Most companies, when the market tightens during crisis, instinctively default to the same response: they go quiet. Budgets are cut, campaigns paused, public positioning scaled back to whatever feels safest. The logic is understandable. When you’re uncertain, you don’t want to say the wrong thing.
The problem is that silence is also a message — and in volatile markets, it is often read as weakness.
This is the communications trap most commonly seen in volatile markets: the belief that staying visible is a risk, when the greater risk may be that of becoming indistinguishable. And the solution is almost never better marketing. It’s better leadership communication.
There’s a clear underlying dynamic for this. When confidence in institutions drops, people shift their attention to individuals. They want to know not what a company claims about itself, but how its leadership reads the situation. The Edelman Trust Barometer has documented this consistently, highlighting a shift toward individual credibility over institutional messaging: in moments of instability, CEOs are trusted more than the organisations they run. Now, this doesn’t happen because executives are inherently credible. But the reality is that in such situations, a recognisable person making a coherent argument is more reassuring at a fundamental level than a brand positioning statement.
The UAE market makes this dynamic particularly acute. This is a fast-moving, highly competitive environment where decisions move fast and alternatives are always visible. When two companies offer comparable products at comparable prices, the differentiator is often a perceived clarity of thought. Almost always, that clarity comes from whoever is willing to articulate it publicly.
The objection I hear most often is reasonable: if an executive voice is strategically shaped, does it compromise its authenticity? If visibility is managed, can it still be trusted?
It is a fair question, and the answer is a qualified yes — it is authentic, provided the substance is real. Authenticity is not the absence of structure; it is the presence of consistency, credibility, and lived experience. What matters is not whether communication is guided, but whether what is being communicated reflects a position that is genuinely held, demonstrably earned, and sustained over time.
A CEO who has spent thirty years building a business has real things to say about uncertainty. The role of communication here is to eliminate the friction between leadership insight and market understanding. In such situations, the ability to articulate one’s point of view confidently and well is almost as important as the point of view itself.
What doesn’t work — and this matters more than most of us realise — is the alternative: generic thought leadership that says nothing, or crisis messaging that sounds like every other company’s crisis messaging. In a saturated market, interchangeability ends up becoming a strategic liability.
The leaders who hold commercial momentum through difficult cycles are typically those who were already visible before those cycles began. After all, people don’t re-evaluate from scratch; they return to reference points they already know and trust.
It’s a strategic mistake to presume that it is safer to communicate cautiously and minimally in times of uncertainty. Instead, what is needed is for executives to raise the standard of thought and its expression. What it demands is less noise — and more willingness to say something specific, even when specific is harder than safe. In closing, I’d go so far as to say that what the present situation demands is the same as what such circumstances have always asked of us; for us to rise to the challenge rather than shrink from it.
By Bassam Sleiman, Managing Director, Yond & Beyond
