What do institutional investors actually want from the companies they back? And are those companies delivering? According to Brunswick’s 2026 US Investor Survey, which polled 100 US institutional active-equity investors, the answer to the second question is largely no, the survey surfaces a striking gap at the heart of investor communications.
Alongside this core finding, the report maps out how AI is reshaping the investment research process, what builds and destroys trust in management, and what companies should prioritise to attract capital in 2026. As synthetic content floods in and scrutiny grows, narrative quality matters more than it used to.
1. Solving the competitive advantage gap
The most striking finding of Brunswick’s 2026 survey concerns the ability to tell a winning story. When asked what gives them the greatest confidence in an investment case, 61% of investors pointed to “why you will win” as the strongest driver. Yet when asked to rank how effectively companies communicate that same message, only 27% placed it among their top selections making it the single biggest communication gap in the entire study.
Brunswick hypothesises two reasons behind this disconnect: some executives expect results to speak for themselves, while others are reluctant to reveal their competitive “secret sauce.” But what investors are telling us is more straightforward: they want a clear, realistic, evidence-backed path to victory. Investors are looking for a genuine competitive narrative.
For financial communications, investor relations, and corporate communications teams, this gap represents both a risk and an opportunity. Companies that can articulate with specificity and conviction what structurally sets them apart, why their model is built to outperform, and what milestones mark the path ahead, stand to meaningfully differentiate themselves in the eyes of capital allocators. In a market where most companies default to numbers-first reporting, a well-constructed competitive narrative becomes a strategic asset in its own right.
2. How AI reshapes the research process
The numbers leave little room for doubt: AI has firmly entered the investment research process. 54% of investors cite GenAI as moderately to very important in their research, and 42% use it as a top tool for conducting deep research on new investments. Most tellingly, 68% report that AI has already changed how they approach earnings calls, meaning every transcript, every management Q&A, and every prepared remark is now being parsed, summarised and sentiment-analysed by machines as much as by human analysts.
Yet investors today use AI primarily for synthesis rather than direct decision-making. Only 23% use it to update their financial models, and more than half expressed reservations about doing so. Investors are acutely aware of AI’s blind spots: outdated sourcing, hallucinations, numerical errors and, perhaps most critically, a lack of contextual judgement. As one respondent put it bluntly, AI “has IQ but no EQ.” Human interactions with the C-suite remain the most valued source of information by a wide margin.
For companies, this dual reality carries a concrete implication that goes well beyond IR strategy. If AI is increasingly the fast filter through which communications are processed, the coherence, clarity and discoverability of everything you publish online become a capital markets question. Your owned content is now your source code. The companies that treat it as such will have a structural advantage over those that don’t.
3. What companies should know about building trust
If there was one finding in Brunswick’s 2026 survey that should stop any IR or communications team in their tracks, it’s this: 93% of investors say they would not invest in a company without trust in management, even if the business had strong financials and an attractive market opportunity. And 85% had already sold a position due to a loss of trust. In other words, trust is the investment thesis.
What builds it, and what destroys it, is more precise than most companies assume. By far the most damaging trust killer, cited by 62% of respondents, is over-promising and under-delivering. Ranked second and third: failing to clearly explain a change in strategy (46%), and posting disappointing results without a credible correction plan (40%). Notably, not meeting regularly with investors ranked last at just 5% — a finding that directly challenges the conventional IR wisdom that access and availability are everything. Frequency of contact matters far less than what you say when you do show up.
On the flipside, the trust-building actions investors value are equally precise. Providing a specific action plan when problems arise and explaining expectations clearly ranked nearly tied at the top, well ahead of simply staying highly available. The pattern is consistent: what investors reward is not performance perfection, but communicative courage. The ability to get ahead of bad news, take ownership, and lay out a credible path forward is what separates companies that retain capital through a difficult cycle from those that don’t.
4. Shareholder activism: how to handle it and what to make of it
Brunswick’s 2026 survey surfaces a striking paradox at the heart of the activism debate. 81% of institutional investors agreed that shareholder activism adds value, a remarkably high figure that signals broad endorsement of activism as a legitimate market mechanism. Yet according to detailed data cited in the report, only 41% of investors actually voted in favour of activist director nominees in practice. Widespread support in principle, selective deployment in practice.
The gap between those numbers is where the real strategic signal lies. It suggests investors don’t necessarily back every activist campaign on its merits. Rather, they use the existence of activism as a baseline pressure, a kind of permanent stress test that companies should assume is always running in the background. Brunswick puts it plainly: assume activist scrutiny is the baseline, not a special scenario. Stress test your investment case, your capital allocation, your covenants and your performance, and be ready for hard questions before someone else asks them.
For communications teams, the implication is straightforward but often underestimated. The quality of your public narrative, the clarity of your strategy, the coherence of your governance story and the credibility of your long-term value proposition are now your first line of defence. Not against activists specifically, but against the broader environment of heightened scrutiny that 93% of investors endorsing trust as a prerequisite for investment has created. In that context, a well-structured investor narrative is a communications asset as well as a governance signal.
Your company’s top priorities
The findings don’t leave much room for interpretation. Across trust, AI, competitive narrative and shareholder scrutiny, Brunswick’s survey points to a single overarching shift: investors are raising the bar on what credible, investor-grade communication looks like, and most companies aren’t keeping up.
Priorities emerge clearly from the data:
- Tell investors why you will win, not just how you perform.
- Manage expectations like a discipline: overpromising and underdelivering is the fastest way to lose capital, and getting ahead of bad news is the fastest way to retain it.
- Optimise your content for machines as well as humans, since it’s the raw material AI draws on to process earnings calls and shape investment research.
- Treat governance as a narrative, not a compliance exercise. In a market where 81% of investors endorse activism as a legitimate pressure tool, a robust governance story is your first line of defence.
- And above all, build trust before you need it: at 93%, the share of investors unwilling to back a company without it makes trust the foundation everything else is built on.
In 2026, the quality of the narrative is the quality of the strategy. Companies that understand that, and communicate accordingly, will have a structural edge over those that don’t.
This is exactly where The Editorialist works. We help financial, shareholder and investor communication teams build the narrative discipline institutional investors now expect.
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