I felt this conference was well timed and achieved quite a lot for those who were there. It was cathartic and also, naturally, began to develop a much more spirited discussion about the enormous value of the financial sector to the UK economy. It felt as though it was a small part of a much bigger reawakening of the communications around the sector. It also felt to me that communicators in the sector were keen to start being more proactive and using more innovative ways to engage a wider group of audiences.
I think everyone felt that the sector had spent too much time speaking to itself through the usual business media channels and not engaged any wider communities, with the result that it had no breadth of support when the crisis hit. Therefore I sensed an appetite to do more with wider audience targets and use a broader range of communications tools in the process.
Naturally I was there to discuss how video communication can form part of this new world and how organisations and the sector should be creating new images in the minds of their target audiences to replace the ones which currently exist. I gave a presentation which outlined three strands to a video communication strategy: provide content for media and other platforms; create virtual announcements so that people can see and hear the story for themselves; and produce a rich digital media kit which showcases the what, why and how of the organisation. It felt to me like that, plus some other presentations on new ways of doing things, got a good response.
Of course I could be fooling myself about this and the idea that anything will change as the financial sector emerges from its purdah. But I don't think so. The world really has changed and even CEOs realise this. They know they need to engage more widely and they know that talking to the FT is no longer enough, even for the most esoteric financial organisation. I came away bullish that there is a real hunger to almost start again in temrs of the reputation - and maybe even some of the practices - of the UK's financial sector.
Stuart Maister, MD of BroadView
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