THIS POST IS BY SALLIE BALE
Andrew Gowers, former Editor of the FT, is the man who claimed in 2005 that there is no future in print media, wrote a review of intellectual property for Gordon Brown, was once described by The Telegraph’s City Editor as “our man in a disaster”, was the head of media at BP during the Deepwater Horizon Crisis, and was previously Head of Communications at the ill-fated investment bank Lehman Brothers.
With a CV like that, he is surely the best choice to restore the battered reputation of Europe’s banking industry, isn’t he? Well, Reuters reported earlier this month that the Association for Financial Markets in Europe (also known by the slightly snappier acronym AFME) has appointed Gowers as their Director of External Relations in an attempt to reverse the increasingly negative public perception of the banking industry.
Financial industry body, AFME has a new troubleshooter
It would appear that Gowers has the experience to deal with big name players in crisis – but commentators question whether he is actually capable of success. Obviously the difficulty here is that by their very nature successfully-managed crises are not high profile and so we must look at other measures of success for those crises that are played out in the media. How quickly and cleanly the company or organisation comes out of a crisis and is able to rebuild trust and reputation is perhaps a better measure.
Lehman Brothers is no more and not remembered fondly and BP is still struggling to regain lost ground. That said the crisis communications industry learnt a great deal both from the failures and successes of the BP Deepwater Horizon episode and hopefully for AFME, Gowers did too.
There is much to be learnt from BP’s Deepwater Horizon incident in 2010, and Gowers will be able to apply these learnings to AFME. Many commentators believe that the biggest obstacle facing the BP communications team was the legalities around what they were able to say, resulting in a ‘too little too late’ situation.
There are so many avenues that this journey could take; will Gowers pick a spokesperson to give the intangible concept of “The Bankers” a human face? Will he advise them to express empathy for what has happened in the past five years? Or will he just soldier on with the task of tackling the endemic structural failures of the European banking system? Will he go to where the people are and use social media to re-connect the masses with the banking industry? Would that work?
It will be interesting to follow his progress and see how his strategy will play out in the coming months, or more likely years. He has already spent three months as a consultant for AFME helping edit the AFME book Investing in Change, and so should be able to hit the ground running.
Is this the biggest challenge in Gowers’ career so far? Trying to increase transparency, please many diverse stakeholders and implement meaningful change is going to be a perplexing test for banks across Europe, but the task of communicating those changes to the European public and demonstrating that they have worked is arguably the greatest challenge of all.
