Tag Archive for: PR strategy

Why Narrative Strategy Comes Before PR in Regulated Industries

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Key Takeaways

  • Regulated companies have fewer ways to differentiate through product claims, so the position behind those claims carries more weight.
  • Messaging should change depending on whether a company is talking to a reporter, regulator, investor, customer, or partner. The underlying narrative should remain consistent.
  • Without a narrative strategy, even good PR placements can create Narrative Leakage instead of building authority.
  • Narrative strategy gives every part of a communications program a common direction, including media relations, executive visibility, investor communications and crisis response.
  • PR can amplify a position until the market associates it with the company, but the company has to decide what that position is first.

Many regulated companies hire a PR team before they know what story they’re trying to build. The agency starts pitching and coverage starts appearing. Everyone has something to put in the monthly report, so the program looks productive.

A year later, the company may have a collection of placements without a clear answer to a much more useful question: What are we now known for?

That’s why narrative strategy has to come before PR in regulated industries. When claims are constrained and public statements face scrutiny from several directions, PR needs a clear position to reinforce. Otherwise, coverage creates activity without building much of an asset.

Why Regulation Makes Narrative Strategy More Important

Some executives assume regulation limits the role of storytelling. But regulation does more than restrict what a company can claim in an individual message; it also shapes how those claims must be developed, supported and repeated across audiences. That makes narrative strategy more important, not less.

Regulators, investors, journalists, customers, retail buyers and business partners can all encounter the same company’s public record. They come to it with different questions, and they may need very different information, but they’re still evaluating the same business. And if the overarching narrative contains contradictions, they won’t stay hidden for long. One audience may notice an inconsistency that another misses, but the contradiction still becomes part of the company’s public record.

Without a clear narrative underneath its communications, a regulated company starts responding to whatever happens next. A regulatory update calls for one response while a competitor’s mistake creates another opportunity to comment. Investor questions take the conversation somewhere else again. Each response can make perfect sense on its own while the company’s public story gradually starts pulling in different directions.

That’s an expensive problem in a category where credibility takes time to earn and very little time to damage.

How Legal and Compliance Constraints Affect PR Strategy

Unregulated companies have plenty of ways to grab attention through aggressive comparisons, provocative predictions or bold product claims. Legal and compliance teams remove many of those options in regulated industries.

Superlatives get flagged and forward-looking statements get softened. Comparative claims may require another round of review. Product language has to survive scrutiny before it ever reaches a reporter or customer, which leaves regulated competitors working within many of the same boundaries.

So what can your company credibly own that your competitors can’t?

The answer might come from the standards the company operates by or the expertise of its leadership. It could be rooted in the problem its founders understood differently, the way the business approaches transparency or a point of view about where the category should go next.

That’s the narrative territory PR should build from. A PR program can make that position visible, but it can’t discover it one media pitch at a time.

What’s the Difference Between Messaging and Narrative?

Messaging changes because a reporter needs a different conversation than an investor, and a regulator needs different information than a customer. A retail buyer evaluating a regulated consumer product will have concerns that barely come up in a journalist interview. The language and evidence should change accordingly, but the company’s underlying position should still be recognizable.

Messaging adapts the story for the audience. Narrative is the position those different messages reinforce. Problems start when the position itself changes depending on who’s listening. A product story might emphasize innovation while the CEO talks almost exclusively about category leadership. Investor materials may introduce a growth story that barely resembles either one. That’s the gap between product-facing and capital-facing communications, and it has to close before either one convinces anybody.

None of those stories has to be inaccurate. But if someone reads them together and can’t tell what the company actually stands for, the coverage isn’t building a coherent body of authority. That’s Narrative Leakage.

Why Regulated Brands Need a Consistent Narrative Across Audiences

Regulated brands speak to several audiences at once, and those audiences don’t stay neatly separated.

An investor reads media coverage before a meeting. A journalist looks at what the company has said about a regulatory issue. Retail buyers search executives and company news. Regulators can see what brands say publicly. Now AI platforms are pulling from that same public record when someone asks about the company or its category.

Consumers, retailers and investors won’t all care about the same things, so trying to give them identical messages would make little sense. What they should encounter is the same company underneath those messages.

That makes narrative consistency a business issue rather than a branding preference. If every audience encounters a different version of the company, eventually those versions collide.

How Narrative Strategy Makes PR More Valuable

Once the narrative is clear, the communications team has a filter for deciding which opportunities are worth pursuing and what each one should contribute.

Media relations can build repeated third-party association between the company and the position it wants to own. Executive visibility gives leadership room to develop that position in more depth. Investor communications can connect the same narrative to the questions investors actually have about the business.

A clear narrative also gives the company a stronger position when something goes wrong. If a regulated brand has spent years establishing how it operates and what standards it holds itself to, scrutiny doesn’t introduce the company to reporters and stakeholders for the first time. There’s already a public record against which the new information will be judged.

AI adds another reason to care about that record. AI systems synthesize patterns across public information about a company. A collection of unrelated placements gives them a collection of unrelated facts. Consistent coverage gives them enough repetition to associate the company with a recognizable area of expertise or point of view.

Over time, that distinction affects what people find when they research the company, whether they’re using Google, an AI platform or the publications covering the industry. That distinction is also what gives brand authority its measurable value once investors start paying attention.

How Narrative Strategy Supported a Regulated Brand Through IPO

Avaans Media worked with a regulated consumer wellness brand for three years leading into its IPO. The communications program needed to reach consumers and trade audiences while building executive credibility in a category under close regulatory scrutiny. Eventually, that same public record would also be visible to investors.

We didn’t treat each of those as a separate story. One underlying category narrative ran through consumer media, trade coverage, executive positioning and investor-facing communications.

By the time the company approached the public markets, it already had an editorial history. The PR team wasn’t suddenly trying to establish credibility because an IPO was approaching.

The company generated more than 10 billion earned media impressions during the program and ultimately entered an oversubscribed IPO, with the stock rising 300% at launch. No individual article can take credit for an outcome like that. What the communications program contributed was three years of third-party coverage that consistently reinforced the company’s position before investors had a reason to scrutinize it closely.

[Read the full case study.]

Why Narrative Strategy Has to Come Before PR

A PR agency can find opportunities, develop media relationships, secure interviews and build executive visibility. But without a narrative strategy, those opportunities start driving the program rather than serving it.

A journalist needs a source, so the company comments. A publication wants a founder story, so the founder tells one. When a new trend takes off, the agency finds a way into that conversation too. These can all produce perfectly good placements.

The problem shows up when you put the coverage side by side.

If the articles don’t reinforce a recognizable position, the company has accumulated coverage without building the same amount of authority. This is how a PR report can look busy while the public record remains surprisingly thin on what the company should actually be known for.

With a narrative in place, the team has a better standard than whether an opportunity can produce coverage. It can ask whether the opportunity adds something useful to the position the company is building.

Over time, those choices create repeated associations between the company and a particular area of expertise or point of view. Investors, customers, journalists and regulators encounter that history before the company gets to make its own case, and AI systems are increasingly reading the same record.

Choose a PR Agency That Starts With Narrative Strategy

A strong PR program for a regulated company shouldn’t begin with a media list. The agency first needs to understand the position the company can credibly own, who needs to understand it and what evidence will make that position believable.

Avaans Media has worked with regulated brands since 2008. Our 100% executive-level team develops the narrative before building the communications strategy and earned media program around it.

If your company is already investing in PR and you can’t clearly explain what all that coverage should make the company known for, that’s the place to start. Reach out to Avaans Media for an assessment. 

[Explore our insights and special reports on regulated industries.]

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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Narrative Strategy: The PR Framework That Supports Valuation at Exit

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It’s a familiar story: a CMO or a founder who’s frustrated with their PR  because a competitor lands a placement in Forbes. A peer company gets acquired at a multiple that makes jaws drop. And the next thing is “we need to do that.” I understand the urge, but what’s most important is narrative strategy PR framework for exits that creates an asset and adds value.

When a company is preparing for an exit, almost everyone on the leadership team has an opinion about PR. Some want more coverage. Some want better coverage. Some want to be in the same publications as the brands they admire.

What almost no one asks is: what narrative does this company actually own?

That’s the question that determines whether your PR program builds toward something or just produces a clip file. And it’s the question I’ve spent years learning how to answer, for companies in the middle of exactly the kind of moment you’re in right now.

I write about it in my book, The Invisible Asset. But the core of it starts here with a narrative strategy PR framework for exits that differentiates you.

Your Brand Has a Fingerprint. Most PR Never Finds It.

Every successful company has a specific position it can hold in the market, a point of view that’s genuinely its own because it comes from something real: the way the business was built, the problem it actually solves, the insight its founders saw before anyone else did.

I call this the brand’s narrative territory. And the reason most PR underperforms, especially at exit stage, is that it never maps it.

Instead, most PR strategy starts by looking outward. Who got great coverage? What narrative worked for them? How do we tell a similar story? That kind of imitation produces coverage that looks fine in a report and does almost nothing for valuation. Acquirers and investors aren’t looking for a company that sounds like other companies. They’re looking for a company with a defensible position that no one else holds.

Finding that position starts with two questions. First: what does this company do that no other company does in quite the same way? Not your category, not your product features. The actual authentic operational or philosophical distinction that a sharp analyst or a sophisticated buyer would find genuinely interesting. Second: what do the audiences that matter most, buyers, investors, strategic acquirers, need to understand, believe, or feel in order to act?

The third question is how do we illustrate those narratives in a way that anyone should care?

Where those three questions intersect is your narrative territory. That’s where authority strategy starts. And that’s what most PR agencies never get to, because they skip the diagnostic and go straight to pitching. A narrative strategy PR framework for exits is built for discipline, not activity.

The most durable PR asset isn’t a great product story. It’s a point of view that only your brand can credibly hold. A defensible point of view transcends competitors and budget. -The Invisible Asset

A Rebrand Won’t Fix a Missing Narrative

I worked with a company that had just completed a full rebrand before they came to us. New logo, new website, clean visual identity. The agency they’d worked with did good design work.

But the narrative was gone. The rebrand had polished the surface without answering the underlying question: what does this company actually stand for, and where does it sit in relation to every other option a buyer or investor is evaluating?

We analyzed what mattered to three stakeholder groups: customers, the people those customers trusted, and investors. What we found was a piece of narrative territory no competitor was talking about, but that customers cared about urgently, and the brand already knew that because they’d built their technology, their product, their ethos, around this gap. Competitors had stopped listening to customers and become overly confident. They were still building on the assumptions that had founded their original products, years earlier. They thought they had a firm grip on the market. They didn’t.

That gap was a door our client could walk through. And they did.

Here’s what I want you to take from that story: understanding your brand’s narrative isn’t only a growth strategy. It’s a defensive posture. The company that owns its narrative owns its market position. The one that doesn’t is always at risk of a competitor stepping into the space they left open.

The Body of Work Is the Asset

Coverage without coherence doesn’t build authority, it’s just noise. That’s the part most founders don’t want to hear when they’re looking at a stack of clips from the last 12 months.

Individual placements, even good ones in good publications, don’t accumulate into anything unless they’re telling a consistent story about a specific point of view. A body of coverage that positions your company the same way, in the right publications, over time, is what creates the kind of authority that holds up in a diligence conversation.

The difference between a clip and an asset is whether it was placed with intention or placed because an opportunity came up. Both might look the same in a coverage report. They don’t look the same to someone evaluating your company.

AI Has Changed Who’s in the Room

AI platforms are now part of your audience. When an investor, an acquirer, or an analyst types your company name or your category into ChatGPT or Google’s AI Overview, the answer they get is synthesized from your editorial record. Your earned media history is now training the AI answer someone else gets about your company before they ever talk to you.

This matters in two specific ways. First, relevant publications carry more weight in AI synthesis. A consistent presence in recognized trade and business outlets builds a stronger AI representation than the same number of placements in less relevant ones. Second, consistency over time builds a richer AI profile than a spike of coverage in a single quarter. AI draws from a body of work.

For a company preparing for an exit, your PR program from the last 3 years is already shaping the AI answers your potential acquirer is getting right now. That’s either an asset or it isn’t.

Regulated Brands Have a Specific Opening Most Are Missing

If your company operates in a regulated category, there’s an authority opportunity that most of your competitors are ignoring entirely.

Every regulated category has an ongoing conversation with policymakers, journalists, and the market about how it should be governed, what standards responsible operators hold themselves to, and which companies are ahead of the curve versus behind it. That conversation happens whether your company shows up to it or not.

The brands that show up shape it. The ones that don’t get shaped by it.

A deliberate editorial presence in that regulatory conversation, one that positions your leadership as a credible, informed voice on the issues that define your category’s future, is a form of authority that holds up specifically in the moments that matter most at exit: compliance questions, category scrutiny, investor diligence. A press release issued when a problem surfaces can’t build that. Only a consistent record of editorial participation over time can.

The brand that arrives at those moments with a track record already in place has something that can’t be manufactured in 30 days.

Who Creates Trust in the Trust Economy

Journalists don’t create trust. They convey it. Before a journalist will platform your executive as a credible voice on something that matters, your company has to have already done the things a trusted company does. Transparency, consistency, defensible claims, a record that holds up when someone looks at it carefully. When that foundation exists, earned media can build authority on top of it. Without it, coverage is borrowed credibility, and it doesn’t hold when the scrutiny comes.

The same is true now for AI. The right narrative strategy PR framework for exits understands that the AI answer someone gets about your company is synthesized from a record of editorial trust signals that built up over time. If that record is thin, the answer is thin. And at exit stage, thin answers in AI tools are a real problem, because the people evaluating your company are using those tools.

Authority at exit isn’t something you build in the last quarter before a process starts. It’s built over years, from a clear narrative foundation, through a consistent body of earned media, in the publications your audience actually reads. The companies that arrive at exit with that record already in place have a measurable advantage over the ones that don’t.

If you’re preparing for a capital event or exit and want to understand whether your PR program is building toward that or just generating activity, our Fingerprint Strategy Analysis is good place to start. Our white glove boutique PR approach shines the light on your most valuable narrative.

 

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.

Request a PR Evaluation Assessment

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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You’re More Ready for Press Than You Think

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The hardest part of PR isn’t getting the interview. It’s the forty-eight hours between “yes, we’d love to talk to you” and actually sitting down for the conversation.

That’s when the spiral starts. What if I say something stupid? What if they ask me something I don’t know? What if I come across as arrogant? What if I come across as boring? What if I’m just… not ready?

Founders will land a great opportunity — a podcast they actually listen to, a reporter at a publication they’ve wanted to be in for years — and instead of being excited, they’re quietly panicking. Some of them ghost the reporter. Some show up so over-rehearsed they sound like they’re reading from a script. Some actually ARE reading from a script (yep, I’ve seen it happen).

Some turn the opportunity down entirely, telling themselves they’ll “do it when they’re ready.”

Here’s the thing: you’re already ready. You’re a founder who’s earned the attention of a reporter. You’ve done the hard part: founding a company, probably a round of fundraising or two, hiring a team, and building a product.

The only difference between doing all of those things and doing a media interview is that you had some guidance for those things. You had a mentor or a coach. You read some books. You felt like there was a process, and you followed it.

This post is the process for media interviews. It’s how I prep my clients so they walk in knowing what to expect, what they want to say, and, maybe most importantly, walk out feeling proud of how they showed up.

How to Prepare for a Media Interview

First, a reframe

You are the expert in this conversation.

Not the reporter. Not the producer. Not the host. You. They’re calling you because you know something they don’t, and their job is to translate it to their audience.

Reporters aren’t trying to trip you up (most of them, anyway — more on the exceptions later). They’re trying to get a clear, useful story out of you before their deadline. When you stop thinking of an interview as a test you might fail, and start thinking of it as a conversation where you’re the one with the information, the whole thing gets easier.

Okay. Now the tactical stuff.

Before you even say yes

When a reporter reaches out, the worst thing you can do is immediately say yes and panic later. The second worst thing is to say no out of fear. The right move is to ask a few questions first — and I mean this literally, as in: questions you ask the reporter before you agree to the interview.

Here’s what to ask:

What outlet is this for? For some reporters, it might be obvious, but in a world where every reporter has a Substack and every TV journalist is an influencer, it’s worth making sure.

What’s the format? Again, when every newspaper also has a TikTok and every TV station has podcasts, is this interview for print, audio, video, or all three? Is it live, live-to-tape, or edited? Is this a quick quote for a roundup, or an in-depth profile? How long will it run? These answers shape everything about how you prepare.

What’s the story? Keep it open-ended. Let them talk. The more they say, the more you learn about what they actually need from you. Don’t interrupt. Don’t pitch. Just listen.

Is there anything I should prepare? Don’t ask them for questions in advance. I’m going to repeat this: Do not ask them for questions in advance. It’s bad form. At the very least, it will earn you an eye roll from the reporter, but at worst, they will call off the interview entirely. However, it is entirely fair to ask them if they’re hoping you’ll bring a certain data set with you, or have something ready to present.

You’re not being difficult by asking these questions. You’re being a good source. Reporters appreciate it — it tells them you take the conversation seriously.

What to expect from each type of interview

Different mediums have different rules. A podcast is not a TV hit. A print interview is not a radio spot. Here’s what I tell clients about each one.

Print / Online

This is where most founder PR happens, and it’s usually the lowest-stakes format to start with. A print journalist is writing a story; they need quotes, context, and facts. They may talk to you for forty-five minutes and use two sentences.

What to expect: An interview that feels more like a conversation than a performance. They’ll take notes, likely record the call, and ask follow-up questions. Expect them to push on specifics — numbers, dates, examples — because that’s what makes their story credible.

How to prep: Write out three things you want to make sure you say. Know them cold. Have specific examples and numbers at the ready. Be prepared for them to use anything you say — including the casual aside at the end of the call. There is no such thing as off the record unless you’ve established it explicitly, in advance, and even then, I wouldn’t bet on it. An interview starts the moment the reporter says hello and ends when you hang up. Act accordingly.

Podcasts (Audio Only)

Podcasts are usually the friendliest format, which is exactly why founders get into trouble on them. They’re long, conversational, and the host often wants you to succeed. That’s great. It’s also how you end up thirty minutes in, feeling relaxed, saying something you didn’t mean to say.

What to expect: Anywhere from twenty minutes to two hours. The host has probably done some research on you, but may not be a deep expert in your space. They’ll want stories, not press-release language. They’ll want you to be a real person.

How to prep: Listen to at least two or three recent episodes before you record. Get a feel for the host’s cadence, what kinds of questions they ask, and how long their tangents run. Prepare three to five stories you can tell — founders often underestimate how much of podcast prep is just having good stories ready. Have your key messages, but don’t force them in unnaturally. Podcast audiences can smell rehearsed talking points.

One warning: the longer the conversation goes, the more comfortable you’ll feel, and the more tempted you’ll be to drop your guard. Despite the friendly demeanor, podcast hosts are not your friends (this goes for any member of the media). Stay warm, stay engaged, but remember the microphone is still on.

Radio

Radio is weird because it’s fast. It’s also becoming less and less likely you’ll ever get a radio interview. But just in case, know that you might get ten minutes, you might get three, and the host is almost always working within a tight format with breaks and transitions.

What to expect: Short segments. Crisp questions. A host who needs you to answer in tight, quotable chunks. If it’s live, there’s no editing, so what you say is what airs.

How to prep: Practice giving your key messages in fifteen to thirty seconds. Seriously, out loud, with a timer. Short answers feel abrupt when you’re not used to them, but on radio they sound confident and clear.

Video

Video is the format that makes founders the most nervous, and fair enough. It’s visual, it’s usually live or lightly edited, and you have roughly zero room for a false start. But video is also the format where preparation makes the biggest visible difference.

What to expect: A short segment — usually three to five minutes for a morning or local news spot, maybe seven to ten for something more in-depth. But it could be as long as a few hours if the podcast you’re booked on also posts on YouTube. Usually, there will be a pre-interview call to make sure you’re a real person, can show up on time, and have the appropriate setting (no distractions, decent audio, etc.)

How to prep: Watch the show. Multiple episodes. Get familiar with the set, the hosts, the pacing. Know whether it’s a friendly vibe or a more serious tone.

Practice your key messages out loud until you can deliver them in fifteen-second chunks.

Dress for the camera. This means: pastel colors (blue works well), no white, no black, no bright red, no busy patterns (checks, herringbone, and small stripes all “wave” on camera). No big jewelry. No tinted glasses. If you wear glasses, get the glare-proof kind. Keep your hair off your face. If you’re shiny-foreheaded, powder it. All this will keep you from getting distracted just as much as the audience.

Drink water beforehand so you don’t lick your lips on camera (it reads weird).

If you’re on Zoom at home, make sure your background is professional and distraction-free. If you don’t have an external microphone, make sure you have headphones. If you’re planning on doing more than one podcast, it’s time to invest in a $100 mic that will seriously up your game. Make sure you’re in a quiet space and you won’t be interrupted. During the pandemic, it was cute when small children and pets showed up unexpectedly on screen. Now, it’s just kind of annoying.

If you do happen to be in a studio with a live interviewer, look at them, not the camera. Always. Unless you’re specifically told to address the camera, your eye line should be on the person asking you questions.

The three things that matter in every interview, regardless of medium

Okay, this is the part I’d tattoo on every founder’s forearm if I could.

1. Know your must-airs. Before any interview, write down the three things you absolutely want the audience to walk away knowing. Not ten. Three. These are your key messages, and your job in the interview is to communicate the central idea of at least one of them in every answer you give.

I’m not going to tell you this is easy. It’s not. If you need some inspiration, go watch the last few interviews of your favorite (or least favorite) politician. You’ll notice that no matter what question the reporter asks, they always return to a few key issues.

If the interview ends and you didn’t get your points across, that’s on you, not the reporter.

2. Bridge from their question to your message. This is how the politicians do it, and you can do it too. You will absolutely get asked things that don’t line up neatly with what you want to say. So you bridge back to your message. Useful phrases:

“The most important thing to remember is…”
“What we’re actually seeing in our industry is…”
“That’s part of a bigger shift, which is…”
“Let me tell you a quick story about that…”

You’re not dodging. You’re translating their question into territory where you can give a useful answer.

3. Don’t bury your lead. When you answer a question, start with the most interesting part of your answer. Then add the context, the background, the nuance. Most founders do it backwards — they set up the context first and then get to the point, and the reporter cuts them off before they land it. Start with the punchline. You can always fill in the rest.

A quick word on tough questions

You will eventually get a question you don’t love. A question with a negative framing, a false premise, or just something you’re not prepared to answer. Here’s what to do:

Don’t repeat negative language. If a reporter asks, “Isn’t it true that your industry is failing to innovate?” do not start your answer with “Well, our industry isn’t failing to innovate…” Now that phrase is in the story. Instead, reframe it: “The innovation I’m seeing is…”

Don’t say “no comment.” It sounds like you’re hiding something, because usually you are. Better options: “I’m not in a position to speak to that, but what I can tell you is…” or “That’s outside my expertise — what I do know is…”

Don’t answer hypotheticals. If a reporter asks, “What would you do if X happened?” — don’t. Just pivot. “I can’t speculate, but here’s what we’re actually doing right now…”

Don’t guess. If you don’t know the answer, say, “I don’t know, but I can get back to you with that.” Then actually get back to them. This is not a weakness — it’s a mark of a credible source.

Don’t fill the silence. Reporters will sometimes go quiet after your answer, hoping you’ll fill the space with something unplanned. You don’t have to. Let the silence sit. Your key message can stand on its own.

How to walk out proud

Here’s my actual test for whether an interview went well:

Did you communicate your key messages?
Did you avoid saying things you didn’t want to?
Did you stay true to who you are?
Did you treat the reporter with respect and professionalism?

That’s the scorecard.

You cannot control what quote they pull. You cannot control the headline. You cannot control whether the piece runs at all. What you can control is whether you showed up prepared, stayed on-message, and acted like yourself. If you did those things, the interview was a success — even if the final piece doesn’t turn out the way you hoped.

The founders I work with who end up loving press are the ones who stop thinking of interviews as tests they might fail and start thinking of them as conversations they’ve been preparing for their whole career. Because you have been. You know your company. You know your industry. You know the problem you’re solving. Nobody is going to ask you a question about your own work that you can’t handle — and if they do, “I don’t know, let me get back to you” is a perfectly respectable answer.

The insecurity is real. I’m not going to tell you it isn’t. But the insecurity is about the unknown, and everything I just walked you through is the known. Prep the knowns, and the unknowns get a lot smaller.

You’re ready. Go do the interview.

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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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Is Your Story Actually News?

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I have this conversation with clients more than almost any other.

They’ve got something happening in their business. A new hire, a product update, a milestone they’ve worked toward for years, and they want to get press. They ask me to help them get it, and I tell them upfront that it probably won’t work.

They ask why.

And the honest answer, almost every time, is this: it’s not news.

Not to a reporter, anyway.

News has a specific definition, and it’s probably not the same definition you’re using. Reporters aren’t looking for things that are important to you. They’re looking for things that are important to their readers. Those two lists overlap a lot less than most people think.

So before we pitch anything, we run it through this test.

These feel like news. They’re usually not.
🚫 “We just launched a new product/feature/service.” Unless you’re Apple or you’re solving a problem that affects millions of people right now, a launch is not news. It’s marketing. Reporters know the difference.

🚫 “We just hit [insert milestone].” Revenue milestones, subscriber counts, and employee numbers matter — to you and your investors. They do not, on their own, give a reporter a story to tell their readers.

🚫 “We’re doing something no one has done before.” Maybe. But “first” only matters to journalists if the category matters to their readers. Being the first to do something in a niche your audience has never heard of is not a story. It’s a footnote.

🚫 “Our CEO has a really interesting backstory.” Profile pieces do still happen, but they’re competitive and editor-assigned. A cold pitch saying “our founder is fascinating” will almost never land one.

🚫 “We have an opinion about [trend].” Just having an opinion is not news. Hard stop.

These actually work.
✅ Your data tells a story readers don’t already know. Do you have proprietary data, from your customers, your platform, or your research that reveals something surprising about your industry? That’s genuinely valuable to journalists. They can use it. They can cite you. More than getting them to respond to a pitch, it will get them to call you back later when they need help.

✅ Something actually changed — and it affects people beyond your company. A real pivot. A significant partnership. A response to something happening in your industry. The bar is: would a stranger who doesn’t know your company care? If yes, you might have something.

✅ Your milestone is a signal of something bigger. If you just hit a number that reflects a real shift in your market, not just your company, there’s a story in there. “We hit 10,000 customers” isn’t news. “We hit 10,000 customers, and 40% of them switched from [dominant competitor/old way of doing things]” starts to be. The milestone is the proof. The shift is the story.

✅ You have a counterintuitive take backed by real experience. This is more than just an opinion. It’s a perspective that challenges what most people in your industry believe, grounded in something you’ve actually seen or done. Reporters love a source who will say something interesting. Most sources won’t.

✅ You can speak to something already in the news. When something is dominating the news cycle, and your business or expertise can offer a credible, specific angle on the story, that’s when having an opinion can be news. This is called newsjacking, and when it’s done well, it’s one of the most reliable ways to earn coverage.

The shortcut I use with my clients: before we pitch anything, ask “why would someone who has never heard of our company care about this right now?”

If we can’t answer that in one sentence, the pitch isn’t ready.

If we can answer it, we’re already ahead of most of the pitches sitting in that reporter’s inbox.

 

This post originally appeared in Megan Hanson’s newsletter, The Hook.

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