If the market isn’t seeing your value, change the story it sees first.
If you’re running a UK listed company today and you feel you are a better business than your valuation suggests, you are not alone.
To understand why, we need to look at how much the world has changed in a very short period.
The world before
Before the pandemic, most UK listed companies were operating in a relatively familiar set of conditions.
Value was largely judged through tangible assets, traditional products and services, and well understood sector comparisons. Executives focused on operational efficiency, cost control, steady growth and an investor base that used broadly similar models and mental shortcuts.
In short: there was an accepted playbook. You could optimise within it and feel that you were playing the same game as everyone else.
The break point
The pandemic arrived and acted as a break point.
Several forces that had been building for years suddenly accelerated and combined.
We moved into what I call an IP and intelligence economy. Intellectual property, knowledge work and digital assets moved from being supporting capabilities and assets to being the core of how value is created and defended.
AI and automation stepped out of the lab and specific applications, and into day-to-day work. Machines joined the productivity network in a way we have never seen before. The question is no longer only “Who has the best people?”, it is “Who can orchestrate human and machine talent most effectively?”.
AI has also brought a sense of uncertainty as its impact feels limitless and difficult to predict. Silicon Valley’s enterprises are absorbing the focus and investment tied to future growth and AI-driven value is seen as almost guaranteed. For organisations not directly linked to AI, this can make it harder to be included in the emerging growth narrative that investors are prioritising.
Remote and hybrid work changed how people relate to employers. Expectations around flexibility, meaning and wellbeing rose sharply. At the same time, cost-of-living pressures and inflation pushed people back towards very practical questions: can I afford to stay here, and will this organisation still work for me tomorrow.
We have also seen the rise of what I think of as a new kind of territorial map. Geography still matters, but layered on top of the physical world we now have powerful digital territories. Platforms, data centres, cloud providers and AI infrastructure create a kind of Silicon Curtain. Where you sit in those virtual territories can be as important as where your headquarters is physically located.
On top of this, the regulatory and stakeholder environment has shifted. ESG, double materiality, transition risk, social impact and licence to operate are no longer fringe topics. Even if many investors currently place growth and resilience at the top of the agenda, sustainability and governance are now built into how risk is assessed.
And in the UK specifically, all of this sits on top of post-Brexit adjustment, lower relative valuations, rising interest rates and a steady pattern of private acquisitions and overseas listings. That is the context for the FTSE through to the smaller AIM names.
The rules of the game have changed, even if some of the scoreboards have not.
Where companies and markets are out of sync
In this new environment, a lot of businesses are still being seen through a pre-pandemic lens.
Some have genuinely evolved. They’ve shifted their portfolio, strengthened their IP, invested in AI and digital capability, and adapted their operating model. But the market is still benchmarking them against the company they were five or ten years ago.
Others are only now realising that the decisions that made sense on the old operating system no longer serve them. They have chased efficiency where they now need uniqueness, or they have underplayed the value of their know-how and data.
On the capital markets side, fund managers and analysts aren’t blind to these shifts. They are increasingly using richer data, AI-driven tools and more nuanced risk frameworks. They are looking for innovation, digital capability, resilience and credible transition stories.
But it is a two-way street.
If a company doesn’t clearly communicate how it is adapting, if it does not present the right artefacts to be interrogated, then the market will fill in the gaps with old assumptions. Algorithms will screen you one way, and humans will interpret you another way, but both are working with the signals you have given them.
Behind every model is still a person, with their own mental picture of your business. The story you tell is what shapes perception.
What you have to win with now
In this environment, what do you actually have to win with?
I would suggest three things:
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Your IP and knowledge capital. Your unique ideas, processes, data, technologies and ways of working. These are the assets that are hardest to copy and easiest to underestimate from the outside.
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Your ability to orchestrate human and AI collaboration. Not just ‘using AI’, but redesigning work so that people and machines together create something better than either could alone.
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Your position in the new digital territories. How you show up on the platforms, in the ecosystems and in the information flows that investors, journalists, rating agencies, customers and large AI models now depend on.
Those three elements are already driving how you are judged.
The question is whether you are in control of the meaning attached to them.
Why reframing the story changes valuation
This is where narrative and symbolism matter.
When you take what might look, from a distance, like a familiar business and you give people a more accurate, symbolic story about it, several things happen.
You create emotional connection and meaning. People don’t invest their money, time or careers in a spreadsheet. They invest in a story they can believe in. When they understand what you stand for and where you are going, the company feels more valuable and worth their commitment.
You enhance perceived credibility and differentiation. You are no longer saying “we make X” or “we operate in Y sector”. You are saying “we are the company that makes this specific shift possible”. That moment of reassessment is typically where new value is recognised and momentum in both valuation and engagement starts to build.
You drive reappraisal and curiosity. When you reframe the story, you give analysts, investors and employees a reason to look again. They see angles and optionality they’d not fully priced in. That reappraisal is often where multiple expansion and improved engagement begin.
You invite investment of all kinds. A strong, credible story does not only attract capital. It attracts better people, partners and ideas. It changes who wants to be associated with you.
In an IP and AI driven economy, this is not a soft layer on top of the “real” business. It’s how the value of your intangibles is recognised. Machines can copy tasks. They cannot copy the meaning you create around what you do.
How our approach fits into this
This is the space our strategic advisory team operates in.
We sit at the intersection of these post-pandemic shifts, the realities of the UK capital markets and internal complexity of large enterprises.
In practical terms, we help leadership teams do four things:
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We reframe the business in this new context. We work with you to understand how the IP economy, AI, new work patterns, stakeholder expectations and UK market pressures are shaping your enterprise. From there, we surface the barriers, the work already underway, emerging hypotheses and your most valuable story. This gives us the clarity needed to execute the next three steps in the process.
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We craft the narrative and symbolic artefacts that carry that value. We help you move from a transactional description of activities to a story that makes sense of your role in this new operating environment. That might involve defining new concepts, naming a new standard or creating a language for your category.
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We build the system that allows that story to take hold. We don’t stop at a positioning paper. We translate the narrative into your leadership communications, capital markets day, investor presentations, corporate website, annual report and sustainability report. Through an enterprise to stakeholder mindset, we design how it flows through multiple platforms, channels, events, video content, working spaces and other ongoing touchpoints.
The aim is to create and maintain the right conversations. With the investors who are evaluating you. With the journalists who shape how you’re understood. With the employees responsible for making the strategy real. And now, within the AI systems that inform institutional and retail research.
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We support the organisation in living the story. That can mean creating internal artefacts and initiatives that bring the narrative into decision making and everyday behaviour, so that what you say externally is matched by what your people experience internally.
Across clients, this approach has already contributed to improved market understanding, stronger cultural engagement and clearer alignment between strategy, story and valuation.
The opportunity
If your valuation is limiting your progress, the impact is real. It affects how risk is assessed, how lenders respond, the scale of customers you can win and the leadership talent you can bring in. And if your story still reflects a pre-pandemic identity or hasn’t kept pace with the post-pandemic environment, that’s not a shortcoming. The world has accelerated faster than most organisations have been able to rearticulate their story.
Our work is to help you close that gap.
To surface what is truly valuable in an IP and AI economy.
To retell your story so it becomes understandable, credible and investable.
And to build the channels and artefacts that allow that new meaning to take hold at scale.
That is how UK listed companies move from being misread to being properly recognised and from reacting to disruption to leading through it.
If you want to find out more about how we can help you tell your story, get in touch.
