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LONDON – April 17, 2024 – Brands2Life today launches a new approach to Executive Communications that combines the strength of the agency’s media relations with its social and digital expertise. Centred around its proprietary LIFE planning framework, and powered by AI insight tools, the new approach combines messaging and storytelling capabilities with expert understanding of social media platform dynamics, copywriting and community engagement to elevate an executive’s platform.
The new proposition also includes a methodology for assessing executive effectiveness on LinkedIn and in the media. As part of the launch an audit of 100 global CEOs spanning nine industries was conducted, with the key finding that many company leaders are failing to meet the required benchmarks.
“We’re in the midst of a challenging economic environment, with relentless internal and external pressures and a fierce battle for attention. Brands need to build up their executives’ presence to get their visions across and develop an approach that mixes earned, paid and social media to get the best chance of enhancing their reputation,” said Giles Fraser, Co-Founder, Brands2Life. “This is why we are launching our new integrated Executive Communications proposition. Centred around our LIFE framework, we will empower executives to tell better stories with bigger impact to the audiences that matter.”
For the audit, benchmarks were set across core areas: Presence, Expertise, Networking, Audience Engagement and Media Leadership. The research reveals that the average CEO has only completed the basics of their LinkedIn profile, posts three times a month and talks about their company twice as much as any other topic. They offer little opinion in their posts and write a comment on one of their connection’s posts about once a month. In the main, their posts do not engage much beyond the employee base.
In contrast, top-performing CEOs have fully filled-out profiles with professional profile and header pictures, featured posts, the follow option enabled, and a compelling About section written-up. They post twice a week to build and maintain their audience, and they talk about their industry, society and personal topics as much as their own company. They always share their insights with original thinking and comment on a connection’s post at least once a week. Their content generates strong engagement including from those outside their company.
The audit also analysed the quantity and quality of media coverage in top-tier publications since March 2023. As earned media relations is highly nuanced and companies often make the strategic choice to remain out of the limelight deliberately, it would be unwise to draw correlations and conclusions of the 100 CEOs as a whole. We created a Net Sentiment Score that is similar to a Net Promoter Score where positive and neutral stories are evaluated against negative stories. Half of the CEOs we looked at have a score above 80% suggesting well-functioning media relations efforts.
“Brand executives are the ultimate brand ambassadors. A well-designed executive comms platform deepens understanding of what the company stands for, builds trust and credibility with stakeholders, makes crisis management manageable, and helps navigate change internally,” said Fraser.
Clients will follow the LIFE framework—a four-stage journey that takes them through data and AI-driven listening insights, platform and strategy development, impact definition and execution.
Brands can get in touch with Brands2Life to benchmark their executives as well as gain a deeper understanding of how the new framework works for their needs.
Media and LinkedIn Audit: Brands2Life analysed 100 CEOs from banking, insurance & finance; consumer goods; energy & utilities; information technology; infrastructure; media & communications; pharmaceuticals & healthcare; retail & fashion; and travel & hospitality.
On LinkedIn we researched all posts, comments and engagements from 1st September 2023 to 29th February 2024. For the media audit we analysed all articles secured in top tier media over the past year using the Onclusive platform.
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