Out of Touch or Out of Time?

This year’s Eurovision may already be peaking with a Finnish performer dressed, according to The Guardian, like “a baked potato wrapped in aluminum foil” while snapping violin strings on live television. Which, honestly, feels like an appropriate metaphor for markets this week.

Every May, Europe gathers for three nights of choreography, geopolitical voting patterns, emotional overreaction, and deeply questionable styling choices. It’s one of the most popular song contests, much in the same way Wall Street is treated as the ultimate arbiter. What stands out is how little success in either has to do with perfection. The performances people remember are the ones bold enough to commit completely to the schtick. A silver-painted man warning about AI “like a robot from 1984.” Rappers on scooters. Power ballads delivered with the emotional intensity of someone announcing the end of civilization. Public companies could learn a thing or two from this campy celebration of cultural diversity.

Too many management teams communicate like nervous contestants apologizing for their performance before the music starts. Eurovision rewards the opposite. Take the repeated refrain “ya, ya, ya” from Norway’s entrant, Jonas Lovv. It lands with so much confidence that you’ll be singing along before he even finishes the song. That’s exactly the kind of singular messaging public companies should clone. Voting viewers (like investors) decide within seconds whether they “get” an act. The rest of the performance simply reinforces or weakens that instinct. Investors behave the same way. The market rarely falls in love with complexity. Rather, it rewards simple, powerful ideas that can be quickly understood and retold easily. Remember, the childhood game of telephone? You get the idea.

Companies that struggle to communicate are often not bad businesses. They are cognitively messy or perhaps expensive ones. The corporate equivalent of trying to combine opera, techno, interpretive dance, and a lecture on climate policy into one 20-minute performance. Investors secretly admire the ambition but will vote with their checkbook for someone else.

Eurovision reminds us of another truth: people vote emotionally first, then spend the next day pretending it was analytical. Markets, of course, would never do such a thing.