MEDIA RELATIONS
GETTING OFF THE BACK FOOT
HELEN DUNNE HEARS HOW THE MEDIA RELATIONS TEAM AT RBS [NOW NATWEST GROUP] MOVED FROM PROACTIVE MODE TO REACTIVE MODE
THREE years ago, Chris Turner, director of communications at RBS [recently rebranded as NatWest Group] gathered his 24-person media relations team together to discuss the future. Life, as they knew it, would be changing. There were approaching a point when the bank would no longer feature on the front pages on a daily basis, when the team would not be constantly firefighting, and they needed to be ready. They also had to decide what type of team they wanted to be. Turner explains: ‘I genuinely felt that there was no
better team in the Footsie when it came to reputation management, when it came to crisis management, dealing with front page stories every single day. We were being thrown and pulled in every single direction.’ Indeed, in one notable week RBS not only featured on front pages every day, but each day brought a new story unrelated to its predecessor. He adds: ‘But there would be a point where we were
not going to be making losses. We were not going to have big conduct fines. We were not going to have to deal with big reputational issues. And that was the moment for us that we started on the journey to move from defence to offence and to be much more proactive. ‘It can be difficult to lift up your head and think long-
30 CorpComms | February/March 2020
term - it is very easy to just focus on what you have on your plates - but we knew that was what we had to do, and to get into that discipline of how we approached things.’ It was a journey that led last year to RBS winning
Best In-house Media Relations Team at the CorpComms Awards - ‘that was great; we felt incredibly proud of what we had achieved’ - although they are far from resting on their laurels. With the appointment of internal candidate Alison Rose as chief executive last November, Turner’s
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