Your Earnings Call Just Testified Before Congress. Were You Ready?

Straight to the Point

The earnings call you design for investors is being read by regulators, journalists, labor organizers, and advocacy groups who will use your own words against you.
Companies that treat earnings calls purely as financial events hand adversaries a transcript with legal weight that no press release can match.
The most sophisticated organizations integrate a reputation lens into earnings preparation, asking what every stakeholder audience will take from the call—and what opponents will weaponize before the next one.

What We See

Every quarter, America’s largest companies convene one of the most consequential communications events on the corporate calendar and then leave much of its potential on the table.

The earnings call is built around a narrow obligation: give investors and analysts the numbers, take their questions, and get off the line. That framing is understandable. It is also increasingly incomplete. Because the audiences who hold real influence over a company’s license to operate are not waiting for the investor deck.

Regulators monitor earnings calls for commitments that can be cited in enforcement actions. Journalists and advocacy groups mine transcripts for ammunition. Policy newsletters read by thousands of Capitol Hill staffers regularly surface earnings call language as evidence of corporate intent. Labor organizers track management’s language about workforce and productivity. And competitors have a standing front-row seat to your strategy.

None of this is hypothetical. In January 2026, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sat before CVS Health CEO David Joyner at a House Energy and Commerce hearing and proceeded to dismantle his prepared testimony using language drawn directly from a CVS investor call. AOC cited the company’s own description of its “captive strategy” and walked through a graphic, sourced from CVS’s own investor materials, showing how a single patient’s entire healthcare journey could flow through CVS-owned entities from insurer to pharmacy to drug manufacturer. ‘Captive strategy’ may read as sound business logic to Wall Street — a shorthand for vertical integration, margin protection, and long-term value capture. To every other audience, it reads as a company that has engineered a system where patient outcomes are secondary to corporate ones. Words written for Wall Street became a national story.

In this environment, a company that walks into an earnings call thinking only about analysts is leaving significant reputational value on the table and handing skeptics and competition a ready-made script.

What It Means

The Untapped Opportunity: Owning Your Narrative Beyond the Street

Reputation is not built in a single channel, but any strategic leader who manages it knows it can be challenged in one. Earnings calls are a case in point. They carry a credibility that almost no other corporate communication can match: legal disclosures, on the record, transcribed, indexed, and read by audiences who would never click on a press release. That same credibility, properly used, is also the opportunity.

That makes the prepared remarks section one of the most underused assets in a company’s stakeholder communications strategy. CEOs and CFOs who treat it purely as a financial walkthrough miss an opportunity to shape the external environment around their business. A well-constructed earnings narrative reaches policymakers, regulators, media, and advocacy audiences with a kind of inherent credibility that corporate communications cannot manufacture.

What gives the earnings call its unusual power with non-financial audiences isn’t its reach — it’s its perceived authenticity. Unlike a press release or a brand campaign, an earnings call is understood as a quasi-internal look at how a business actually thinks. A powerful test of corporate character is whether stakeholders believe a company does the right thing when it thinks no one important is watching. The earnings call is one of the few public forums where that question gets answered in real time — and where narrative coherence between business outcomes and the expectations of those who control your license to operate is not optional.

When a CEO uses that platform to articulate a compelling vision on workforce investment, economic contribution, or long-term strategy, they are not padding the call. They are executing a reputation strategy, delivering under the conditions of disclosure exactly the message they want attached to their brand.

The Under-Appreciated Threat: Active Adversaries Are Already Listening

This dynamic cuts across industries. When grocery executives boasted about pricing power on earnings calls during the post-pandemic inflation surge of 2022 and 2023, those quotes became the backbone of congressional hearings on “greedflation” and state attorneys general investigations into price gouging. When major retailers project margin expansion driven by labor efficiencies, union negotiators arrive at the next contract with that transcript in hand. A single sentence about competitive dynamics, spoken to reassure analysts, can hand a rival a ready-made line of attack. And in an era when AI tools can parse thousands of transcripts instantaneously, the information asymmetry between companies and their adversaries has never been greater.

Competitors retain analysts to track rival transcripts. Government investigators build timelines from sequential earnings calls. Advocacy campaigns are seeded by a single loosely worded answer to an analyst’s question about labor costs or environmental commitments. The transcript that closes on a Tuesday afternoon may be the foundation of someone else’s strategy by Wednesday morning.

What to Do

Treat Earnings as an Outcomes Event

The companies that get this right don’t change what they say; they change how they prepare to say it. Investors still need substance. Analysts still punish evasion. The financial narrative has to hold.

But the earnings call is not only a report on outcomes. It’s a moment that shapes outcomes. The regulators, lawmakers, competitors, labor leaders, and advocacy groups reading an earnings call transcript don’t just observe your business — they define the landscape in which you operate. When a CEO uses this platform to articulate a coherent, credible narrative about workforce investment, economic contribution, or long-term strategy, they are not padding the call. They are actively shaping the conditions for future success.

That’s the difference between a communications function that reacts and one that leads. Forward-looking communications teams are integrating a reputation lens into earnings preparation: opening the aperture, identifying the non-financial stakeholders who will encounter this call, and doing the deeper work to translate the story behind the numbers into language that lands with audiences who are not reading a 10-Q.

That means asking, before every earnings cycle, two questions that rarely appear on the prep agenda: What do we want every stakeholder audience to take from this call, not just the analysts? And what are we about to say that our adversaries will use against us before the next one?

Those questions do not require a longer call or hiding details. They require a different frame going in, and a communications function that has earned a seat at the table before the script is written.

The earnings call will always be a financial event. But for organizations that understand reputation as a business asset, it is also a strategic one. The audiences holding your license to operate are listening. The only question is whether you’re speaking to them.