Michela Ratti has built products, built brands, and rebuilt reputations — as an engineer turned communicator across P&G, eBay, Swarovski, and Ferragamo (and including a stint on the advisory side). In this episode, she joins Javier Boix to unpack what actually changes, and what stays the same, when you move a career between detergent plants, luxury fashion houses, and hypergrowth tech. Michela is half Italian, half Welsh, and speaks four languages. She trained as an engineer, graduated with honors, and spent years in R&D before crossing into communications — a path she says gave her a lasting instinct for cause and effect, systems thinking, and the gap between what a company says and what people actually experience. That gap, she argues, is the real definition of reputation, in any industry. Whether the product is a diaper, a piece of jewelry, or a handbag, the business is the same: building trust at scale. What differs is visibility and stakes — in luxury, she explains, reputation is turned up louder, because people aren't just buying a product, they're buying status, self-worth, and a piece of a dream. When that dream doesn't hold up, the fallout moves faster and hits harder. Javier and Michela trace how the job itself has changed since she started at Procter & Gamble in the early 2000s. Back then, communications was largely about controlling a narrative through a small number of press gatekeepers. Today, she says, it's about shaping a conversation that's already happening across dozens of channels you don't own, faster than any single company can fully control. That shift, she argues, is why understanding systems — how information moves, who trusts whom, and why — matters more than ever. The conversation moves through some of the biggest transformations of her career: relaunching Procter & Gamble into prestige beauty against decades-old luxury incumbents, merging three separate businesses into one at Swarovski while repositioning its price point five times higher, and returning to Ferragamo for a second stint to lead a brand turnaround. Across all three, she says, the discipline was the same — build trust with your own team first, be explicit about what communications can and cannot do, and give people a clear, honest timeline instead of promising overnight change. They also get hands-on about AI: how agentic tools are leveling the playing field for challenger brands, how propensity modeling and omni-channel data are reshaping audience targeting, and why visibility inside AI-powered search is becoming as important as traditional media coverage. Michela is candid about the limits too — the lag between what AI models surface and what's actually happening in the market, and the very real concerns around bias and trust that make some leaders cautious to fully embrace it. Underneath the career story is a broader argument about the profession itself. Michela pushes back on the idea that communications is the "firefighter function," brought in only after something has gone wrong. The real value, she says, comes from having a seat at the table before the mess happens — helping define what a company is trying to achieve and why, not just cleaning up when it doesn't land. She also reflects candidly on a hard-earned lesson: that great work doesn't speak for itself, and that being an advocate for your own impact is not the same as playing politics. It's a conversation about translation — of complex ideas into stories people embrace, of engineering logic into human trust, of a life lived across cultures and industries into a single, consistent instinct for what makes people believe. As Michela puts it, communicators are ultimately in "the science of being believed." If you enjoyed this conversation, follow The Reputation Room on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube, and share it with your network. https://thereputationroom.com
