Earlier in this blog, we spent some time with Domino’s Pizza. The story, if you remember it, is about a company whose product had become a genuine embarrassment, whose customers compared its food to cardboard, and which decided, against every instinct of corporate self-preservation, to admit all of it publicly and start over. The result was one of the great brand turnarounds in modern business history.

I want to revisit the central lesson of that story, because it applies far beyond the food industry. It applies, with uncomfortable precision, to political communications.

The lesson was this: a communication strategy, however sophisticated, can delay a reckoning. It can manage a narrative for a news cycle or two. It can keep the most committed supporters in the fold. What it cannot do is replace the thing it is supposed to be communicating. When the product is broken, the only path forward is to fix the product.

Political leaders and their communications advisors have, by and large, not absorbed this lesson.

The Expensive Illusion of Crisis Management

Governments across Europe spend significant public funds on communications infrastructure: press offices, media advisors, strategic communications units, crisis management consultants. Provided that spending is directed at explaining genuine policy and genuine decisions, it serves a purpose. Governments are complex institutions that need to communicate with millions of people across multiple channels, and doing that well requires resources and expertise.

The problem arises when those same budgets are deployed to manage the perception that no genuine failure has occurred. At that point, crisis management becomes, in the most literal sense, a waste of money. Perception management without underlying substance follows a logic of diminishing returns: every spin cycle costs more than the last, and delivers less.

Research on political trust in European democracies is consistent on this point. The sharpest drops in public trust follow perceived performance failures, the 2008 financial crisis, prolonged economic stagnation, institutional scandals, policies that visibly fail the people they were designed to help. Many assume that what citizens are judging is how well their government communicates. The evidence suggests they are judging something far simpler: whether their government is actually doing its job.

The Three Failure Modes

Looking at how governments in Southern and Western European democracies have handled political crises over the past decade, three recurring communications failure modes stand out. They tend to operate together, and each one amplifies the damage of the others.

The first is the substitution of spin for substance. Rather than addressing the actual failure, the communications strategy focuses on reframing it: offering alternative narratives, attributing blame elsewhere, or burying the story in counter-programming. This produces results, occasionally, in the very short term. Beyond the first news cycle, the underlying problem remains and continues to generate new evidence of itself. Each new piece of evidence requires a new spin, which requires more resources, and which erodes credibility a little further with every iteration.

The second failure mode is the echo chamber trap. A government’s communications strategy shaped primarily around retaining and energising its existing base tends to produce messaging that is internally coherent but externally incomprehensible. The language, the framing, the choice of what to emphasise, all of it makes perfect sense within the political community that has already committed to the government. Outside that community, it reads as evasion at best, contempt at worst. The base becomes more enthusiastic. The undecided become more sceptical. The gap between the two widens.

The third failure mode is what might be called the sincerity deficit. In an environment of general distrust, citizens are highly sensitive to the signals that distinguish authentic communication from performance. A leader who acknowledges a problem clearly and directly, even when the acknowledgement is painful, tends to recover more trust than one who deploys a series of carefully calibrated reassurances that are technically accurate but emotionally hollow. The attempt to appear sincere while withholding sincerity is almost always detectable, and when detected, it is more damaging than the original problem would have been.

Why Political Communication Is Harder Than Brand Communication

Some would argue that comparing political communications to corporate communications misses the structural complexity of governing, and they would have a point worth taking seriously. Genuine differences exist that make the political context harder.

A brand can decide, as Domino’s did, to fix its product and then communicate the fix. The decision sits with a relatively small group of executives, the timeline is manageable, and the audience’s expectations are ultimately about the quality of a pizza. A government is trying to fix complex, systemic problems in real time, in public, while managing coalitions of competing interests, under continuous adversarial scrutiny, on timelines set by electoral cycles rather than by the logic of the problem itself.

Those constraints are real. They do not, however, make fundamentally dishonest communications strategies defensible. If anything, they are an argument for humility: for managing expectations accurately, for being willing to say publicly that some problems are hard, that some fixes take longer than a political cycle, that the government’s job is to make honest progress rather than to perform success.

The governments that communicate this way tend, over time, to retain more trust than those that project manufactured confidence. Research from Northern European democracies, where institutional trust remains comparatively high, points to a consistent pattern: transparency about difficulty and genuine accountability build more durable public confidence than the prioritisation of appearances.

The Specific Greek Context

Greece presents a particularly instructive case precisely because the structural conditions that make communications failure so costly are unusually visible here.

A society that experienced a decade of economic crisis, significant institutional failures, and a sustained erosion of public trust in virtually every established institution arrives at political messaging with a very different threshold of scepticism. The credibility reserves that allow governments in higher-trust societies to absorb communications mistakes have largely been depleted. In that environment, spin compounds the damage it was meant to contain, because it confirms the existing suspicion that the political class does not take the public seriously.

Greek governments, across political administrations and across the political spectrum, have shown a consistent tendency to respond to crises with communications strategies that prioritise appearances over accountability. The pattern is recognisable: an initial denial or minimisation, followed by a managed acknowledgement once the story can no longer be contained, followed by an attribution of blame to structural factors or predecessor administrations, followed by an announcement of measures that may or may not address the actual problem. The cycle then repeats with the next crisis.

Perhaps the most telling detail in this pattern is where it fails. Predictably, this approach finds no traction with citizens already opposed to the government. More revealing is that it increasingly fails with citizens who were initially well-disposed. The communications strategy designed to retain the base ends up shrinking it, because even loyal supporters eventually register the gap between what is being said and what they can see for themselves.

The Question That Goes Unanswered

There is a question that tends to go unasked in political communications consultancies and government press offices alike: what are we actually communicating about?

In brand communications, the answer is reasonably clear. You are communicating about a product or a service, and the quality of that product or service sets the ceiling for what communications can achieve. A great communications strategy for a bad product produces a temporary spike in attention and a lasting decline in trust. A modest communications strategy for a genuinely good product tends to compound over time.

In political communications, the equivalent question is whether the government’s actual performance has earned the trust it is trying to communicate. The answer to that question sets the ceiling. A government whose performance has genuinely earned trust can communicate that honestly and be believed. One whose performance has fallen short will find that even the most expert communications cannot bridge that gap for long.

Some might read this as an argument against political communications as a discipline, but the intention is rather different. Communications can amplify genuine achievement. It can explain complex decisions in accessible language. It can build the relationships between institutions and citizens that make governance possible. The difficulty arises when it is asked to substitute for the substance it was meant to represent, and the evidence is consistent that this substitution, however skilfully attempted, tends to fail.

The Lesson from Domino’s, Applied

Domino’s saved its brand by acknowledging the failure, fixing the product, and then communicating the fix honestly. The communications success was downstream of the substantive change. It was the articulation of something that had actually happened.

The equivalent in political terms would be a government that identifies a genuine failure, takes genuine accountability for it, implements a genuine fix, and communicates all three steps honestly and without spin. This is considerably harder than ordering new ingredients for a pizza recipe. It requires political courage of a kind that is genuinely rare, and it requires resisting the short-term incentive to manage appearances at the cost of long-term credibility.

The mechanics, though, are the same. And the outcome, for the governments that manage it, tends to be the same: a recovery of public trust that no amount of spin could have produced.

The most expensive thing a government can do is invest in communications for a product that has stopped deserving to be communicated. The investment does not just fail. In failing, it makes the underlying problem harder to fix.

The citizens watching know the difference. They always have. In an era where every failure is filmed, uploaded, and shared before the press office has drafted its first statement, they know it faster than ever.

The question is whether the people being watched have understood that yet.