Tone, timing and telling the story
This piece was first published on Friday 30 November in The Insider Briefing and on The Insurance Insider.
PR is a tough old game, you know. It’s not all booze, canapés and strategy days.
Done well, PR is worth its weight in gold. But if it misses its mark, the impact can be catastrophic.
Journalists and communications teams are often presented as opposite ends of the spectrum: the light side and the dark side, the truth-seekers and the spin merchants.
But the reality is, if we’re doing our jobs properly, our roles have a lot in common. Both sides seek to produce a clear, concise, accurate understanding of what’s happening, along with clear contextual background about how we got here.
The thing is, getting communications right is hard. Unlike news, where you’re reporting straight facts, with communications you need to ensure the tone, timing, and content is all spot on.
Following Lloyd’s recent crackdown on Decile 10, syndicate business forecast plans, and increased capital loading, there’s a growing sense that it’s not just what Lloyd’s was saying but how it was saying it that caused some ire in the wider insurance market.
While there were certainly those that felt some of the communications sent out early on in the process were “heavy-handed”, most were willing to forgive the strong tone given the urgency of the message and the need to prove that the Corporation was prepared to bare its teeth.
There was also some grumbling about the lack of transparency on Lloyd’s methodology for increasing syndicates’ solvency capital requirement, with underwriters frequently using words such as “spurious” and “arbitrary” to describe the rationales presented to them.
But the far bigger issue was Lloyd’s lack of promotion of what it was doing outside the underwriting community.
“The messaging to brokers was poor,” lamented one underwriting CEO during a conversation last week. “Given the Brexit backdrop, Lloyd’s could have been clearer on messaging. There was very much an impression that Lloyd’s was shut for business and brokers felt they had to find other homes for their risks.”
Another CEO agreed: “The messaging and communication outside of managing agents was very light, they particularly needed to talk to the broker community. Brokers have not been as supportive of Lloyd’s since.”
The lack of wider messaging isn’t just restricted to London either. Several sources in Singapore have lamented about the lack of positive stories coming out of the Corporation, with a lack of leadership in the region exacerbating the situation.
Lloyd’s Asia is profitable, as this publication has reported, but the lack of communication to brokers and MGAs has left the platform looking vulnerable at a time when it’s trying to attract more of the local risks.
Lessons need to be learned here, and fast. A perception that Lloyd’s can’t take on your business, even a false one, is dangerous at a time when risks are increasingly being placed locally.
And with the uncertainty of Brexit, the ongoing fight to prove that London represents good value for money and increasing pressure from rival insurance hubs, failing to spend enough time talking to the key distributors of your market’s business could prove expensively naive.