The gap between what organisations intend and what people experience
By Priyanka Chard, Marketing Manager
Most organisations have a pretty clear idea of the impression they want to create.
The more interesting question is: is that the impression people actually get?
People don’t experience your strategy, your brand guidelines or the conversations that went into creating them.
They experience the organisation through everything it says, does and delivers.
They visit the website. Read a piece of guidance. See a campaign. Attend an event. Go through a process. Use a service. Speak to someone in the organisation.
Sometimes those experiences reinforce exactly the impression you were hoping to create. Sometimes they tell a slightly different story.
If you work in communications, you’ll probably know the frustration. You can get the message right, make the campaign clear and produce genuinely useful information, only for someone to hit a clunky process, get passed between teams or hear something completely different elsewhere in the organisation.
Suddenly, the experience is saying something your communications never intended.
Your website might promise simplicity while the process behind it involves five steps and three different teams.
You might talk about accessibility while the information people need is difficult to navigate.
Or you might want to be known for expertise while people are still struggling to understand what you actually do.
So which version becomes the brand?
That’s the bit I find interesting, because those impressions can influence whether people trust an organisation, use its services, apply to join it, want to work with it, recommend it or engage with it at all.
So what actually is a brand?
It helps to separate brand from all the things we use to express it.
Logos, colours, typography, tone of voice and all the other things we associate with branding absolutely matter. Some of these can become distinctive brand assets (DBAs): recognisable cues that help people identify a brand quickly.
But they’re not the whole brand.
A useful way of thinking about brand is as the meaning that builds up around an organisation: what people know about it, what they associate with it and what they’ve learned to expect from it.
One distinction I’ve found particularly useful is the difference between having a brand and actually managing one, because it changes where you start. Before deciding what you want the brand to become, you need to understand what people already associate with it.
Marketing professor and long-time Marketing Week columnist Mark Ritson, who has spent much of his career teaching and writing about brand management, makes a similar point: understanding the brand you already have should come before deciding what to do with it.
And that makes sense, right?
An organisation doesn’t start with a blank sheet of paper every time it updates its visual identity or launches a campaign. There may already be years, even decades, of experiences, associations and history behind the name.
And the basic idea behind branding goes back much further than modern marketing.
Ancient Egyptian imagery shows livestock being marked to identify ownership thousands of years ago. By Roman Pompeii, things start to look surprisingly familiar.
Aulus Umbricius Scaurus produced garum, a fish sauce, in containers carrying his name and product information. His home even featured mosaics depicting the jars. Which is quite a commitment to your product branding!
But underneath the Roman fish sauce is an idea we’d still recognise today: a name or mark tells us where something came from, and over time we attach expectations and reputation to it.
The tools have changed considerably. The human behaviour underneath them, perhaps less so.
The bits you can’t put in a brand guide
Think about your own organisation for a moment.
Take away the logo, colours, strapline and carefully chosen brand language.
What’s left?
Maybe people know you for deep expertise. Perhaps they’ve always found your team helpful. Maybe you’ve built a reputation for getting difficult things done.
There may be other associations too: a process that always feels complicated, slow responses, confusing language, or one helpful interaction that completely changes someone’s view of the organisation.
Those things shape the brand too.
This is where it gets interesting for communications. We can shape how an organisation presents itself, make things clearer and help people understand what it stands for.
But we can’t make a frustrating experience feel simple just by calling it simple.
Sometimes the most important thing influencing your brand is happening nowhere near the people responsible for marketing, communications or brand.
There’s evidence that clarity has value too.
Kantar, the global research and insights company, describes brand clarity as the extent to which people understand what a brand stands for. Its meta-analysis found that brands with strong clarity contributed 70% more to sales than those with weak clarity.
Sales won’t be the objective for every organisation, of course. The outcome might instead be trust, recruitment, engagement, service uptake or willingness to work with you.
But the principle travels: the clearer and more consistent the experience, the easier it is for people to understand what an organisation stands for.
So how do you know if there’s a gap?
Organisations naturally see themselves from the inside. We understand the structure, the acronyms and why decisions were made.
People outside the organisation don’t have that context. They experience what’s in front of them.
So it’s worth asking:
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What do we want people to associate with us?
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What do they actually associate with us now?
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Where is the biggest gap between the two?
Sometimes answering those questions properly means formal audience or brand research. But clues can also sit in recurring questions, stakeholder conversations, complaints, feedback and what colleagues who deal directly with audiences hear every day.
And the answer might not be the one you expected.
If people regularly misunderstand what you do, perhaps there’s a communications problem.
If they understand what you promise but their experience doesn’t match it, the problem may sit somewhere else.
For communicators, that distinction is important. Sometimes the most useful question isn’t:
What should we say?
It’s:
Does the experience we’re creating give people a reason to believe what we’re saying?
Sometimes the answer isn’t another campaign, a new message or a refreshed identity. It’s helping the organisation see where the experience itself needs to change.
You can write the promise. The organisation has to deliver the proof.