On Monday a client's communications lead sent me three drafts of a statement about Ukraine and asked which one sounded most like them. All three were carefully written. None of them mentioned that her company still has product moving through a distributor outside Moscow.
I told her the drafts were not the assignment.
The Yale list has been going around since the weekend, a running tally of which multinationals have pulled out of Russia and which have not. It reads like a leaderboard, and the whole industry is treating it like one. But the thing being ranked is not conviction. It is willingness to eat a number.
BP walked away from its Rosneft stake in a weekend. Shell followed. Apple stopped selling products there. Disney and Warner pulled their releases before the first weekend of March was over. Every one of those looked like a values decision in the press and was, inside the building, a write-down somebody had to sign.
A position you can afford is not a position, it is a preference, and the market has finally built a scoreboard that can tell the difference.
Which is why the companies still open are having a worse week than the ones that left. McDonald's, Starbucks, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola. Their situations are genuinely complicated: franchise agreements, bottling partners, thousands of local employees who did not choose any of this. That complexity is real. It is also not a communications strategy, and the silence is being read as an answer anyway.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms for a decade. The pattern never changes. Publish the statement, sort the operations out later, hope nobody measures the gap. What is different now is that the gap is being measured daily, publicly, by people with a spreadsheet and a column for it.
That complexity is real. It is also not a communications strategy, and the silence is being read as an answer anyway.
So the advice I gave the client was not about tone. Do not publish a sentence your operations cannot honor. Say the constraint out loud, in plain language, including the part where people you employ are the reason it is hard. Put a date on what happens next, and then hit the date. A company that says we are unwinding this and it will take until June will survive June. A company that says it stands with the people of Ukraine while shipping into a distributor will not survive the screenshot.
She cut all three drafts and wrote one paragraph about the distributor instead. It was the first honest thing the brand has published this year.
I got home late and Truffles had knocked my notebook onto the floor, and Barnaby was asleep on the page where I had written the word credibility. Fair enough. It is much cheaper to write than to buy.