Communication Tools

With corporate turnaround and recovery, communications is a life-and-death strategic imperative, especially for midsize companies that have neither the economic nor brand-name capital to weather protracted misperceptions or no-confidence investor votes. The good news is that the marketplace is full of mid-cap companies that have survived corporate turnaround and recovery despite formidable adversity.

Take Quadramed, for example, a hospital software company that suffered one setback after another: an SEC investigation, NASDAQ de-listing, an earnings restatement, and shareholder actions. But the company seized on one great positive event, an Amex re-listing, to propagate a story centered on corporate turnaround and recovery. Corporate turnaround and recovery became the story – and, as a result, the worse its past misfortunes were, the more impressive its current recovery story became.

Global behemoths must operate on many more fronts to fully communicate corporate turnaround and recovery. Decades ago, General Electric was able to tie up all the skeins of its multifaceted resurgence in one symbolic brand-defining package: Jack Welch. Today, General Motors and Ford must look for new strategies, integrating PR and advertising and marketing and merchandising, in a communications package that will support their (hopefully) inevitable corporate turnaround and recovery.