Reputation Is Decided When Companies Restructure

Transition is inevitable. Decline during transition is optional.

The most vulnerable moment for any organisation is not during stable operations. It is during restructuring — when roles disappear, knowledge leaves the building and narrative control fragments. Across Europe, large corporates are restructuring at scale. Automotive, chemicals, media and logistics groups are eliminating thousands of roles in response to sluggish growth, geopolitical volatility, energy costs and accelerating AI adoption.  Marketing and communications functions are frequently among the first areas examined. History suggests this is precisely where companies miscalculate.

What the Data Shows

During the 2008–09 financial crisis, McKinsey identified a group of “emerging resilients” — companies that reallocated resources toward growth rather than cutting indiscriminately. Over the following decade, they outperformed peers by roughly 150 percentage points in total shareholder return.

Long-term data from the IPA and Kantar shows a similarly consistent pattern. Brands that maintained or increased advertising investment during downturns achieved materially higher market share growth and stronger business effects than those that reduced spend heavily. Increasing investment by more than 20 per cent during recessions was associated with durable share gains of around 0.9 percentage points. Heavy cutters saw marginal improvements and no structural profitability advantage. The lesson is counterintuitive but clear: transition rewards strategic investment. It punishes reflex retrenchment.

Why This Cycle Is Different

Unlike previous downturns, today’s disruption is structural. AI is redesigning workflows across marketing, communications, public affairs and corporate functions. Companies therefore face a structural choice. They can use AI as a cost lever layered onto a shrinking function.
Or they can redesign communications architecture for coherence, speed and scale.

The first path reduces visible overhead. It also thins institutional memory, fragments narrative ownership and weakens trust. The second integrates AI-enabled execution with senior strategic oversight — turning communication into a multiplier of transformation rather than a casualty of it.

At the same time, reputational exposure is intensifying. Cyber incidents propagate globally within hours. Leadership transitions attract immediate scrutiny. Research consistently shows that most large-scale transformations underperform, with weak communication and low employee engagement among the primary causes. In restructuring, silence is interpreted as opacity. Inconsistency is interpreted as instability. Reputation rarely collapses in a single event. It erodes when narrative control weakens during transition.

Communication as Infrastructure

Boards typically frame resilience in financial and operational terms. Yet evidence across crises points to a broader conclusion: communication capability functions as strategic infrastructure. Organisations that protected and modernised marketing and communications during downturns gained share, strengthened pricing power and delivered superior long-term returns. Those that treated it as discretionary overhead often struggled to recover lost ground. The risk compounds when internal restructuring coincides with external shocks. A data breach during stable operations is a crisis. A breach during leadership transition or cost reduction becomes a reputational multiplier. Reducing communication capacity at precisely this moment increases both operational and reputational risk.

Transition removes buffers.
What was previously absorbed becomes visible.
What was loosely aligned becomes exposed.

Built for Structural Transition

Moonraker is built for this inflection point. The name refers to the highest sail on a ship — positioned above turbulence, capturing the cleanest wind and helping set the course. The principle is strategic rather than poetic: in volatile conditions, advantage comes from alignment at the highest level, not activity at the margins. We operate in the same way. Through our AI-first platform, ENTUAL, we combine a scalable operating system — automating data-intensive execution — with senior expertise focused on strategy, stakeholder alignment, public affairs and crisis management.

Our objective is not to preserve legacy structures. It is to design one overarching strategic architecture that integrates disciplines, breaks down traditional silos and ensures that marketing and communications functions operate as a coherent system rather than fragmented units.

One strategic narrative. Integrated across disciplines. Built to scale without diluting accountability. Directed at measurable business outcomes. Over the past years we have observed a recurring pattern: organisations attempt to cut their way through transition. Yet reducing capacity without redesigning the foundation creates long-term fragility.

Trust becomes fragile. Communication slows. Decision-making turns reactive. In volatile markets, coherence is not cosmetic. It is structural.

The Strategic Choice

The empirical record across crises is unambiguous. Companies that treat transition purely as cost compression weaken brand and trust.
Companies that rebuild strategically during transition outperform when markets stabilise.

Transition is inevitable.
Reputation loss is not.

The most vulnerable moment for any organisation is restructuring. It is also the moment when advantage is built.

This is not firefighting. It is structural reconstruction. Organisations that treat transition as temporary damage control will fall behind. Those that rebuild during transition will dominate when stability returns.