How to get business strategy communications right inside and outside your organisation
Getting your business strategy communications right is especially important inside Finance and FinTech companies where every decision matters.
See this blog as a mini guide for Finance and FinTech leaders. Most finance and fintech leaders can recite their strategy word for word. Fewer can say, with confidence, that their people, customers and partners could do the same or understand its essence. That gap – between the strategy written down and the strategy understood – is exactly what business strategy communications exists to close.
So, what is it?
Business strategy communications is the discipline of translating a strategic plan into language, behaviour and experience that different audiences can understand and act on. It sits above marketing and internal comms, because it has to work in both directions at once: giving employees a focus and purpose to their work, and building trust and holding you accountable to customers, investors and regulators.
It’s a simple human truth that people don’t follow strategies – they follow stories they believe and behaviours they see modelled around them. In financial services, where trust is the product as much as the balance sheet, that truth matters more than most sectors will admit.
Getting it right on the inside
When NatWest Group needed to unify strategy communication across its Wealth businesses – Coutts, Adam & Co, NatWest Premier and Holts – the temptation would have been to write a single, tidy narrative and push it out. Instead, we spent six months interviewing senior leaders, workshopping what we heard and testing it against the strategy the management consultants had already validated. What emerged was ‘Becoming the best – for everyone, not just a few’ which was brought to life through films, town halls, one-page summaries and a central intranet hub.
As Camilla Manistre, Interim Director of Communications, put it: “Becoming the Best stuck and we’re following it.” That’s the test of internal strategy communications done well – not whether people remember the line on launch day, but whether they’re still using it eighteen months later. It worked because the narrative was built on genuine organisational strengths, not aspiration: Coutts’ B Corp status and its work democratising access to investment gave the strategy something true to hold onto.
Getting it right on the outside
Externally, the same principle applies: strategy has to be felt, not just stated.
Moneyfarm faced a different problem. A fintech wealth manager well known in Italy and Germany, their strategy was to help more people in the UK improve their financial wellbeing by making personal investing straight forward and accessible through technology. Rather than segmenting by age or income, we segmented by behaviour and motivation – targeting the ‘curious, busy go-getters’ who wanted an expert that matched their outlook and lifestyle. The resulting campaign, ‘See more than money,’ reframed investing around outcomes such as freedom and achievement rather than just interest rates and products. Awareness and engagement followed because the communications bought the strategy to life in a relatable way by channeled aspirations and how people actually decide, not how a product brochure assumes they decide.
Three things to take from this
Have you thought about how your own strategy would fare under the same test? Three principles hold true across each of these examples. First, alignment comes before amplification – internal belief has to exist before external messaging can be credible. Second, behavioural insight beats demographic assumption – what people believe about themselves changes what they’ll do far more than who they are on paper. Third, a strategy only counts once someone outside the boardroom can understand it, believe it and repeat it in their own words.
Get those three right, and your strategy stops being a document people file away and becomes something they carry with them, on both sides of the organisation.
