It’s the one where you decide your communication without knowing how the market already sees you.
Some meetings cost very little in time and a great deal in consequences.
The one where leadership defines the positioning, approves the communication plan, chooses the main message — without first answering one essential question: what does the market actually think of us today?
Not what we’d like it to think. Not what we assume it thinks. What it actually thinks.
The problem nobody names
Communication decisions are made, almost always, from the inside. From the CEO with a vision. From the marketing manager who knows the numbers. From the commercial director who feels the market every day through the sales network.
All legitimate sources. All partial ones.
Because people who work inside a company inevitably develop a distorted picture of how that same company is seen from outside. Not out of bad faith. Out of proximity.
It’s like trying to assess your own haircut using a mirror you haven’t looked at in years.
What happens next
A communication plan gets approved — built on an internal perception that doesn’t match external reality. Budget gets invested in messages the market doesn’t receive the way intended. The agency gets changed because “results aren’t coming.” Everyone starts over.
And the next meeting unfolds exactly like the previous one.
This cycle has a cost that appears in no report. It’s not a budget line. It’s the distance accumulated over time between what the company believes it communicates and what the market actually perceives.
The question missing from the agenda
Before deciding what to say to the market, you need to know what it’s already hearing.
You don’t need a hundred-thousand-euro market study. You need the willingness to ask an uncomfortable question: are we certain we know how we’re seen by the people who haven’t chosen us yet?
Existing clients are a partial source. They already know the company, have already evaluated it, have already cleared the perception barriers. Those who didn’t choose you — and those who don’t know you yet — are the source that actually matters for building an effective communication strategy.
How do you find out
There is no single method. There are signals that most companies already have available and aren’t reading.
Negative reviews — not from satisfied customers, but from people who looked and didn’t buy. The reasons leads don’t convert. The objections the sales network hears on repeat. The questions that come in before a negotiation begins. What competitors write about you, implicitly, in the way they position themselves.
And then there are direct conversations — not post-sale satisfaction surveys, but interviews with people who evaluated your company and chose someone else. They’re the hardest to get and the most valuable.
External perception isn’t measured by asking your own clients if they’re satisfied. It’s measured by listening to those who decided not to become one.
Who should be in that room
A communication decision made without data on external perception is a bet. Sometimes it pays off. Often it doesn’t.
The role of whoever leads a company’s strategic communication isn’t just to produce messages. It’s to bring an external perspective into that room. It’s to ask the uncomfortable question before the plan gets approved. It’s to prevent budget from being allocated on wrong premises.
It is, in other words, the work an operational Marketing Manager cannot do alone — and that a Communication Manager is there to do.
The most expensive meeting isn’t the one that runs too long.
It’s the one where nobody asked that question.
Want to understand how your market really perceives you, before the next meeting? Let’s talk.