From a quiet foundation to 3 habits of diplomacy PR needs to steal

Bradly Howland, CEO, Alkemi Collective, says corporate reputation now behaves like statecraft, but most of the PR profession is still equipped for something else (Image supplied)

It is a small, procedural fact, easy to miss in a year of much 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.

Careful management, not messaging

The 30% tariff imposed on South African goods in 2025 was struck down by the US Supreme Court in February and replaced, within a day, by a 10% baseline tariff imposed under separate authority.

The African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa) 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 an adversarial relationship that nobody expects to become friendly, only survivable.

World PR Day

#WPRD2026 | The golden age of strategic PR will elude government until leadership changes

Lorato Tshenkeng  28 Jul 2026

The quiet foundation

Most public relations practice was not built for adversarial relationships. It was built for a media landscape with a stable, largely trusted gatekeeper in the middle, and an audience that, once reached, was broadly willing to listen.

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.

Harder to reach at a distance

The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer found that seven in 10 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 spoken through: 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.

World PR Day

#WPRD2026 | A Golden Age of Strategic PR must also be a golden age of disclosures

Solly Moeng  23 Jul 2026

3 Habits of diplomacy

Diplomacy never assumed a captive, well-disposed audience. It assumes the opposite… an audience that may be indifferent or actively opposed, which has to be worked with over years, not persuaded in a single cycle.

Three of its habits translate directly and are worth stealing outright.

Deterrence over persuasion

Sometimes the objective is not to convince anyone of anything. It is to make an action too costly to take against you.

A reputation built well in advance can function less as a charm offensive and more as a standing cost imposed on anyone considering harming you, which is closer to how Agoa itself now operates for South Africa: a relationship maintained not because either party is fond of the other, but because the cost of losing it is well understood on both sides.

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.

Alliance-building over stakeholder mapping

A stakeholder map is a snapshot, drawn up and activated when a crisis lands. An alliance is reciprocal and maintained whether or not you currently need it.

China's response to American tariff pressure is instructive here: rather than leaning mainly on retaliatory tariffs of its own, it has spent the past year deepening trade relationships with emerging markets and using 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 institutional incentive to simply posture in public instead.

Calculated ambiguity

The third is calculated ambiguity over 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.

World PR Day

#WPRD2026 | The Golden age of PR reminds us that the P stands for Public

Lebo Madiba  16 Jul 2026

Not an abstract trust deficit

Agoa-linked exports from the continent fell 32% in the year to November 2025, with South African auto exports alone down almost 75%.

That local automakers still posted a record overall export year by finding buyers beyond the US is not a rebuttal of the point; it is the second habit above, alliance-building, executed under duress.

That is not an abstract trust deficit. It is jobs and GDP, moving in step with how a diplomatic relationship was or was not 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 comparatively healthy 68%, while trust in media sat far lower, at 46%.

The intermediary PR has traditionally spoken through is not the trusted party here. The relationship itself is.

Where reputation management belongs

None of this argues for turning communications teams into junior diplomats for its own sake.

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 practitioners 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.