Crisis, M&A and Trading: Communicating Commodities with Will Medvei

Podcast Briefing: an Edited Q&A

The following Q&A has been adapted from the HC Commodities Podcast and edited for clarity and length.

Corporate Communications Today

Paul Chapman: What does modern corporate communications involve, and what do you mean when you describe Brunswick as a critical issues business?

Will Medvei: Companies are affected by a range of issues involving different stakeholders, including employees, investors, governments, regulators, communities and the media. Corporate communications helps businesses understand those pressure points and communicate effectively with each audience.

Externally, that includes media relations, digital communications, community engagement, financial communications and crisis management. Internally, communications can support employee engagement, culture and a shared sense of purpose. There are also closely related disciplines such as government relations, regulatory affairs and investor relations.

Different companies structure these functions in different ways, but what matters is that they work together. A company cannot tell investors one story while communicating something conflicting to employees or government. Audiences now consume information through many different channels, so everything needs to form part of a coherent corporate narrative.

Communications in the Boardroom

Paul Chapman: Is corporate communications now a more important part of board and leadership discussions?

Will Medvei: Absolutely. Communications teams and advisers increasingly sit alongside boards and executive teams, particularly during crises and major transactions. These situations can affect reputation, stakeholder confidence and perceptions of management competence, so communications needs to inform decision-making rather than be added after the key decisions have been taken.

Commodities on Hard Mode

Paul Chapman: Why is corporate communications particularly difficult in the commodities sector?

Will Medvei: Commodities sit at the heart of many of the most important issues facing society, including energy security, affordability, climate change, trade, industrial competitiveness, geopolitics and national security. The sector provides the energy we use, the food we eat, the materials we build with and many of the resources required by modern technology.

The paradox is that commodities are largely invisible when everything works properly. People do not necessarily think about the gas powering their homes or the materials inside their phones. The better the industry performs, the less most people need to consider it in their daily lives.

The sector often becomes visible when something goes wrong, whether through an operational incident, an environmental issue or a supply disruption. Its benefits are frequently taken for granted, while its negative impacts receive significant attention. That makes it difficult for companies to communicate positively and to find credible advocates outside the industry who are prepared to explain its wider contribution. 

Reputation and the Talent Challenge

Paul Chapman: What does the sector’s reputation mean for its ability to attract talent?

Will Medvei: The way an industry communicates inevitably affects how potential employees see it. Senior executives need to be able to explain the company, its strategy and the role people can play within it. That ability to translate and communicate strategy is becoming increasingly important to executive success.

Companies must also consider how their messages will be received by people outside the organisation. If the sector does not clearly communicate its purpose, value and opportunities, it becomes harder for potential employees to understand why they should build a career within it.

The wider energy and resources sector therefore needs an authentic and realistic voice. This is particularly important as experienced professionals approach retirement in areas such as offshore oil and gas. The industry still requires technical expertise, commercial capability and new talent, but fewer people may consider these careers if the sector does not explain why its work remains essential.

Communications cannot solve the talent challenge alone, but it can help companies articulate what they do, why it matters and where they are going. The same principles apply to an individual recruitment campaign: begin with clarity about what the organisation is trying to achieve, then build the role and its narrative around that objective. 

Preparing for a Crisis

Paul Chapman: What should commodities companies have in place before a crisis occurs?

Will Medvei: Many commodities businesses operate large, complex industrial assets in challenging environments. They may be working in deep water, extreme temperatures or heavily populated areas, while moving combustible materials or competing with local communities for resources such as water. Despite stringent safety standards and considerable engineering expertise, things can still go wrong.

The best companies therefore devote substantial time to crisis preparation. They develop detailed protocols, clarify responsibilities and rehearse different scenarios so that people understand where they sit in the response process.

Live exercises and crisis communications workshops can expose weaknesses before a real event occurs. They allow management teams to examine plausible operational, financial, employee and reputational risks, assess how prepared the organisation is and identify where processes need to be strengthened.

Showing Leadership Under Pressure

Paul Chapman: During a crisis, how can leaders demonstrate control without communicating prematurely?

Will Medvei: Leaders need to show that they have a grip on the situation without trying to fill every information gap. The facts may still be emerging, so visible leadership must be balanced with the discipline not to get ahead of what is known. Above all, communications and operational delivery must remain aligned.

Communicating M&A

Paul Chapman: What makes communications so important during a major transaction?

Will Medvei: M&A creates an asymmetry of time and information. Senior management and their financial and legal advisers may have spent months examining the strategic rationale, valuation, risks and available alternatives. When the transaction is announced, employees, investors, analysts, journalists and other stakeholders have very little time to understand it.

Companies therefore need to answer several basic questions clearly. Why are they pursuing this transaction? Why now? How does it support or change the strategy? Why does the valuation and financial rationale make sense?

Those answers must be communicated in a coordinated way to investors, employees, government, regulators and other relevant audiences. Involving communications early helps ensure that these different stakeholder perspectives are considered before the announcement, not afterwards.

The work also continues beyond the announcement and completion. Integration can take years, and employees need clarity about where the combined company is going, why the transaction happened and what it means for them. Communications does not remove the operational difficulty of integration, but it can help create alignment across the two organisations. 

Explaining Commodity Trading

Paul Chapman: Why is commodity trading so difficult to explain to investors, boards and employees?

Will Medvei: Trading is commercially sensitive by its nature. Companies cannot disclose every position or element of their strategy, so the business can appear to be a black box from the outside.

There is also volatility. Trading can generate exceptionally strong quarters, followed by periods of weaker performance or occasional significant losses. That is difficult to explain to a market that generally prefers stable and consistent financial narratives.

Rather than treating trading only as a quarterly earnings story, companies can explain it as an underlying capability. Trading can help a business manage risk, strengthen resilience, maximise value and pursue opportunities it might otherwise be unable to access.

The internal story matters too. When a producer, miner, refiner or processor builds a more developed trading and optimisation function, employees across the organisation need to understand why it is happening and how it supports the wider strategy. Without that clarity, a new commercial team can be seen as a threat to the existing culture rather than a capability that makes the business stronger. 

Communications Is Not Spin

Paul Chapman: What are the most important principles companies should remember when developing their communications?

Will Medvei: The wrong starting point is to ask, “What do we want to say?” The better questions are: what are we trying to achieve, why is this the right approach and what will it allow the business to do?

Communications is not a substitute for strategy or operational delivery. If a company repeatedly over-promises and under-delivers, the market will discount its messages until it sees sustained evidence of improvement. Trying to put a positive sheen on a negative situation will not restore credibility.

Communications should enable a sound strategy by creating clarity around purpose, direction and delivery. It can help a company get things done, but it cannot compensate for the absence of a credible plan or the failure to execute it. 

Finding an Authentic Voice

Paul Chapman: How can companies and individuals become more effective communicators without making every message overly cautious or controlled?

Will Medvei: Good communications professionals spend a great deal of time considering how the outside world will interpret a message. They look beyond the organisation’s internal perspective, question their assumptions and test how the message might land with more sceptical audiences.

Companies also need to be willing to communicate the limits of what they can control. During the evolution of the energy transition debate, some businesses made commitments that later proved difficult to deliver. Others took a more constrained position, explaining what they could achieve and what depended on government policy, regulation or wider market developments. That approach may have been unpopular in the short term, but delivering on credible commitments can strengthen trust over time.

There is always a risk that communications becomes too conservative. Avoiding every risk can result in a message being diluted until it says very little. However, companies are better placed to communicate confidently when they have a clear strategy and a realistic view of what the business can become over the next 10, 20 or 30 years.

If a company says very little about itself, other people will fill the gap, often using partial information or from a different, sometimes hostile, perspective. The energy and resources sector needs to articulate its own narrative, particularly if it wants to engage stakeholders, explain the value of trading and attract the next generation of talent. That voice must be authentic, evidence-based and supported by what the organisation can actually deliver.