This piece first appeared in the September 2026 issue of O’Dwyer’s PR Magazine.
Two companies in the same sector report the same quarter. One moves up six percent. The other drops four. The numbers are nearly identical. The difference is the narrative.
This is not a hypothetical. It plays out every earnings season and anyone who has spent time in and around public markets has watched it happen. The gap between what a company is worth and what the market thinks it is worth is real, measurable and, more often than people in finance want to admit, a communications problem.
Most companies treat communications as a downstream function, something managed after strategic decisions are made. IR gets the earnings call. PR gets the trade publication story. The CEO shows up for CNBC when there is news. These are not communications programs. They are communications accidents waiting to happen.
The companies outperforming their peer universes today understand something fundamental: reputation is not a reflection of financial performance. It is an input to it.
Reputational capital: the asset most companies forget to manage
Think of reputation the way you think of financial capital. It accumulates slowly through consistent behavior and credible communication. It earns a return in valuation premiums, lower cost of capital and a shareholder base stable enough to weather difficult quarters. And it can be drawn down quickly when the gap between what a company says and what it does becomes visible to the market.
The executives who manage reputational capital deliberately show up in the data. Their stocks tend to trade at a premium to sector peers with identical fundamentals. When they miss a quarter, they recover faster. When they hit, the multiple expansion is greater because the market already believed in the direction. The inverse is equally true. The company without a coherent narrative going into a difficult quarter gets punished twice: once for the miss and again for the uncertainty. That discount is not simply a reaction to bad news. It is the market pricing in the absence of reputational capital.
The CEO carries the narrative
The CEO is the single most powerful communications asset a public company has. Not because of title but because of reach, credibility and signal value. Those mental models investors build around a CEO’s words become the lens through which every subsequent piece of information is interpreted. That advantage is built over time, not deployed in a crisis.
Jensen Huang at Nvidia is among the clearest current examples. His ability to make technical complexity legible as a business narrative has been almost as important to that company’s valuation story as the underlying technology.
Larry Fink at BlackRock offers an equally instructive example. Through his annual chairman’s letter and consistent public presence, Fink has spent years repositioning BlackRock in the minds of investors: not simply as the world’s largest index fund provider but as a long-term capital steward, a technology platform and now a dominant force in private markets and infrastructure. That narrative evolution is reflected in how the market understands and values the firm. The annual letter has become one of the most widely read documents in institutional finance, not because it reports results but because it shapes how the market thinks about where capital is going next. That is reputational capital compounding in real time.
The pattern plays out just as clearly beyond the mega-cap universe. When a mid-cap company faces an activist campaign, the management teams that have built a consistent, credible narrative over time have a structural advantage before the first public letter lands. Institutional shareholders who already understand and believe the strategy are far harder for an activist to move. Those who have not invested in that narrative find themselves building the case for their own company from scratch, under pressure, in public.
The CFO and board carry it too
The CFO’s role has expanded in ways not yet fully reflected in how most companies resource the function. Explaining tariff exposure to analysts, defending capital allocation to the board, managing activist pressure from investors who have done more homework on the capital structure than most management teams have – every one of those conversations is a communications event as much as a financial one. The CFO who owns a clear, credible and consistently reinforced narrative controls the room. Credibility is built in the quiet quarters. It is spent in the hard ones.
The board is critical, too, and it’s not just an oversight body. It’s also a reputational signal. Investors read board composition, independence and responsiveness as proxies for governance quality, and governance quality is increasingly a valuation input. Boards today are evaluated on their oversight of AI risk, their response to activist pressure and their willingness to engage directly with shareholders. A board perceived as captured or disconnected from material risk creates a vulnerability that activists know exactly how to exploit. Proactive engagement and transparent governance disclosure are reputational investments that show up in the share price.
IR and PR are not separate mandates. They are one discipline.
Here is where many companies and many advisors get it wrong. The earnings call is not an IR event. The story in a major financial publication is not a PR event. The CEO’s LinkedIn post, the Reddit thread about a product recall, the analyst day presentation, the non-deal roadshow, the proxy statement and the response to an activist’s public letter are all expressions of the same narrative. They are either consistent or they are not.
According to the 2026 Global RepTrak 100, AI-generated content already ranks seventh out of fourteen channels in reputational impact despite ranking eleventh in reach, outranking email, social media news and traditional news media on impact while reaching only about ten percent of stakeholders. A retail investor is forming an opinion about your company on a platform your IR team has never visited. An institutional analyst is running your earnings transcript through a large language model and asking questions you did not anticipate.
Employees belong in this conversation. The strongest corporate narratives are not just believed by investors and analysts. They are understood and internalized by the people who do the work. An employee who can articulate clearly what the company stands for and where it is going is a powerful amplifier of reputational capital. Getting internal and external communications aligned is a precondition for the narrative holding together under pressure. The message must be the same whether it appears in a 10-K risk factor, a CEO post or an all-hands meeting. Managing that narrative is not a communications project. It is an ongoing strategic discipline.
Owning the story
The companies that will define what great looks like in today’s markets are not the ones with the best earnings. They are the ones with the best integration of what they do, what they say and who says it. The CEO who has a trusted public voice. The CFO who treats the narrative as rigorously as the model. The board that earns institutional confidence through visibility and responsiveness. The employees who believe the story well enough to carry it. And an advisory team that understands all of it, the capital markets, the media, the investor base and the governance environment, as a single interconnected system.
Reputation drives valuation. Reputational capital is what makes that relationship durable. The companies that build it deliberately, protect it consistently and manage it with the same discipline they bring to any other strategic asset have an advantage that does not show up in the income statement, but shows up everywhere else.
Josh Hochberg is ICR’s President of Communications. He leads the firm’s strategic communications business, partnering across teams to enhance client service, develop talent and deliver integrated communications and investor engagement programs for clients across the capital markets landscape.
Josh advises public and private companies, financial sponsors and boards on strategies that enhance corporate reputation, support valuation and navigate complex stakeholder environments. He counsels clients through critical situations, including shareholder activism, IPOs, M&A transactions, restructurings and other transformative events, and works closely with executive teams and boards to develop clear, compelling narratives for key moments such as earnings communications, investor days and high-profile media engagements.
He also plays a key role in developing the firm’s next generation of leaders, strengthening ICR’s integrated service model and driving consistency in client delivery.
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