What Percentage of Romanian CEOs Truly Understand the Power of Communication?

Nobody has published that number. And the absence of the research is telling.

There are surveys on Romanian CEO confidence levels, acquisition plans, technology investment, and talent priorities.

The latest PwC CEO Survey Romania reveals that just 25% of local leaders feel confident about business growth over the next year — the lowest in five years. There is data on where budgets are going. A Revolut Business study of 150 Romanian decision-makers found that scaling sales and marketing ranks second for budget increases in 2026, behind IT infrastructure modernisation.

What nobody has measured is how many of those leaders genuinely understand that communication is a strategic function.

The Honest Assessment

"In twenty years of working with senior leadership across Romania and the region, I can count on one hand the CEOs who arrived at the first conversation with a genuine communications strategy already in place. The rest arrived with good intentions and an urgent deadline." Steve Gardiner

Lighthouse PR has a working estimate, built from years of client conversations across Romania and the wider region. It is not a comfortable number. The Romanian business landscape contains three distinct categories of CEO when it comes to communication.

The first group — perhaps ten to fifteen per cent — understands communication at a strategic level. They treat reputation as a balance sheet asset. They involve their communications partners at the strategy stage, not the announcement stage. They know the difference between a press release and a media relations campaign, between a social media presence and a social media strategy. When a crisis arrives, they are not surprised that the infrastructure exists to manage it, because they built that infrastructure before they needed it.

The second group — significantly larger — understands communication at an intuitive level without the strategic framework to deploy it consistently. They know reputation matters. They have seen what happens when it fails. They invest in communications reactively, in bursts, around launches and crises and moments when the absence of a strategy becomes impossible to ignore. This group is reachable. The gap is education, not intention.

The third group believes communication is a cost, not an investment. They approve the minimum budget required to maintain a visible presence and measure the return in coverage volume rather than business outcomes. In a market where multinational competitors arrive with sophisticated communications operations as standard, this group is losing ground; it does not realise it is losing.

Why This Matters for Romania Specifically

Romania is one of the fastest-growing economies in Southeastern Europe. The talent base is deep, the market is expanding, and international investor attention is increasing. The businesses that will define the next decade of Romanian commercial life are being built right now.

Those who treat communication as a strategic priority from the beginning and utilise media relations to persuade, influence, and gain customer trust for commercial advantage will be disproportionately represented in that group.

The ones that don't will find themselves outmanoeuvred by competitors who understood something they didn't, long before the gap became visible in their numbers.

Lighthouse PR exists, in part, to close that gap. The conversation starts with a single question: which category does your business currently sit in?

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About the Author

Steve Gardiner (exec MBA) is a senior marketing and commercial leader at Lighthouse PR, bringing global experience from Accenture, Electronic Arts, Virgin Media, Telekom, and Etisalat. Latterly, as VP Business at Etisalat, he was responsible for $1.8B in revenue.

Today, Steve applies his strategic, marketing, and growth expertise to support Lighthouse PR clients as part of the agency’s service offering.

About Lighthouse PR

Lighthouse PR is a leading PR agency in Romania that works with a select number of organisations across Central and Southeastern Europe, delivering media relations, reputation management, crisis communications, social media and an extensive range of marketing services — always led by senior practitioners.

We hold exclusive membership for Romania and the Republic of Moldova in both the Eurocom worldwide PR network and the CCNE, Europe's leading crisis communications network.

Lighthouse PR: Clear. Concise. Convincing.