On the biggest morning of his career, announcing Sainsbury’s proposed merger with Asda, chief executive Mike Coupe sat waiting between broadcast interviews and quietly sang “We’re in the Money” to himself. Mortifyingly, the camera was still rolling. The interviews themselves went perfectly well; yet nobody remembers a word of them. What the country remembers is the clip in between, which set the tone for how the deal was covered and the incident has subsequently followed him for years.
Or take P&O Ferries. In 2022, its chief executive sat in front of a parliamentary select committee and told MPs, with candour of a very expensive kind, that the company had known it was required to consult unions before sacking 800 seafarers and had chosen not to. The clip led every bulletin. Whatever preparation had happened beforehand, it evidently hadn’t included the one question anyone could have predicted.
Executive media training sessions used to open with Gerald Ratner’s ten-second joke from 1991 (“People ask, how can you sell this for such a low price? Because it’s total crap”). The file refreshes rather more often now, and the modern examples share a pattern the old one only hinted at: the damage rarely happens in the setting the training imagined. It happens between the interviews, in a committee room, on an all-hands call. The failure isn’t delivery, it’s judgement, and judgement doesn’t respond to one-off training but considered, consistent and repeated reinforcement and rehearsal.
There are two very different products with the same name
It’s important to define the models honestly and accurately because both get called media training and the conflation is unhelpful and inaccurate.
The traditional version is interview preparation. It’s tactical, tied to a moment: a launch, a results day, a crisis that’s already arrived. A spokesperson learns to land messages, handle interruption, avoid traps. The skills are real and the day is usually well spent; then everyone goes back to work, and the clock starts ticking on how much of it survives.
The second version is leadership communications as an ongoing discipline. It treats every senior leader as a standing spokesperson, because that’s what they now are, and builds capability the way organisations build financial literacy or safety culture: continuously, with cadence, tied to the actual risks of the business.
Spokesperson development rather than spokesperson rehearsal; regular scenario-based training against the issues on this quarter’s risk register, not a generic grilling. It involved message development and testing that evolves as strategy evolves, as well as a feedback loop from real appearances, real all-hands, real analyst calls.
The first protects a moment whilst the second protects the business and is a crucial part of building reputation resilience.
What the one-off model quietly costs
Harvard Business School’s landmark study of how chief executives spend their time tracked 27 CEOs around the clock for a quarter and found 72% of their working hours spent in meetings, almost all of it live, interpersonal, unscripted communication. The public interview is a rounding error in that total as the leader’s judgement is being tested every time they speak, in town halls, sales conferences, investor calls, LinkedIn posts, and a training model built around the rare journalist encounter simply misses where the exposure actually lives. The Sainsbury’s clip, remember, didn’t come from the interview, it came from the wait between them. Moreover in the age of social media and citizen journalism, your stakeholders (or “publics”) are broad and ubiquitous.
Contrasted with what happens during a single day of media training, the differences in the philosophy and learning paradigm become stark. The forgetting curve is one of the oldest and most replicated findings in psychology; a rigorous 2015 replication found roughly two-thirds of newly learned material gone within a day without reinforcement. The counter-evidence is just as well established. A meta-analysis of 254 studies on the spacing effect found that distributed practice reliably beats one intensive session for retention, with the advantage growing the longer you need the skills to last.
In today’s information environment, there really is little room for error. When United Airlines’ CEO responded to the 2017 passenger-dragging incident with a statement about “re-accommodating” customers, the backlash moved faster than any press office could: hundreds of thousands of tweets generating over a billion impressions in a single day, and at the worst point the following morning around $1.4 billion off the company’s market value. When Bud Light became the centre of a boycott in 2023, the eventual statement from its parent company’s CEO was so carefully hedged that it managed to satisfy nobody at all, and the brand lost its decades-long position as America’s best-selling beer in the aftermath. And the scrutiny now comes from inside the building too: in early 2024 a Cloudflare employee filmed her own dismissal and posted it, forcing a public response from the CEO. Every all-hands is potentially public and every corridor remark is one phone away from an audience. The moments that define a leader’s reputation are increasingly the ones nobody scheduled training for.
Add up those three facts, that communication is most of the job, that untrained-for months erode trained-for skills, and that scrutiny is now continuous, and the cost of the one-off model becomes visible. It’s carried in slower, more defensive executives who avoid visibility because they don’t feel match-fit; in muddled messages that colleagues, customers and investors each hear differently; and occasionally, at the tail end of the distribution, in a viral clip that a rehearsed habit of judgement would have survived.
The case for cadence
None of this means abandoning the studio day or building the foundations of confidence and control through the one or half day session. It means putting it inside a rhythm, the way corporate communications teams already handle everything else that matters. The business changes constantly: a new CFO arrives, a risk matures, a channel emerges, scrutiny intensifies ahead of a transaction. Each of those is a moment where last year’s leadership communications training is already out of date. So too expectations of cultural salience or the zeitgeist which change at lightning speed and affect businesses through their action or inaction – perceived or otherwise – greater than at any time in recent memory.
A discipline has a cadence that catches them, refresher sessions spaced through the year, new leaders inducted as a matter of course rather than after their first bruising encounter, scenarios refreshed from the live risk register, and performance reviewed against real appearances rather than remembered ones.
There’s an upside case too, and it’s the stronger one. Executive visibility (and reputation) is now a commercial asset; buyers, candidates and investors all form views from what leaders say in public, and organisations invest heavily in getting their executives seen. It’s an odd sort of strategy that spends real money making leaders more visible and a single day per year making them worth watching.
About the author
Simarin Tandon | Junior Digital Account Director
Having worked with brands across the Beauty & Wellness, FMCG, FinTech, and Home & Lifestyle sectors, Simarin focuses on driving acquisition and growth, whilst managing the Digital team at brandnation.
A curious marketer, Simarin’s finger is always on the pulse when it comes to performance and digital updates across both paid and organic platforms.
