Tag Archive for: investor communications

The Regulatory Narrative: Why Brands Should Shape the Conversation Before Regulators Do

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Key Takeaways

  • Every regulated industry has a public conversation running whether or not a company joins it, and the regulatory narrative gets shaped by whoever shows up.
  • Staying silent doesn’t protect a regulated brand. It hands the narrative to a competitor, a critic, or a regulator instead.
  • Credibility for a regulated brand comes from repeated, visible participation in front of investors, regulators, journalists, and customers, not a single press release.
  • Commentary builds trust that lobbying can’t, because it informs an audience instead of asking something of them.
  • Every voice a regulated brand puts into the conversation eventually shows up in capital, valuation, and competitive position.
  • Regulated brands that shape their narrative early set the terms of the conversation; the ones that wait respond to terms someone else already set.

The Conversation Is Already Happening

Every regulated industry has a public conversation running in the background, one reporters are covering, regulators are debating, and investors are already pricing in.

That conversation moves with or without a company’s participation. Now it’s just a matter of who is shaping it.

For regulated brands, public narratives can affect how regulators understand an industry, what questions journalists ask, what investors see as risk, and what stakeholders consider responsible behavior. The companies that help shape those conversations early have more opportunity to define their category before someone else does.

Silence Is Not Neutral

Some executives treat staying quiet as the safe, controlled move. But silence doesn’t pause the conversation, it just hands the microphone to someone else. Avoiding that starts with treating narrative strategy as its own discipline, before regulators or competitors force the issue.

A reporter covering biotech pricing will find a source somewhere. So will a regulator drafting new guidance, and a retail buyer deciding which brands to stock.

If that source isn’t your company, it becomes a competitor. That competitor now has an opportunity to influence how the issue is framed, which questions get asked, and what responsible behavior in the category looks like. Left unattended long enough, that’s how narrative leakage starts, from a company simply not being in the room when its own story gets written by someone else.

Credibility Is Built in Public

Trust builds through repeated, visible participation in front of the audiences a company depends on, not a single press release. Journalists call back a source who explains things clearly and responds fast, not one who was just quotable once, and policymakers, working to understand an industry from the outside, look to the companies that keep giving them an accurate picture, the ones that end up shaping the outcome.

Investors watch for something similar: a story that holds up the same way in a filing as it does in a press interview, since that consistency is what actually builds credibility, more than any single spokesperson. That kind of consistency is also what gives credibility measurable value once a company reaches a raise or a deal. Retailers and consumers respond to the same pattern from a different angle. A name that keeps showing up in coverage and expert quotes lowers the risk of a shelf placement or a purchase in a way plain familiarity never could.

Commentary Is Not Lobbying

Confusing lobbying, advocacy, and thought leadership costs companies credibility. While lobbying pushes for an outcome and advocacy asks people to take a side, thoughtful commentary simply explains how an industry works. By following the evidence instead of an agenda, it earns trust that self-serving messaging can’t.

A fintech executive explaining how interchange fees affect small merchants is commentary. The same executive demanding a specific rate cap is lobbying. Both can be legitimate parts of a company’s public presence, but only one builds credibility with the reporters, regulators, and skeptics who aren’t already on the company’s side.

Balancing both roles is part of why regulated brands often need two communications tracks running at the same time. This is especially true in regulated industries, where credibility is often the starting point for earning trust at all.

Every Voice Has a Business Outcome

Participation shows up in the numbers a board actually tracks, not just in reputation.

A founder who can explain their industry’s risk and upside in plain, confident language gives investors a clearer basis for their own judgment. That kind of explanation is squarely PR for capital, talking to investors rather than customers. If the investor story and the product story ever pull apart, that gap becomes  the kind of inconsistency that costs a company credibility. That’s why PR for product and PR for capital need to work together rather than run as two disconnected efforts. That coordination is what keeps the two working together instead of pulling apart.

Visibility boosts valuation by smoothing the path to key milestones like funding or acquisitions. By owning the industry narrative, a recognizable company forces competitors onto the defensive.

Consistent, value-driven messaging builds the credibility regulated companies need to influence major strategic outcomes.

Two Paths, One Choice

Every regulated company eventually enters the public conversation. The only variable is timing, and who’s driving it when that happens.

Early movers define the terms reporters use, the questions regulators ask, and the assumptions investors make. Ahead of its merger, one regulated cannabis brand proved this by using six months of targeted earned media to boost its competitive share of voice by 291% and close the deal on schedule.

Delaying proactive communication leaves you defending your reputation during a crisis. Regulated businesses face a simple choice: build credibility early to shape the conversation, or let others shape it for you.

Partner With An Agency That Shapes The Conversation

Before the next assessment conversation, ask yourself two questions: if a reporter needed a source on the biggest issue facing your category right now, would they already have you on f

ile? And if a regulator opened a comment period tomorrow, would your company already have a position on record, or would it be starting from zero?

Avaans Media has done this since 2008, with a 100% executive-level team guiding regulated industries through funding rounds, IPOs, and high-stakes moments.

If you’re ready to shape the conversation instead of reacting to it, an assessment from Avaans Media shows you where you stand and what it would take to lead it.

Explore our insights and special reports on regulated industries at avaansmedia.com/category/resources.

The Invisible Asset, written by Avaans Media founder Tara Coomans, is the PR ROI framework that builds brand equity, drives valuation, attracts capital, and wins high-stakes moments. It’s built for CMOs defending budgets, CEOs preparing for a capital event, and operators in regulated categories. Get the book →

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Why Consumer Brand IPO PR Starts Years Before the Roadshow

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Most content about IPO public relations is written backward. It starts with the roadshow: the press releases, the media tour, the investor deck walkthrough. But by the time a consumer brand is booking that tour, the outcome is largely set. The IPO stress-tests a narrative you should have built years earlier.

Consumer brands feel this harder than anyone. They’re carrying two audiences into the IPO at once: the retail buyer who has to trust the product, and the institutional investor who has to trust the story. Most companies build their communications plan for one and just hope the other follows along.

Founders and CMOs who start thinking about IPO PR once the roadshow gets scheduled are already behind. Compare that to the companies that walk into their public debut with pricing power and investor confidence: they spent years building the record that made both possible, some of it dating back to Series B funding stage, long before the roadshow was ever a formality to check off. That record is what gives brand authority a measurable value once the company reaches the roadshow.

The 18-Month Pre-IPO PR Timeline for Consumer Brands

Consumer brands need eighteen months of steady work before the final quarter arrives.  It breaks down into four phases, each one making the next easier to earn.

18 Months Out: Establish the Category Narrative

Before an investor can trust a company, they have to understand the category it competes in. This phase is about becoming the named leader in a category investors can explain in one sentence.

Most consumer brands underinvest here. They assume product quality speaks for itself. It doesn’t, not to an institutional audience meeting the category for the first time. The work here is trade press first, then category-defining coverage that gives analysts a frame to place the company inside. For regulated brands, that category narrative has to hold up under more scrutiny than most, which is its own discipline.

12 Months Out: Build Executive Visibility and Executive Profile

By this point, the CEO’s executive profile needs to already be a recognizable source in the relevant trade and business press, not someone the market is meeting for the first time.

If your CEO isn’t already a source reporters call for comment in your category, you’re not 12 months out. You’re further behind than the calendar suggests. Executive visibility doesn’t compress. Faking it in a 90-day sprint reads exactly like what it is.

6 Months Out: Layer Third-Party Validation

Analyst coverage, industry awards, and partnership announcements start doing the work a company can’t do for itself. Nobody trusts a brand’s own claims about its market position. They trust what independent parties are willing to put their name on.

This phase builds the valuation story in the language investors actually use: growth signals, competitive positioning, third-party proof. And it’s easier to earn here because the trade and category work from the earlier phases already laid the groundwork.

90 Days Out: Build the Earned Media Inventory

By the time the roadshow starts, there should be a body of coverage the company can already point to as evidence. The roadshow’s only job left: confirm what the coverage already proved

Why Consumer Brand IPO PR Often Starts Too Late

A consumer brand can dominate retail shelf space and still walk into due diligence with a thin editorial record. That’s because nobody built the investor-facing track. Retail and DTC audiences respond to lifestyle press, product reviews, and cultural relevance. Investors want something different: trade credibility, financial press, and proof the company leads its category. That split runs even deeper for regulated brands, where legal review and dual narratives complicate both tracks at once. Most marketing teams only chase lifestyle and cultural coverage, because that’s the metric leadership tracks.

The fix is sequencing: run both tracks together so they compound into the same narrative instead of competing for the same twelve months of attention.

Three Questions to Ask Before You Hire an IPO Communications Partner

Most agencies will tell you they do pre-IPO PR. Few can survive these three questions:

1. “Where does your team start the narrative build, at 18 months or at 90 days?”

A partner who says 90 days is describing a media sprint.  If they can’t name what comes before executive visibility, they’ve never run this sequence before.

2. “How do you separate our consumer-facing coverage from our investor-facing coverage?”

A weak answer treats these as the same pitch to different reporters. A strong answer describes two distinct tracks, run in parallel, built to reinforce each other by the time the roadshow starts.

3. “Can you show me a program where the coverage record existed before the IPO date was ever set?”

That question is the real test. Any firm can generate press once a deal is already close. The partners worth hiring can point to work that started years before there was urgency to sell.

How This Timeline Drove a 300% IPO Stock Increase

We ran this exact sequence for a consumer wellness brand in a regulated, emerging category ahead of its IPO. Strong product, strong growth, but thin editorial coverage right as investors started their own diligence.

We built a 3-year authority program in deliberate order: industry and trade press first, consumer lifestyle coverage next, then business and financial media timed to the pre-IPO window. Coverage ran across Fox Business, Inc., Cheddar, MG Magazine, and Stockhead, among more than 200 placements and 10 billion-plus earned media impressions over the program.

By the time investors began their diligence, the independent editorial record was already there to meet them: a 300% stock price increase at IPO, on an offering that ended up oversubscribed. As the client’s CMO put it, the campaigns were “universally successful, providing significant and measurable growth.” You can read the full pre-IPO PR case study here.

The coverage made the IPO possible before the IPO ever needed it to.

Run This Audit on Your Own Pre-IPO Narrative

 If you’re a CMO or founder with an IPO somewhere on the horizon, run a narrative stock-flow audit now.

Pull every piece of earned media your company has generated. Sort it by track: category and trade coverage, consumer and lifestyle coverage, executive visibility, financial and business press. Then look at what’s missing.

Most consumer brands find the same pattern: strong lifestyle and product coverage, because marketing has always chased that metric. Then almost nothing in the trade or financial press, because nobody owned that track until the IPO date made it urgent. Closing that gap means starting the trade and financial track 18 months out, the same way companies already build the lifestyle track.

Our pre-IPO PR program is built around this sequencing work. If you want a clear picture of where your narrative stands against that runway, an assessment is the place to start.

The Invisible Asset, written by Avaans Media founder Tara Coomans, is the PR ROI framework that builds brand equity, drives valuation, attracts capital, and wins high-stakes moments. It’s built for CMOs defending budgets, CEOs preparing for a capital event, and operators in regulated categories. Get the book →

 
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Health and Wellness Brands Need Investor Visibility Before They Think They Do

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Health and wellness brands become very good at building consumer trust. They have to. When a product affects how someone sleeps or manages a chronic condition, every purchase decision runs through a trust filter. But as a wellness company grows, it attracts a different kind of attention. Retail buyers, investors, and acquirers want to understand the company, not just the product. They’re looking in places most wellness brands never think to build visibility.

Why Investor PR for Health and Wellness Brands Matters Earlier Than Founders Think

Years of steady coverage don’t automatically create authority with capital audiences.  Most health and wellness PR is built to collect mentions, not build credibility with investors. But an investor researching your company wants to understand what the business stands for, what category position it holds, and why it commands a premium. They’re reading trade publications like Rock Health, Fierce Healthcare, MedCity News, and Forbes Health, and if your wellness brand isn’t showing up there, you’ve missed the chance to educate a financially sophisticated audience on why your company deserves their attention.

That gap in capital-market visibility develops because most wellness brands build a consumer PR program and stop. What they actually need is two programs, a consumer program and an investor-facing program, built from the same narrative foundation so the message stays consistent regardless of who’s reading it.

Case Study: A first-time wellness brand entered retail with no paid media budget and an entirely new product category to explain. Avaans Media combined executive authority, national earned media, and industry recognition to build credibility with both consumers and industry stakeholders, helping triple DTC sales and secure retail placement. See the full case study

Why Most Wellness Brands Never Build Capital-Market Visibility

Most wellness brands don’t think of capital-market visibility as something they need. When consumer metrics look healthy, investor-facing visibility slides off the agenda. It’s easy to lose track of an audience you were never explicitly building for.

But wellness attracts serious capital. CPG conglomerates, pharma, digital health VCs, and health-focused PE firms are all active in the category (Rock Health tracks this extensively). The brands that close rounds efficiently and command strong multiples built investor-facing visibility before they needed it.

If that’s where you are, an assessment will tell you what your current program is building for capital audiences and what it isn’t.</em>

For healthtech specifically, the window is even shorter, because it is a regulated industry.

Narrative Leakage Creates Problems for Investors, Not Just Consumers

Narrative Leakage develops when coverage has no common thread. A wellness founder gets a product feature in Well+Good, a podcast covers the origin story, a trade pub runs a quote about supply chain transparency, and a business journal profiles the company’s growth. 

Every placement is legitimate, but an investor reading those pieces in sequence can’t arrive at a clear picture of what the company stands for or why it deserves capital attention. The narrative disperses instead of building, and because AI tools synthesize patterns across a coverage record rather than counting mentions, a fragmented record doesn’t just fail to impress. It actively works against you, because the picture an investor or acquirer forms from that record is the one they bring into every conversation that follows.

The stakes are higher in regulated categories, where that fragmented picture can shape both a valuation and a regulator’s read on the company.

Brand Authority Influences Valuation in Health and Wellness

Consumer wellness is a low-trust category, which means brand authority carries more financial weight here than in most consumer categories. When two wellness brands with similar financials go to market, the one with established authority in credible publications commands a higher multiple. That premium is built through Earned Media, not paid channels, and it’s calculable: it’s the difference between a buyer paying $50M for a company with $8M in EBITDA and the $24M a straight earnings multiple would suggest.

Most wellness brands also leave a compliance dimension completely untouched as a narrative asset. Third-party certifications, clinical advisory relationships, transparent sourcing, and manufacturing standards are evidence that journalists, retailers, and investors can evaluate independently. In a category where product claims face legal constraints, operational rigor is available as a credibility signal. Most wellness brands aren’t using it.

How the Fingerprint Strategy Builds Consumer and Investor Communications Together

This is the problem Avaans Media’s Fingerprint PR Strategy was built to solve. The diagnostic identifies what a company can credibly own in its market. From that foundation, builds two coordinated programs: one for consumer audiences, one for capital audiences, both telling the same story in different registers.

If you want to understand what your current PR program is building for capital audiences, and what it isn’t, an assessment is where that conversation starts. That’s regulatory risk layered on top of valuation risk.

Case Study: A consumer wellness brand in a regulated category began building investor-facing authority years before its IPO window opened. By the time institutional investors began their diligence, the company had already established a multi-year editorial record across consumer, trade, and business media. The IPO was oversubscribed and the stock increased 300% at launch. See the full case study.

The Window Is Earlier Than You Think

Most founders assume they can address capital-market visibility when they need it. The founders who get this right know better. The coverage record investors find when they search your company was built long before they looked. By the time a raise is active, there’s no fast way to rebuild what wasn’t built. Which is why they start years earlier, not months.

 

The Invisible Asset, written by Avaans Media founder Tara Coomans, is the PR ROI framework that builds brand equity, drives valuation, attracts capital, and wins high-stakes moments. It’s built for CMOs defending budgets, CEOs preparing for a capital event, and operators in regulated categories. Get the book →

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Why Regulated Consumer Brand PR Requires Two Communications Tracks Running at the Same Time

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Most brands think of PR as a single channel, with one voice, one strategy, and one team managing the message. That works well when your only audience is consumers.

But regulated consumer brand strategy rarely serves just one audience. If you’re operating in healthcare, pharma, cannabis, alcohol, fintech, energy, or another regulated sector, and you’re raising capital, preparing for an IPO, pursuing an acquisition, or already publicly traded, your communications strategy serves two very different groups: customers and investors.

Consumers are deciding whether to buy. Investors are deciding what the company may be worth. Early on, PR primarily influences awareness, trust, and demand. Once capital enters the picture, communications begin influencing credibility, investor confidence, and ultimately valuation. 

For regulated brands, where disclosure obligations and compliance requirements add another layer of complexity, treating those audiences as a single communication stream can create real risk.

The solution isn’t two different stories, it’s two coordinated communications tracks built from the same strategic foundation.

If you’re a regulated consumer brand navigating both audiences right now, an assessment  will tell you which stream is working and where the gaps are.

Why Regulated Consumer Brand Strategy Requires Two Tracks

Consumer PR is built to drive awareness, trust, and preference. Investor communications are built to communicate business performance, growth strategy, market opportunity, risk management, and leadership credibility. These are not stylistic differences: these are structural ones.

Consumer communications influence purchasing decisions. Investor communications influence confidence in the business. One affects revenue, and the other affects access to capital, strategic opportunities, and valuation.

For regulated brands, the distinction becomes even more important because financial communications are governed by disclosure requirements that don’t apply to most consumer marketing efforts. Material information can’t simply appear in a founder’s social media post, a brand campaign, or a company blog.

Selective disclosure can create regulatory scrutiny, legal exposure, and investor relations problems that no amount of positive coverage can fix.

When a Second Communications Track Becomes Necessary

Many private companies assume these concerns begin at IPO, but in reality, the need for a second communications track often starts years earlier.

The first trigger is fundraising. Once institutional investors begin evaluating the company, public-facing communications become part of the diligence process.

The second trigger is IPO preparation. Quiet period restrictions and gun jumping concerns mean that seemingly routine public statements can create complications if they’re not coordinated with financial communications.

The third trigger is strategic transactions: M&A conversations, secondary transactions, and late-stage rounds increasingly involve sophisticated financial counterparties who are reading your public narrative alongside your financial materials. That’s especially true for PE-backed brands managing this coordination through an entire hold period, not just at the moment of a deal.

Why Regulated Consumer Brands Face Even Higher Stakes

Regulated industries carry an additional layer of complexity because the product itself is subject to oversight, and that oversight doesn’t stop caring about how you communicate just because a message was intended for consumers.

Consider a healthtech company preparing for an IPO. Its consumer narrative may focus on accessibility, patient outcomes, and the experience of care. Its investor narrative may focus on reimbursement positioning, revenue growth, regulatory clearances, retention metrics, and market expansion. The underlying story is the same, the company is the same, the strategic thesis is the same, but what changes is how that story is translated for each audience and the rules governing how it can be communicated.

Regulated brands can absolutely have vibrant, compelling consumer communications, and they should. The requirement is that someone be thinking about both sets of rules simultaneously, with those conversations happening before content goes out, not after.

Consumer PR and Investor PR Serve Different Jobs

Consumer PR leads with product, brand, and story. Success is measured through awareness, reputation, engagement, and customer acquisition.

Investor communications lead with business performance, strategy, and market opportunity. Success is measured through credibility, confidence, and valuation support. 

The two tracks rely on different proof points, approval processes, timelines, and often different spokespeople. Yet both should reinforce the same underlying narrative about where the company is headed and why it matters.

Where Consumer PR and Investor PR Break Down

Most brands struggle with this because the two functions are not aligned. These are coordination failures:

  1. A product launch uses aggressive language about category disruption while the company is preparing for a financing event.
  2. A founder comments publicly on a regulatory development without consulting legal or investor relations.
  3. The consumer communications team is unaware of upcoming financial disclosures.

Over time, these disconnects create gaps between the consumer narrative and the investor narrative. Avaans Media calls this narrative leakage, and for regulated brands engaged in capital conversations, it’s one of the most common and costly communications challenges. The discipline required to prevent it is its own strategic problem, worth solving before the two tracks ever launch.

The Avaans Media Fingerprint Strategy is designed to identify what each audience needs to hear, where narrative leverage exists, and which elements belong in each communications track while keeping the underlying story aligned.

Case Study:  A publicly traded global brand entering the U.S. market needed to reach consumers, industry stakeholders, and investors without creating regulatory or reputational risk. Avaans Media built coordinated consumer, executive, and industry communications that helped the company achieve 93% share of voice and become the leading online destination in its category.

The Bottom Line

Regulated consumer brands that are raising capital, preparing for an exit, or operating in public markets are communicating with two audiences that operate under very different rules. The strongest regulated consumer brand strategy builds one strategic narrative and execute it through two coordinated communications tracks. 

Done well, consumer communications build trust in the product, while investor communication builds confidence in the business. Together, they create the kind of authority that supports both market demand and long-term valuation.

If your two communications tracks aren’t coordinated yet, reach out to Avaans Media for an assessment. It maps where each one stands today and what it takes to run them in sync.



The Invisible Asset, written by Avaans Media founder Tara Coomans, is the PR ROI framework that builds brand equity, drives valuation, attracts capital, and wins high-stakes moments. It’s built for CMOs defending budgets, CEOs preparing for a capital event, and operators in regulated categories. Get the book →

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How To Measure Healthtech PR Before The Next Raise

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By the time you start preparing for a raise, investors have usually already started forming a view.

At some point, usually well before the process formally begins, you’ve been asked to “get PR in place.” Build visibility, shape the narrative, and make sure the company shows up the right way when investors start looking. In healthtech that usually means some version of investor-facing communications, even if it isn’t described that way.

What’s rarely defined is what that actually needs to do. Because by the time anyone is looking closely, they’ve already formed an initial view. Not from the deck, or from a single conversation, but from what’s been published about the company, how the leadership talks about the product, and whether those two things line up.

PR works in the space between how a company describes itself and how outside observers read it. By the time a healthtech company is formally raising, that external view is already taking shape. Investors have looked at what’s publicly available, noticed patterns, and made early judgments about credibility.

Most teams aren’t measuring against that process. They’re measuring what’s easiest to collect and report: coverage, impressions, and volume, because it’s familiar and creates the appearance of momentum. It also avoids a harder question about what PR is supposed to change.

In a healthtech raise, the question is not how much visibility the company has generated. It’s whether the company feels credible, disciplined, and coherent when someone starts evaluating it from the outside. If your measurement framework isn’t tracking that, it won’t tell you anything useful when someone asks.

An Assessment tells you what your PR is actually doing for your raise, and what it isn’t.

Measurement breaks when it stays at the activity level

Healthtech introduces a different set of constraints than most B2B sectors. Timelines are longer, diligence is deeper, and there are more ways for risk to enter the story, not all of them tied to the product itself. Some of the risk comes from how the company is described and how consistently that description holds up.

The regulatory layer makes this more concrete. Guidance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration continues to evolve, particularly around software and AI-driven interventions. At the same time, the Federal Trade Commission has increased scrutiny on how health-related claims are communicated. That affects more than legal review, it shapes how language is picked up, repeated, and interpreted across different contexts. That is often where issues begin in regulated industries. A statement that is accurate in one setting can read as overstated in another once it loses its qualifiers. Over time, those small shifts accumulate. Most reporting frameworks don’t capture that, because they track volume, not effect.

The narrative is rarely coming from one place

Inside the company, the story is being constructed from multiple perspectives.

  • Clinical teams are grounded in data and interpretation
  • Regulatory and legal are focused on constraints and defensibility
  • Product is oriented toward what is coming next
  • Finance is evaluating risk, timing, and return

Each perspective is valid, but they aren’t naturally aligned. That misalignment isn’t unusual, but it becomes more pronounced in emerging categories like healthtech.

PR typically sits on top of those inputs, often without the authority to resolve the differences before external communication begins. The result is a narrative that is directionally consistent but not fully coherent when encountered more than once. This doesn’t usually create an obvious issue in a single piece of coverage. It becomes visible when someone reads across multiple sources and begins to notice that the emphasis shifts depending on the context. That kind of inconsistency is enough to slow a diligence process. This is the same discipline problem that shows up across regulated industries generally, not just healthtech.

What the measurement question actually is

Once the problem is framed correctly, the measurement question becomes more precise. The question isn’t whether PR is working in a general sense, but whether the company is becoming easier or harder to evaluate.

In healthtech, investors tend to focus on three things:

1. Whether the clinical evidence holds up
2. Whether the company has been careful about regulatory claims
3. Whether the story stays consistent when it moves from a pitch into technical or regulatory detail

They show up in where the company appears, how it is described, and whether that description holds across different conversations, and in how those signals are built deliberately over time. Coverage can build those signals or undermine them. Aggregate metrics won’t tell you which one is happening.

Translating PR into something a board recognizes

PR measurement still needs to connect to financial language. Share of voice relative to market position, brand-driven acquisition efficiency, and approaches like the royalty relief method all exist for a reason. They give boards and CFOs a way to connect PR to business outcomes rather than just activity.The same demand for financial translation shows up in PE-backed boards during the hold period, not just VC-backed ones preparing to raise.

But in healthtech, the structure isn’t the hard part. The input is, especially as investors become more selective about what they’re willing to underwrite, a shift reflected in recent healthtech investment trends.

Alignment is the work that gets skipped

Most measurement problems can be traced back to a lack of alignment early in the process. Before PR activity begins, there needs to be agreement across clinical, regulatory, product, finance, and communications on what the company must demonstrate by the time it raises capital.

That means agreeing on what the company needs to have demonstrated, in published research,  regulatory filings, and how the product is described before the raise begins. Without it, you’re measuring output, not progress. That alignment is also what makes narrative strategy function as a valuation lever at exit, not just at fundraise.

Adjusting midstream

If PR is already underway without that alignment, the correction point is the investor perspective. Investors typically get stuck on the same few questions:

1. Does the product actually do what the company says it does?
2. Can a health system realistically adopt it?
3. Is there a reimbursement path that doesn’t require an act of Congress?
4. Whether the company communicates discipline.

This last point is where PR either holds up or it doesn’t,  and where you can see the difference most clearly in real growth scenarios.

PR doesn’t influence a raise through isolated moments; it builds through accumulation. The company is being cited in clinical publications, quoted in trade press that investors actually read, and showing up in the same conversations as the category leaders.

Avaans Media success story: A consumer wellness brand in a regulated, emerging category started building both tracks three years before its IPO window. No burst of pre-raise activity, just consistent, deliberate positioning in clinical, trade, and business press, with each layer making the next one easier to earn. By the time institutional investors started due diligence, the public record was already there: 200+ placements, 10 billion earned media impressions, a coherent executive narrative across the right channels. The IPO was oversubscribed. The stock increased 300% at close. See the full case study.

Building the Foundation Before the Raise

The measurement problem most healthtech companies face isn’t a reporting problem, it’s a foundation problem. The narrative was never built to serve both audiences simultaneously, and by the time the raise begins, the gap is already showing up in due diligence.

Avaans Media works with healthtech companies to build that foundation before it’s needed. Every engagement starts with the Fingerprint Strategy, a strategic diagnostic that maps where the brand actually stands, what each audience needs to hear, and where the narrative leverage is before a single pitch goes out. The output isn’t a press calendar. It’s a clear picture of what brand authority needs to be built, for whom, and in what order, so the public record investors find during due diligence is already working for you.

Brand authority is what both tracks are building toward. Customers pay more for it, investors assign a premium to it, and acquirers move through due diligence faster when it’s established. The companies that strategically build it are the ones that show up to those conversations from a position of strength.

If your PR program isn’t building toward that, an Assessment is the right starting point.

Questions CMOs Ask

How should a healthtech CMO measure PR effectiveness for investors?

The most defensible frameworks connect PR to how investors evaluate risk, not how teams report activity.

Share of voice relative to market position is still useful, but only if that visibility is happening in credible environments. Brand-driven CAC efficiency can translate PR into financial terms, but it assumes the underlying narrative is trusted enough to convert.

For companies ahead of meaningful revenue, approaches like the royalty relief method can isolate brand value as an asset. In healthtech, that value is heavily influenced by clinical credibility, regulatory discipline, and whether the story holds up under scrutiny.

The framework matters less than the question it’s built to answer. If it doesn’t map to what an investor needs to believe before underwriting the risk, it won’t hold up in a board conversation.

What’s different about PR for healthtech companies compared to other B2B sectors?

Three dynamics tend to shape how PR functions in healthtech.

First, the audience mix carries different consequences. Investors are evaluating risk and scalability. Clinicians are evaluating evidence. Regulators are evaluating claims. Those groups don’t respond to the same signals, and moving one in the wrong direction can create exposure, not just noise.

Second, regulatory and claims risk is built into how the story is told. A statement that is accurate in one context can become problematic once it’s repeated elsewhere without the same qualifiers. PR is not just shaping perception; it’s shaping how the company is interpreted.

Third, the timeline from validation to scale means that credibility often precedes revenue. What exists early is a pattern of signals, where the company shows up, who engages with it, and how consistently the narrative holds. That pattern becomes a proxy for quality long before financial metrics are fully developed.

When should a healthtech company start building its PR measurement framework?

Before the program starts, not after.

In practice, that means before an agency is engaged, before coverage goals are set, and ideally before PR is even framed as a line item.

The measurement framework should come out of the same conversation that defines what the company needs to demonstrate in order to raise capital. Not messaging, but proof. What has to be believed, and what would make that belief reasonable.

Most teams avoid that conversation because it requires alignment across clinical, regulatory, product, finance, and communications. It’s easier to start generating activity and define success later.

That works until the moment someone asks what PR is actually doing for the raise.

What signals actually matter to investors evaluating a healthtech company?

Investors are rarely reacting to a single piece of coverage. They’re responding to the accumulation of signals.

Where the company appears, and whether those environments carry weight. How consistently the company is described across different contexts. Whether the narrative holds when you move from marketing language to technical or regulatory detail.

Individually, none of these are decisive. Together, they shape whether the company feels credible, disciplined, and investable.

Those signals are measurable, but not through volume alone. They require a framework that looks at pattern, consistency, and context over time.

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Sources

 

The Invisible Asset, written by Avaans Media founder Tara Coomans, is the PR ROI framework that builds brand equity, drives valuation, attracts capital, and wins high-stakes moments. It’s built for CMOs defending budgets, CEOs preparing for a capital event, and operators in regulated categories. Get the book →

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Does Thought Leadership for Consumer Products Matter?

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The short answer is yes. But the more useful answer is: it depends on when, for whom, and what you’re trying to accomplish. Consumer brands tend to think of thought leadership as a nice-to-have, something you do when you have extra budget and a slow news cycle. I’ve seen that assumption cost companies real money.

There are three moments in a consumer brand’s lifecycle when thought leadership stops being optional. When you’re raising money. When you’re heading toward an exit, whether that’s an IPO or an acquisition. And right now, when AI is reshaping how investors, analysts, and acquirers form their first impression of your brand before they ever open your deck.

When You’re Raising: Share of Voice Is a Growth Signal

At the Series A and Series B stage, founders tend to think the work is all product: penetration, iteration, opening new channels. That’s the baseline. That’s what investors expect. The brands that command higher valuations and better multiples have done something beyond that. They’ve built marketplace authority.

Owning conversations in your category, showing up consistently in earned media, building share of voice: these aren’t vanity metrics. Research published in WARC by strategist James Hankins demonstrates that share of search is one of the most accurate proxies for market share available, holding true across categories from CPG to automotive to SaaS, with category-level R² correlations above 0.6 at 95% confidence. And per the Excess Share of Voice principle, documented across more than 4,000 brands in Millward Brown research: when your share of voice exceeds your market share, you grow. When it doesn’t, you decline.

Investors know this. When a brand has clear marketplace authority, the brand itself has value. That’s where higher multiples come from. It’s not just a product story anymore. It’s a market position story.

AI Is Now the First and Last Pass in Due Diligence

Something has shifted in how deals get evaluated, and most consumer brands haven’t caught up to it yet. AI tools are now part of due diligence. Not as a novelty, but as actual workflow.

Before an analyst or deal team ever opens your pitch deck, someone has run your brand through ChatGPT or Perplexity. A quick AI search adds context about whether your deck is worth the time. At the back end of the process, when deeper questions are being asked about credibility, category leadership, and product integrity, AI is used again. It’s the filter at the door and the closing argument.

That means your brand needs to show up clearly in AI-generated responses. Not just mentioned. Positioned. Investors and deal teams want to see that you’re understood as a category leader, that your product philosophy is legible, that the brand is credible. If AI can’t answer basic questions about your company with confidence, that’s a signal. And not a good one.

I see this in how our clients are evaluated. The brands with clear narrative penetration in AI search create fewer friction points in the deal process. The ones who show up inconsistently, or not at all, create doubt. Doubt slows deals down, and sometimes even stops them.

Pre-IPO: You’re Not Convincing One Deal Team. You’re Convincing a Market.

An IPO creates a different kind of complexity. You’re not managing one set of decision makers. You have investors, customers, and potentially regulators, and they don’t all want the same thing.

Investors want consistent growth, clean financials, and a brand with a defensible position. Customers want something different. They want to know that going public won’t degrade the product they love, that the company will continue to act in alignment with their values, that they’ll actually benefit in some way from the brand’s success. There are moments when investor needs and customer needs are in direct tension.

But here’s how I think about resolving that tension: if your customers are happy, if you’re acquiring new ones and retaining existing ones, brand investments stay defensible. Customer loyalty is an investor argument. You don’t have to choose between the two audiences if your PR strategy is built correctly.

What that requires is two distinct but aligned strategies running in parallel. For investors, you need strong financials and PR financial storytelling, executed within regulatory constraints. For customers, you need marketing and PR working together to meet them where they are and tell the right story consistently. These can’t be siloed. Narrative leakage happens when the investor story and the customer story are pulling in different directions. And by the time you notice it, the damage is already done.

There’s a Regulatory Window and Most Brands Miss It

Pre-IPO consumer brands have a window. There’s considerably more latitude to tell your story in the 12 months before an IPO than there is once you’re in the quiet period or have filed. The story you build during that time needs to match the story that adds value during the IPO itself. Consistency between those two phases isn’t optional. It’s scrutinized.

And you cannot get the regulatory piece wrong. For many consumer brands, especially those in wellness, food, or any category with product claims, there’s an additional layer beyond standard IPO compliance. The FTC, FDA, and category-specific regulatory bodies are paying attention. A cease and desist from a regulatory body will blow an IPO faster than almost anything else. The risk isn’t theoretical. I’ve watched it happen.

The brands that execute this well start early. They build the narrative deliberately, they stay within bounds, and they make sure every public-facing message during that window is calibrated for where they’re going, not just where they are.

What Actually Creates the Valuation Story

I’ve worked with a consumer wellness brand that achieved 300% stock growth at IPO. What made the difference wasn’t one brilliant PR move. It was integration.

They went from a largely manual manufacturing operation to one that was almost fully automated. They got there by becoming one of the top 3 brands in their sector first. And they did it by committing fully: PR, content, SEO, smart industry sponsorship, celebrity spokespersons, deep investment in their local market. They didn’t lean on any one tactic. They built a plan and they executed it at every level.

Because it was genuinely integrated, every channel elevated the others. The PR made the content more credible. The SEO made the PR more findable. The sponsorships reinforced the brand positioning that everything else was building. That’s how you create a valuation story. Not by doing one thing well, but by doing everything in alignment.

The brands that go into a raise or an exit underprepared are the ones that treated thought leadership as a campaign. Something you turn on when you need it. By the time you need it, you’re already behind.

The best time to build the narrative was 18 months ago. The second best time is now.

Ready to Build Your Brand’s Authority Before You Need It?

If you’re a venture-backed consumer brand preparing for a raise, an IPO, or an acquisition, the narrative you build today directly affects the valuation you command tomorrow. Start with an assessment of where you stand, with an experienced PR partner.

Claim Your Narrative. Request an assessment

Sources:

  1. James Hankins, “Share of Search: The Most Important Metric You’ve Never Heard Of,” WARC, January 2021.
  2. Millward Brown brand study via BrightEdge, “Understanding Share of Voice in Digital Markets.”
  3. Cometly, “What Is Share of Voice: The Complete Guide,” January 2026.

The Invisible Asset, written by Avaans Media founder Tara Coomans, is the PR ROI framework that builds brand equity, drives valuation, attracts capital, and wins high-stakes moments. It’s built for CMOs defending budgets, CEOs preparing for a capital event, and operators in regulated categories. Get the book →

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