Does your Perception match the Reality?

Most of us are so involved and so familiar with our company, our product or our service that it becomes very easy to assume that how we view it is how others see it too. But anyone who has done a communications audit will know that the reality is always surprising and sometimes shocking.



Some years ago the PR consultancy I then worked for was introduced to a large and well-known publisher of encyclopaedias. We were working with them as subsidiary sponsors of a major sponsorship scheme which we were handling for another client.


Being a lean and hungry consultancy we were keen to land the encyclopaedia publisher as a client, and it was quite clear that they did not use PR at present. We did some very basic research and found that they were widely regarded as being very pushy and employed ’foot-in-the door’ salesmen’ who hard-sell their products which became a burden on the family finances once the complete set had been purchased. When we tackled the company on this they were truly shocked – they hadn’t sold on the doorstep for nearly 20 years! (This was before the days of online and CD-based encyclopaedias)


It turned out that in the 50s and early 60s they had received a bad press for their doorstep selling techniques. So much so that, fearing further bad coverage, they had ‘pulled down the shutters’ and refused to talk to the press for nearly 20 years. So no one knew that the company had changed, no longer sold door-to-door and had produced new products. They had missed the opportunity to point out that it was, and still is, a company highly respected in academic circles for the excellence of its encyclopaedia content.


But just think of the business that must have been lost because of a lack of communication and a lack of engaging with the company’s potential market.


It is of course an extreme example but illustrates how perception can lag behind reality, and how important it is to engage with your market and work hard to sure that perception keeps close to reality.


We never did land the business of course, old habits die hard and they were still afraid to put their heads over the parapet.


Richard Peters

January 2010