Hearts & Minds: UK companies must relearn the art of storytelling

Not long ago, the focus was on the stock market, on floating or merging or demerging and separately listing one part of the business. This year, IPOs in the UK have fallen to their lowest level in 30 years. With that drop off comes a reshaping of comms. It’s less about pursuing a grand design and more about growing revenues. Not so much about takeover and exit but on making the existing company sing.

The reason London is not humming with flotations is down to lower valuations. Institutional investors do not rate companies as highly as they do elsewhere. While that may be opportune for PE as they get themselves what they consider to be a bargain and for foreign buyers and overseas exchanges, especially New York, it does put the onus on UK brands to pay greater attention to their underlying strength, to show how good they really are.

Once, journalists were looking for the deal. Open the business pages and their headlines would be all about the latest IPOs and mergers or break-ups. Speculation would abound; hares would be set running. It would overshadow the results, interviews and off-the-record chats.

The stories virtually wrote themselves. Now, though, in a slower, not so febrile environment, it’s harder. The press still desire a headline and in order to grab them and seize that space, to be that headline, a company must stand out, it must have a tale to tell.

What that requires is finding aspects of the operation that are interesting to outsiders, that will make them sit up. See them as a way in, into detailing what you’re doing, how the company is performing and going to perform. They can be quirky - you might think they’re trivial, relative to the size of the company and everything it’s doing - but they may just cut-through. Here is a personal example. I said I would see Charlie Mullins, boss of Pimlico Plumbers. I admit, plumbing was not exactly the sexiest topic. But when I went to see him, Charlie mentioned that ‘Buster over there, is nearly 100 and he’s still cleaning vans.’ Next thing was a main piece going in on Buster Martin, Britain’s oldest worker and leading into Charlie talking about his employment policy, Pimlico and the plumbing industry, complete with pictures of them both.

Chris Blackhurst is one of the UK’s foremost business journalists. He was previously Editor of The Independent and City Editor of the Evening Standard.