Why Reputation Now Belongs to the Geopolitical Age

Every flight begins the same way: buckle in, expect turbulence, ride it out. For decades, corporate communicators could tell themselves the same story. Crises came and went. The sky smoothed eventually.

Not anymore.

The Ipsos Reputation Council 2025 makes it clear: the seatbelt sign is on, permanently. What’s changed isn’t just the scale of disruption — it’s the role of those charged with explaining it. The Chief Communications Officer is no longer a custodian of the message. They are a geopolitical analyst, a crisis forecaster, a strategist in the war room.

One member said it plainly: “If it’s my top three, it’s geopolitics, geopolitics, geopolitics.”

This is the new reality: communicators are foreign ministers of their companies. Every tariff, every election, every war is not just news — it’s a direct variable in the business equation. The CCO is the one asked to translate it into strategy.

The Age of Strategic Silence

The old corporate playbook said: speak out, show purpose, take a stand. After George Floyd, after Ukraine, the chorus was almost unanimous. Today? Only one in five CCOs still prefer that route.

Silence has become a strategy. Not cowardice, but calculation. Because in a world of fractured politics, what wins you applause in one country sparks boycotts in another.

Here lies the paradox: the more dangerous the external world becomes, the more valuable internal authenticity is. Employees still want to know what their company believes. If silence reigns outside, the voice must echo inside.

ESG Without the Acronym

Three letters once carried moral weight: ESG. Today, they’re as likely to trigger cynicism or political firestorms as applause. Only a third of leaders even think the acronym describes what they actually do.

And yet — beneath the fading label — the principles are embedding deeper into corporate DNA. Climate risk is a financial risk. Workforce equity is a resilience strategy. Supply chain responsibility is survival.

The smart shift is from proclamation to proof. Don’t tell the world how green you are; show the numbers, the actions, the resilience.

AI: From Hype to Risk

Fifty-seven percent of communicators now use AI daily. But fewer than half think they use it meaningfully. Confidence is slipping, not rising.

Why? Because the risks are no longer theoretical. Deepfakes. Hallucinated facts. Ethical guardrails that don’t hold. One CCO captured the threat in a single line: “AI is not coming to take your job. A person who knows how to use AI well is coming to take your job.”

The challenge isn’t adoption. It’s integration. The winners won’t be the fastest. They’ll be the most thoughtful — those who pair human intelligence with machine efficiency, and demand transparency from tools built in black boxes.

The Intimacy of Turbulence

Here’s the most radical finding: 91% of CCOs now have direct access to their CEO. What was once a seat on the side is now a place at the center. In turbulence, intimacy is necessity.

The communicator has become the strategist. The one who doesn’t just deliver the message but shapes the decision. In some companies, the CEO-CCO bond is now the most critical partnership in the business.

The Future Belongs to the Sense-Makers

This is the throughline of the Ipsos report: in a polycrisis, the role of the communicator is not to calm the noise. It is to make sense of it. To decide when to speak, when to stay silent, when to turn jargon into plain speech, when to demand AI explain itself.

The most dangerous mistake would be to treat turbulence as temporary. It isn’t. The seatbelt sign will not turn off. The question isn’t how to wait it out — it’s how to lead while strapped in.