It’s the one thing nobody wants to think about: Recession.

In October 2025, Moody’s Analytics reported that 22 U.S. states are either in or near recession. Consumer pessimism is climbing. Inflation is lingering. Major sectors are cutting jobs. The federal shutdown continues. And yet, many companies are budgeting for business-as-usual.

That’s a mistake.

Recessions are disruptive, but they’re also clarifying. The most successful companies in history didn’t just survive downturns; they redefined themselves through them. As JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon put it: “A recession isn’t inherently a bad thing… It’s bad for America, it’s bad for people who are unemployed, but it’s usually an opportunity for JPMorgan.”

But action alone isn’t enough. It’s how companies communicate those actions—internally, externally, and strategically—that determines whether they succeed.

What the Best-Performing Businesses Do in a Downturn

Decades of research from Harvard Business Review, McKinsey, Richards College of Business, and others reveal seven traits shared by the companies that outperformed their peers during economic contractions. Every one of these traits is amplified or undermined by a communication strategy.

Here’s how thriving companies lead during recessions and how communication plays a make-or-break role in each.

1. Frame Innovation as Progress, Not Panic
   Recessions accelerate change. They force companies to reimagine offerings, modernize systems, and digitize customer experiences. A 2023 McKinsey study found that companies investing in innovation during downturns grew 10–15% faster than their peers post-recovery.
   
   Communication Strategy: Frame innovation as a purposeful evolution, not a desperate pivot. When leaders use confident, forward-looking language, they rally employees, reassure partners, and attract investor confidence.
   
   
2. Restructure Talent with Transparency
   Successful companies don’t default to mass layoffs. They reassess roles, retain high performers, and recruit talent from a newly competitive labor market. The focus is on strengthening, not shrinking, the team.
   
   Communication Strategy: Honest, empathetic internal communication preserves culture during change. When teams understand the “why” and “what’s next,” they stay engaged and aligned.
   
   
3. Stay Radically Customer-Centric
   Customer needs shift fast in a downturn. The best companies don’t just guess: they listen, adapt, and offer real solutions such as bundled services, flexible payment terms, and enhanced support.
   
   Communication Strategy: Your messages must reflect real understanding. Show customers that you hear their pain points—and that you’re acting to help them succeed.
   
   
4. Be the Brand That Stays Visible
   It’s tempting to cut marketing when cash gets tight. But history proves that brands that stay loud during recessions often emerge as market leaders. Ad space becomes cheaper. Competitor noise fades. Visibility multiplies.
   
   Communication Strategy: Keep telling your story. Use consistent, high-impact messaging to reinforce trust, stability, and value.
   
   
5. Communicate Financial Discipline Clearly
   Resilient companies manage cash, limit debt, and build reserves. But it’s not just about the numbers—it’s about the confidence others place in your financial leadership.
   
   Communication Strategy: Be transparent. Communicate your financial strategy with clarity to employees, investors, and customers. Confidence is contagious.
   
   
6. Lead Tech Adoption with a Clear Narrative
   Digital transformation is a recession accelerant. Whether it’s AI, automation, or operational redesign, companies that modernize thrive. But transformation only sticks when employees are on board.
   
   Communication Strategy: Don’t just announce a tool, tell a story. Link technology to purpose, customer outcomes, and your future vision.
   
   
7. Tell a Story of Strategic Flexibility
   Thriving companies don’t rely on one customer type, revenue stream, or supplier. They diversify to build resilience and seize new market opportunities.
   
   Communication Strategy: Share your adaptability. Communicate how you’re evolving to meet changing needs without losing sight of your core mission.

A Final Word: Don’t Just Act—Communicate

Recession doesn’t just test your business model; it tests your message. In moments of uncertainty, great communication becomes a company’s most strategic asset.

It builds trust. It aligns teams. It signals strength. So yes, build your recession plan. And build your communication strategy right alongside it.

At Tunheim, we help leaders turn moments of uncertainty into long-term advantage.

Let’s talk!

The post How to Thrive in Recession appeared first on Tunheim.

There’s a certain myth around the “breakthrough idea” — the kind of concept that reinvents a product, captures the imagination of a market, or creates something entirely new. We treat it like lightning: random, rare, and impossible to harness. But the truth is, real breakthroughs — the kind that move companies forward and shift customer expectations — don’t come from luck.

They come from process.

Why Breakthroughs Matter Now More Than Ever

The cost of sameness is getting higher. In every sector, from consumer retail to B2B services, audiences are bombarded by messages that blend together. Standing out isn’t just a marketing challenge — it’s an existential one.

Breakthrough ideas are how brands get unstuck. They capture attention, redefine categories, and invite people to see a future they hadn’t imagined. But they only work when they’re grounded in something more meaningful than a clever stunt.

Breakthrough Is a Brand Strategy, Not a Tactic

Here’s the first principle: breakthrough ideas aren’t standalone tactics — they’re manifestations of your brand’s mission, vision, and positioning.

They emerge from clarity. Clarity about what you stand for, the future you’re building toward, and how you’re different from everyone else in your category.

When we’ve helped companies in retail and B2B services unlock breakthrough ideas, it always starts with this internal alignment. If you don’t know your long idea — your unique and bold view of the future — you’re not ready to break through.

Tunheim’s Breakthrough Method: A Process that Works

Here’s the framework we use and adapt:

1. Define Breakthrough for You
   Breakthrough must align with your brand’s positioning — not just a new idea, but a bold expression of your core purpose. It should be recognizable as you even if it’s something you’ve never done before.
2. Share Your Particular Future
   Great brands don’t just respond to trends — they define them. Be willing to articulate the future you believe in, even if Wall Street isn’t ready to put it on a calendar. Whether it’s the future of sleep or the transformation of care delivery, that future becomes the foundation for ideas with impact.
3. Leverage Your Differentiators
   You likely already have the ingredients. Your tech. Your data. Your insights about customers or the market. These are your competitive advantages — but only if you use them to craft ideas no one else could credibly execute.
4. Address What Customers Really Care About
   Every sector has its burning issues — the problems your audience wakes up thinking about. Use your research and insights to address those head-on. That’s where breakthrough ideas resonate most deeply.
5. Use What You’ve Already Got
   Breakthroughs don’t need new budgets or blank slates. They need new thinking applied to existing platforms. One retail client built a high-impact activation campaign by reimagining how to use their store footprint during the holidays. A B2B firm developed an award concept that turned client partnerships into category leadership.
6. Find the Right Tone and Voice
   Even the best idea will fall flat if it sounds generic. The tone of your breakthrough should surprise, delight, or provoke — whatever matches the essence of your brand. But it must cut through.
7. Measure and Refine
   Not every idea hits. That’s okay. Breakthrough organizations treat innovation like a lab: test, measure, learn, and try again. Over time, this becomes a muscle — and a strategic advantage.

It’s Not Just About One Idea, It’s About Building a Machine.

The goal isn’t to have a breakthrough. It’s to build an organization that can generate and sustain them. That means establishing a process, creating the conditions for creativity, and empowering teams to think beyond what’s easy or safe.

Done right, breakthrough becomes part of the culture — and the brand.

Breakthrough is Not Magic, It’s Method

And it starts by asking better questions — not “what’s a big idea?” but “what’s our big idea?” and “what does our future demand?”

When you can answer that, the breakthroughs begin.

Curious what a breakthrough process looks like for your organization? We would love to show you.

The post A Proven Framework for Brands That Need Breakthrough Ideas Now appeared first on Tunheim.

If you think disruption is occurring, take the bold move to ask your CEO if she has faith in your team’s ability to respond to rapid disruption. The Forbes survey, titled “Disrupt and Grow,” included 400 CEOs across eleven industry sectors. Two-thirds of the CEOs surveyed think their organizations “do not have the sensory capabilities and innovative processes to respond to rapid disruption.”

Based on our experience working with many clients trying to transform in the context of market changes, we suspect that what we have here is a bad case of disruption avoidance.

We all understand avoidance. Disruption pushes us out of our comfort zones. It challenges conventional wisdom and the ways we have always done things. It scrambles our routines by forcing us to confront skills sets we don’t have and expertise we need to develop.

The question, now that you’ve read this far, is whether this makes you feel uncomfortable or energized? If uncomfortable, we challenge you to ask yourself whether you are content to hide under your desk hoping disruption will leave you alone (it won’t), or if you are ready to jump up, embrace your vulnerability and start disrupting your own teams.

Here are a few things we have learned as our consulting teams at Tunheim help clients begin the process of embracing disruption to better their organizations’ competitiveness.

We make this offering with one important caveat: we consider this a rapid prototype process. We and our clients have to go into it ready to embrace a process confronting a new and different set of factors. It is fast, it can be uncomfortable – embrace the process and it can be fun.

#1 Take a shot at challenging the positioning

Ask the question: Where are we now versus where we need to go? Where is the high ground that challenges the existing equation in our sector? As an example to ignite your thinking process, consider a couple industry examples where disruption is challenging old-world positioning:

ENTERTAINMENT: HBO’s pivot from a subscription-based model for cable and satellite to developing its own platform, and licensing content to other streaming platforms (Amazon Prime).

MANUFACTURING: Repositioning Lego from a plastic toy company, with an unprofitable game to digital designer producing movies, a hardware/software robot platform and video games.

You get the idea.

#2 Survey your executive team

Ask your executive leaders about the things that keep them up at night. How do their answers compare to what their industry peers say? There are several great research polling groups that constantly survey most business categories with this information. The internal answers you gather versus category research on these questions, may be an eye-opening experience. If nothing else, this should spur deeper conversations about disruption and its effects on your organization. In the end you want to understand what needs to be different within your organization that will enable transformation.

#3 Identify industry trends

Perhaps the easiest step in the process is identifying trends. This is an exercise to compare and contrast where value is being created, how innovation is being unlocked, the role of technology versus talent and perhaps most importantly, the new and improved customer centric focus. In the end, every trend is a response to one overarching credo: Remove friction from every step in your process. If you need inspiration check out the case study of the entertainment company that was nailing customer service at every touchpoint – only to find they were losing significant ground in overall satisfaction. The McKinsey study can be found here.

#4 Who is the competition, really?

Who are your competitors and where are they going? There are no secrets. Between thought leadership publishing, quarterly financial reports and annual reports (with information-rich MD&As), there is a wealth of information outlining what your competitors are trying to achieve. Mine this for all it is worth.

One warning: Do not make the mistake of limiting your search to historic competitors. Technology is making it easy to be a disruptor. The real competition is likely to be found outside your typical industry sector. Who are the outliers looking to disrupt your market?

#5 Identify challenges and opportunities

Get beyond the usual challenge/opportunity bucket list. Consider that yesterday’s data bottlenecks are becoming today’s opportunities. The ability to leverage operating systems for data to inform key product and customer insight is a high priority within most organizations.

CEOs have begun an important pivot away from initiatives aimed at understanding customers, to fully funding tasks focused on execution that delivers against customer expectations.

The good news about this exercise is that you and your team(s) will have a better understanding of the challenge of being a disruptor. The really good news is that if you invest the time and ignite your teams, your CEO is unlikely to be worried about your ability to help her disrupt the category.

Truth is, there’s nothing better (or more fun) than being the disruptor, once you are armed for the role.

Tunheim’s core credo is to help its clients be understood by stakeholder audiences who are critical to success. We help clients through this disruptor process and then help them communicate their new positioning for business success.

Can Tunheim help your organization prepare to disrupt? Contact Us to get started today.

KPMG U.S. CEO Outlook – Disrupt and Grow, June 2017

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