#WPRD26: Corporate reputation is statecraft now
By Bradly Howland, CEO, Alkemi Collective
In April, Trade and Industry Minister Parks Tau responded to the threat of a 25% United States tariff on South African auto exports with something notably absent from the modern communications playbook: he asked for a meeting. It was not a statement, campaign or rebuttal thread. Just a request to get South African and American officials into the same room before either side tried to win the argument in public.
It is a small detail, easy to miss amid louder tariff news. But it is also, in miniature, the whole argument of this piece: that corporate reputation now behaves like statecraft, and that most of the profession is still equipped for something else.
The rest of the year has borne this out in real time.
The US Supreme Court struck down the 30% tariff on South African goods in February 2025. Within a day, a separate authority imposed a 10% baseline tariff. The African Growth and Opportunity Act was renewed for a single year rather than the multi-year term South Africa had wanted. Washington has since imposed a new 12.5% tariff following a forced-labour enforcement finding that Pretoria disputes, and government is now weighing retaliatory duties of its own.
None of this has been resolved through messaging. It has been resolved, when it has been resolved at all, through negotiation, leverage and the careful management of a difficult relationship that nobody expects to become friendly, only survivable.
Most public relations practice was not built for difficult relationships. It emerged in a media landscape with a stable, largely trusted gatekeeper in the middle and an audience that was broadly willing to listen once reached. Say it well enough, often enough, to enough people, and belief would follow.
That assumption is the quiet foundation under most of what the profession calls strategy: messaging architecture, share of voice, campaign reach. Public affairs and crisis specialists will rightly object that their corners of the profession have always known this. The objection rather proves the point: they remain corners.
The assumption no longer holds and there are numbers behind that claim.
The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer found that seven in ten people globally are now unwilling or hesitant to trust someone who holds different values, comes from a different background, or draws on different sources of information. Trade wars rank among the events that have done the most damage to trust over the past five years, behind only inflation, misinformation and the pandemic.
The institutions people are walking away from are precisely the ones PR has traditionally used to reach them: trust in national government leaders and in foreign business leaders has fallen sharply, while trust in neighbours, colleagues and immediate circles has risen. People are not becoming harder to reach. They are becoming harder to reach at a distance, through institutions, by people who do not already have standing with them.
Diplomacy never assumed a captive, well-disposed audience. It assumes the opposite… an audience that may be indifferent or actively opposed, and that requires years of relationship-building rather than persuasion in a single cycle. Three of its habits translate directly and are worth stealing outright.
First comes deterrence over persuasion. Sometimes the goal is not to convince anyone of anything. Instead, the goal is to make an action too costly to take against you. A strong reputation can do more than create goodwill. It can raise the cost for anyone considering action against you. That is close to how AGOA now operates for South Africa. Both sides maintain the relationship because they understand the cost of losing it.
The corporate version is unglamorous: the company no campaigner or short-seller bothers to target, because its record is documented, dull and already priced in.
Next comes alliance-building over stakeholder mapping. A stakeholder map is a snapshot, drawn up and activated when a crisis lands. An alliance is mutual and maintained whether or not you currently need it.
China's response to American tariff pressure is instructive. Rather than relying mainly on retaliatory tariffs, it has deepened trade relationships with emerging markets. It has also used its position in critical minerals as leverage.
The leverage is structural and no company can replicate it; the behaviour, building reciprocity before it is needed, is available to anyone. That is alliance-building deployed as strategy by an actor with every reason to simply posture in public instead.
Finally, there is calculated ambiguity rather than the pressure to always have a statement ready.
Minister Tau's own language through the AGOA saga has been notably careful: welcoming the renewal while pointedly flagging its short duration, a diplomatic parenthesis rather than a declaration. PR culture treats silence, or qualified language, as a failure of communications. Diplomats know it is sometimes the only accurate way to describe an unresolved position.
This matters more in Africa than the trade press coverage suggests, and not only because of goodwill.
AGOA-linked exports from the continent fell 32% in the year to November 2025, with South African auto exports alone down almost 75%. Local automakers still posted a record overall export year by finding buyers beyond the US. That does not rebut the point. It shows the second habit above, alliance-building, executed under duress.
That is not an abstract trust deficit. It affects jobs and GDP. Both move with how the diplomatic relationship is managed. The underlying trust environment is not the one most PR training assumes. In last year's barometer, South African trust in business sat at a relatively strong 68%, while trust in media sat far lower, at 46%. PR has traditionally used the intermediary to reach audiences, but that intermediary is not the trusted party here.
None of this means communications teams should become junior diplomats. It argues for something more specific: that reputation strategy belongs in the room with legal and government affairs, with the same seniority and the same access, and that the professionals doing it need to be trained to read power and leverage, not only narrative and tone.
The organisations that adapt fastest to this will not be the ones still perfecting their messaging. They will be the ones that learned, the way government has been forced to learn this year, that some relationships are never won. They are only managed, continuously, for as long as they matter.
Howland is the CEO of Alkemi Collective, and is the immediate past President of PRISA.
