Communicating Your 2030 Midterm Strategy: How to Build Investor Trust
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August 29, 2025
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In 2025 many companies are presenting their new corporate strategies for the next business cycle to investors, but this time everything is different. With geopolitical tensions, tariffs, regulatory uncertainty and many more topics topping the agenda, it can be extremely difficult to give a reliable mid-term guidance to the market. Strategic priorities may need to shift unexpectedly along the way. As a result rigid strategic pillars and strict five-year business plans aren’t able to adapt and withstand this disruption. Instead, business leaders need a new level of flexibility without appearing directionless. These five principles can help companies add in agility into their 2030 mid-term strategies and decision making processes, as well as in supporting confidence amongst stakeholders, particularly investors.
- Be Clear on the Vision and Articulate the Levers as Strategic Guard Rails
The long-term vision of a company remains essential and should to be articulated clearly and unambiguously. However, the strategic levers to achieve it need to be articulated with more flexible language. This is because strategies today must include a fundamentally increased element of change and should therefore be presented as guardrails, rather than fixed pillars. Consequently, narratives messages and metaphorical language must be chosen with even more foresight, so that they leave room to manoeuvre without appearing arbitrary. - Acknowledge Uncertainty and Demonstrate Preparedness
Be it investors, customers or employees, stakeholders are all aware of the increased risk profiles of companies. Communications should proactively address risks instead of leaving them uncommented. With insights into contingency plans and mitigation strategies, companies can credibly convey how they manage the increased level of volatility. It is a thin line in terms of both, depth of information as well as level of transparency. - Add Context to Mid-Term Financial Targets
Investors want to understand how strategic initiatives and capex programs translate into financial outcomes, be it revenue growth, profitability or return on capital employed. Given the increased risk of guidance corrections due to parallel crises, it becomes even more important to explain underlying assumptions and factors behind individual financial targets. Should the forecast need to be adapted, it will be easier for investors to understand the link to certain external or macroeconomic factors without losing trust in the long-term value creation potential of a firm. Overall it is sensible to provide guidance for key targets 2030 as well as the respective current financial year only. - Capitalize on Operational Leadership and Customers as Endorsers
New technologies including artificial intelligence (“AI”) rapidly change products, application areas and work processes. Capital markets days also offer a great platform to provide insights into new business opportunities. Presenting use cases and letting customers speak are extremely powerful ways to add depth to e.g. a company’s extended research and development capabilities, manufacturing processes or new aspects of customer experience. This adds real-world experience and underlines a firm’s market relevance. - Strategy Activation via Communications and Action Points
While investors remain the primary audience for updates of a company’s midterm strategy, it is leaders and employees who must ultimately bring it to life. Unit leaders and operational managers should therefore be involved in strategy communication, both with investors and employees. With regard to the workforce, it has become apparent that the traditional communication cascade, in which internal town hall meetings are followed by external capital market days, is often no longer sufficient. Having leaders and employees hear about the new priorities from management first brings a significant benefit ─ particularly given the already high level of change fatigue in many organisations, resulting from previous transformation processes. However, communication is just one side of the coin. It is as important to define a dedicated activation program that translates the new 2030 midterm strategy into tangible action points for employees.
Strategy Communications 2030 Creates Trust into Value Creation while Managing Change
As companies prepare to present their 2030 midterm strategies, they should recognise that this cycle is likely to be even more volatile than previous ones. Presenting strategic priorities, forecasts and business assumptions to the market requires even greater foresight.
Narratives must strike a careful balance, firm enough to convey commitment yet flexible enough to allow strategic adaptions. Overly rigid statements can limit room to manoeuvre and erode credibility if course corrections become necessary. Stakeholders, particularly investors, understand the complexity that companies nowadays face and do not expect rigid strategy execution — as long as flexibility is exercised responsibly and the company’s overall direction remains in place.
During capital markets days, the focus should be on sharing the overarching vision, long-term business drivers and the overall outlook 2030. In addition, what matters in the current environment is demonstrating the organisation’s ability, to activate the midterm strategy and adapt swiftly and purposefully to unexpected events.
Published
August 29, 2025
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