Reach without relevance becomes noise. And in a fluctuating market, noise is the one thing your audience has no tolerance for, writes Colin Hutton, Founder and CEO of Umami Comms and Good Juju.
The most significant shift I’m seeing is the move away from campaign thinking and toward relationship thinking. When market confidence is high, communications strategy is largely about reach: how many people can we get the message in front of, how loudly, how often. When confidence dips, that logic inverts. Reach without relevance becomes noise. And in a fluctuating market, noise is the one thing your audience has no tolerance for.
What’s replacing it, for the brands and agencies doing this well, is a much more deliberate focus on depth over breadth. Fewer touchpoints, but more considered ones. Less emphasis on generating coverage and more on generating trust. The question shifts from “how do we get people talking about us?” to “what do we actually want people to think and feel about us right now, and what’s the most honest way to get there?”
That sounds like a subtle distinction, but it changes almost every practical decision. It changes what you pitch to the media, what you post, how you brief your spokespeople, how you talk to existing clients versus prospects. It also changes how you measure success. In a fluctuating market, the metric that matters isn’t impressions. It’s whether the people who matter to your business still trust you, still choose you, and still feel that you understand their world.
The other shift worth naming is internal communications. In uncertain periods, the audience that needs the most considered communications strategy is often your own team. How leadership communicates during turbulence, honestly, consistently, without false reassurance, determines how that organisation presents itself to every external audience. You cannot have a coherent external voice if the internal one is confused or absent. The two are the same strategy. Most businesses still treat them as separate departments.
Why Visibility Matters More in Uncertain Times
There’s a version of this answer that’s purely commercial. Brands that maintain share of voice during downturns come out ahead when conditions improve, and the data broadly supports that. But the more interesting and honest answer is about what visibility actually signals during uncertainty.
When a brand goes quiet, it doesn’t disappear from its audience’s mind. It just leaves a gap. And in uncertain times, gaps get filled by assumption, usually negative. Clients wonder if you’re struggling. Guests wonder if you’re still open. Talent wonders if you’re stable. The absence of communication is itself a message, and it’s rarely the one you’d choose to send.
Staying visible when things are difficult is a statement of confidence. Not manufactured confidence, which reads as tone-deaf and audiences in a heightened state of attention will spot immediately. The quiet, consistent confidence of a brand that continues to show up, continues to produce work worth paying attention to, continues to communicate with its community as if the relationship matters regardless of trading conditions. That’s the kind of visibility that compounds over time.
The brands I’ve watched navigate this region through multiple cycles, from the financial crisis through COVID and into the current environment, share a pattern. They don’t shout louder when things are hard. But they don’t go silent either. They find the register that’s appropriate to the moment and they maintain it. Steady, considered, present. And when the market turns, they’re not starting from zero. They’re building on a foundation that their competitors, the ones who went dark, have to rebuild from scratch.
The practical implication for any brand reviewing budget right now: if something has to give, make sure it’s not the thing that keeps you in the conversation. Cut the channels that aren’t working regardless of conditions. Redeploy that budget into content, into owned channels, into the relationships with media and community that you’ve spent years building. A rebrand, a campaign built and ready to launch when confidence returns, an investment in the creative assets that will define your next chapter. These are productive uses of a quieter period. The brands that emerge from downturns looking sharper, more defined, more confident than when they went in didn’t get lucky. They made a deliberate choice not to do nothing.
