Key takeaways
• Every organisation develops blind spots about how it is perceived externally. The closer you are to the business, the less obvious they become.
• Internal effort and external significance are rarely the same thing. Major projects don’t always make the big splash expected, while genuinely distinctive strengths often go unnoticed because they feel ordinary inside the business.
• Historic achievements build reputation but never guarantee continued market leadership. Industries evolve, competitors improve, and perceptions change.
• Communication is not simply about telling your organisation’s story. At its best, it helps leaders understand how that story is already being interpreted by customers, journalists, competitors, and the wider market.
Every organisation lives inside its own story. Teams spend years developing products, solving engineering challenges, investing in new facilities, and delivering projects that matter enormously to the business. By the time the news reaches customers, journalists, or the wider market, everyone involved likely already knows why it matters.
That familiarity creates an institutional bias – what we might call a proximity problem. The closer you are to your own operations, the harder it becomes to gauge how they are perceived from the outside. This isn’t unique to industrial businesses, nor is it a communications failure. It’s simply human nature.
When big stories don't feel big outside the business
One of the most common frustrations in communications is seeing an announcement that feels monumental internally receive a relatively muted response externally. After years of development, a new product launch feels transformational. A major capital investment feels like a defining moment. A strategic acquisition feels like the beginning of an entirely new chapter. Sometimes the market agrees. Sometimes it sees just another press release.
That doesn’t diminish the hard work involved but it does remind us that effort and significance are not the same thing. External audiences don’t experience the late nights, the budget allocation debates, or the engineering hurdles behind the news. They judge it solely against the immediate problems they need solving today and everything else happening in the market.
The opposite happens just as often
Just as some organisations overestimate the likely impact of their announcements, they can also become so accustomed to doing things a certain way that they stop recognising what makes them genuinely distinctive. An engineer shrugs and says: “We’ve always done it like that”, while a prospective customer thinks: “None of your competitors do.”
We’ve seen organisations overlook decades of specialist expertise, exceptionally collaborative customer relationships, or genuinely innovative ways of solving technical challenges simply because those strengths have become invisible ‘business as usual’ internally.
When a distinct advantage feels entirely normal inside the corporate walls, it frequently disappears from marketing output and ironically, those unheralded, everyday capabilities are often the stories the market finds most compelling.
Yesterday's leadership isn't today's positioning
Proximity creates another subtle blind spot. Most organisations compare today’s business with yesterday’s business. Have we improved? Have we invested? Have we launched something new?
While these are sensible operational questions, they aren’t the questions customers ask because they’re comparing today’s business with today’s competition. An organisation may have pioneered a market-defining innovation a decade ago and single-handedly transformed a sector but that doesn’t mean it continues to dominate the conversation today. Markets evolve, competitors catch up, and buyer expectations shift. Reputation is cumulative but market leadership must be continually earned.
Looking through external lenses
Fortunately, organisations don’t have to rely on instinct alone. When asked, journalists will often share what they believe makes a brand interesting – and just as importantly, what doesn’t. Similarly, sales teams hear the questions, comparisons, and objections customers raise every day, offering direct insight into how the market really perceives your business.
Larger organisations may commission market research, customer satisfaction studies, or competitive perception surveys to understand how their reputation is evolving over time. Meanwhile, analysing where your brand appears in media coverage, social listening tools, and AI search reveals how people and algorithms describe your business when you’re not in the room.
None of these perspectives is definitive on its own but together should provide something more valuable than internal consensus.
Communications is more than a broadcasting function
Communications is often described as the function that tells an organisation’s story. We think that’s only half the job. Before deciding what an organisation should say, communications should help it understand how it is already being understood. Because positioning isn’t something you create from scratch. It already exists in the minds of stakeholders. Customers, journalists, competitors, prospective employees, and even AI models already have an opinion.
The strategic role of communications is to continually audit those external perceptions against the organisation’s own understanding of itself – identifying where perceptions are outdated, where misconceptions persist, where genuine strengths are being overlooked, and where market leadership can no longer be taken for granted. Only then can you decide what story needs telling next.
Hannah Kitchener
Associate Director
About the author
Hannah is an associate director in the UK, leading strategic campaigns for industrial clients across the EMEA region. A professionally qualified journalist (NCTJ), she combines specialist sectoral knowledge in construction, energy, and materials handling with a strong network of trade media contacts to secure valuable coverage. Her expertise in inter-cultural communication, honed by degrees in modern languages and translation, is key to executing campaigns that succeed across diverse European markets.
