Corporate & Financial Public Relations
Corporations today view communications management as a critical component of business success. We offer principles that have passed the test of time, and techniques that address the realities of today.
Strategic counsel
Corporations increasingly find communications essential to business strategy. We advise managements on the communications dimensions of corporate strategic plans and specific business initiatives: What to say, how to say it, how loudly or softly to say it. We work closely with internal communications teams and with external legal, financial and marketing advisors. We frequently play active roles in implementing the plans we help to shape.
Boards of directors
Communications are increasingly part of a board’s responsibilities. Their decisions on governance issues are now matters for public scrutiny and debate. Public positioning is now part of business strategy. Investor relations is central to shareholder value creation. At times, board actions require communications counsel separate from management. Since our founding, we have worked directly with boards in all of these areas.
Best practices
Clients frequently turn to us for broader perspective on what works best in everyday practices and in response to the unexpected. We offer rapid, focused views in urgent situations, and research-based analysis when time permits. We audit clients’ communications policies, practices and performance. We provide training for both managements and communications departments.
Litigation support
We are frequently engaged by clients involved in high stakes, high-visibility litigation (or in similarly visible and important regulatory matters). Our clients seek to reassure employees, customers and others potentially affected, or to develop greater understanding among opinion leaders and others of the client’s position on the issues. We have become adept at delivering useful messages within narrow legal guidelines.
Enterprise communications & credibility
A corporation’s reputation should be more than the sum of its products. We use a proprietary multi-factorial analysis to highlight five key drivers of enterprise – vs. product, or line-of-business – credibility. This enterprise signature allows us to derive highly-targeted and cost-efficient communications strategies and tactics that correlate with supporting higher valuations and also add value to existing PR and marketing strategies.
Management positioning
CEOs, and sometimes their C-suite colleagues, are public citizens. Through public activities and statements, they can enhance their company’s stature. They can benefit worthy causes they care about. They can also become highly visible targets. We help clients to make their actions in the public sphere meaningful, their relationships productive, their statements noteworthy, and their
vulnerability well controlled.
Media relations
Digital, mobile, social: Media aren’t what they used to be. But they’re crucial to the perceptions that shape companies’ public presence. We maintain an unusually wide range of relationships with publishers, producers, editors, reporters, bloggers and other media figures. We offer both strategic and situational advice on building, managing and muting media presence. We provide direct media representation whenever useful to our clients.
Stakeholder engagement & rankings management
We have developed proprietary approaches to targeting, building, maintaining and calculating ROI from corporate-level stakeholder relations. We have built relationships and techniques to assist clients with their performance on third-party rankings of corporate performance. Clients often find their placement in these rankings is material to their ability to attract the new hires, new customers and new business relationships that help drive enterprise credibility.
Hedge funds
Our award-winning hedge fund practice is one of the oldest and largest in the industry. These clients use the full range of our firms’ services: marketing and branding, transactions, crisis preparedness and management, executive positioning, investor and media relations, and presentation training. Services are generally designed both to support strategic business objectives and manage reputation risk.