We have become very good at making organisations visible. There are more platforms, more campaigns and more opportunities to tell people what a business stands for. Yet I am not convinced that all this communication is necessarily making organisations better understood, or more trusted.
I have always believed that business is human. Behind every organisation are people making decisions, people delivering on promises and people affected by those decisions. We sometimes lose sight of that when communication becomes a race for attention.
A brand can have a compelling campaign, a beautifully produced video and a strong media presence. But none of those things will undo the experience of a customer who cannot get an answer, an employee who does not feel heard or a community that was consulted but never heard from again.
That is where the real work of reputation begins. It is not simply about what an organisation says. It is about whether its actions give people a reason to believe it.
Across corporate, public-sector and development work, I have seen how easy it is for communication to be treated as the final stage of a project: the decision has been made, the programme has been designed, and the communications team is asked to announce it. Sometimes that is appropriate. Often, though, the questions that matter most should have been asked much earlier.
Who will this decision affect? What do those people actually need to know? Have we listened to them? Are we promising something the organisation is equipped to deliver? And what happens after the campaign ends?
These are not questions for the communications department alone. They belong in management conversations, operational planning and, where appropriate, the boardroom. A good communications adviser should be able to ask difficult questions before the press release is written.
Consider the way organisations communicate their social investment or community programmes. There is nothing wrong with telling a positive story about meaningful work. Those stories deserve to be told. But I believe the strongest story is the one that can withstand a simple follow-up question: what changed for the people this programme was intended to serve?
If the answer is clear, communication has substance. If it is not, a louder campaign is unlikely to solve the problem.
The same applies to stakeholder engagement. An event is not a relationship. A consultation is not evidence that people feel heard. And an attendance register is not a measure of trust. Engagement has to include listening, making sense of what has been said and showing, where possible, how that input informed a decision.
This matters even more in an environment where organisations can produce and distribute content at extraordinary speed. Technology can make communication more efficient, but it cannot make an unfulfilled promise credible. Nor can it replace the judgement required to know when to speak, when to listen and when an organisation needs to fix something before saying more about it.
I also think our industry has to be more careful about what we celebrate. Media coverage, impressions, views and event attendance all have a place in reporting. They tell us something about reach and activity. They do not, on their own, tell us whether understanding improved, whether a relationship became stronger or whether the intended audience has greater confidence in the organisation.
We should be asking better questions of our work. Did the communication help people make sense of an issue? Did it create room for a meaningful response? Did it support an organisational objective? Did it reveal a problem that leadership needed to address?
None of this means visibility is unimportant. Organisations need to communicate, and they should take pride in work that is worth sharing. But visibility should serve a purpose beyond being seen.
For me, credibility is built in the space between what we say and what people experience. It is built through consistency, accountability and the quality of our relationships. Those things are not always as easy to photograph or measure as a campaign launch, but they are what people remember.
Perhaps the question for organisations is no longer simply, “Are people seeing us?” It is, “When they do, do they have a reason to believe us?”
By Viwe Booi, Managing Director, EQ4 Brand Architects and Digital Communications