Jeff Bezos gave communications professionals one of the most useful definitions of brand ever articulated. “Your brand,” he said, “is what other people say about you when you are not in the room.” The quote is widely cited. Its full implications are rarely followed to their conclusion. If your brand is what other people say about you when you are absent, then every conversation where your name or your organisation’s name comes up without you present is an act of brand formation. Every introduction a contact makes on your behalf. Every reference call an investor conducts. Every time a peer describes what your company does at a dinner table. Every word-of-mouth recommendation that either fires or misfires. These are all moments at which your brand is being made, unmade, or shaped in ways you did not intend. They are happening continuously, at a scale no communications strategy directly manages, and they will happen whether you have prepared for them or not.
The conventional approach to brand management is focused on outputs: the website, the press releases, the social media presence, the pitch deck, the annual report. These are the channels an organisation controls directly. The implicit assumption embedded in this approach is that if you get your owned channels right, the rest of your brand follows. In a low-information environment, where the primary way people learned about organisations was through what those organisations published, this was roughly correct. In the current environment, it is no longer sufficient as a strategic framework.
McKinsey’s research on the customer decision journey, updated in their 2022 findings on B2B buyer behaviour, found that before a serious commercial conversation begins, the average buyer has conducted between five and eight independent research touchpoints. These include peer recommendations, third-party reviews, industry commentary, social media references, and secondary media. By the time a prospect visits your website or responds to an outreach, they have already formed a preliminary view. That view was assembled from sources you did not produce and conversations you were not present for. Your owned channels did not set the frame. Something else did.
This is what Byron Sharp’s landmark 2010 book How Brands Grow documented at scale across consumer markets, in findings that have since been extended across B2B contexts by researchers at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute.
This is what Byron Sharp’s landmark 2010 book How Brands Grow documented at scale across consumer markets, in findings that have since been extended across B2B contexts by researchers at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. Sharp argued that brand salience — the degree to which a brand is mentally available when a buyer is making a relevant decision — is the primary driver of market share growth. Mental availability is not built through single high-impact campaigns. It is built through consistent presence across the multiple memory structures that form in the minds of potential buyers over time. What this means practically is that your brand is being reinforced or eroded in every interaction where your name comes up in any context, not just in the interactions you orchestrate.
Nielsen’s annual Global Trust in Advertising report has found, across more than a decade of measurement and across more than 60 countries, that recommendations from people known to the buyer are the most trusted form of brand communication, trusted by approximately 89 percent of respondents. Paid advertising, by contrast, is trusted by significantly fewer. The strategic implication is that the most powerful brand formation mechanism available to any organisation is the quality of what people say about it in private, unprompted conversations. And the quality of those conversations is determined not by the communications strategy but by the narrative that has been built, over time, in the minds of the people having them.
This creates a specific and often neglected strategic imperative. The objective of communications is not to control the narrative. In a networked world where information travels across channels no organisation can monitor or manage, narrative control is not available as a strategic goal. The achievable objective is to shape the narrative upstream, so that by the time the uncontrollable moments happen, they are pulling in a consistent direction. That requires a different starting point for communications strategy. Instead of beginning with what we want to say, the question that builds durable brand presence is: what do we need people to already believe about us before the conversations we most want to have?
Answering that question requires two things that are often missing from communications planning. The first is an honest assessment of what people currently believe: what they understand, what they misunderstand, and what they have no view on at all. This requires research that is genuinely diagnostic rather than confirmatory. Most organisations, when they conduct brand research, are looking for validation. The research that creates strategic value is the research that surfaces uncomfortable gaps between the brand that was intended and the brand that actually exists in the minds of the audiences that matter. The second is the discipline to build a communications programme that addresses the real gap rather than the comfortable one.
The organisations that manage their brand most effectively in this environment are not the ones doing the most. They are the ones that have done the foundational work of understanding exactly how they are received before investing in how they are projected. They know the difference between their intended brand and their actual brand. They treat that gap as a strategic priority. And they have built a communications infrastructure designed to close it systematically, through consistent narrative, coherent positioning, and the kind of behaviour-based brand evidence that no campaign can manufacture but that compounding, genuine action over time can build.
The consequence of not doing this work is not usually a crisis. It is a slow, invisible accumulation of misalignment. The partnership that never quite came together because the other party had a subtly incorrect understanding of what your organisation does. The investor who passed not because the business was insufficient but because the narrative did not give them the confidence to act. The talent who chose a less impressive organisation because the competitor’s story was more compelling. Each of these is a small loss. Over three years, five years, a decade, the accumulation is significant.
Your brand is being formed in every room you are not in. The question is not whether you can stop that from happening. You cannot. The question is whether you have invested in building the narrative infrastructure that ensures those rooms, to the greatest extent possible, are working in your direction. That investment begins not with a communications campaign but with an honest answer to the question: what does the world currently understand about us, and what do we need them to understand? The distance between those two answers is the work.
The implication of Bezos’s definition of brand is not merely that you should care about what people say when you are not in the room. It is that you should invest, deliberately and systematically, in shaping what they are able to say. The mechanism for this is not advertising. It is not press coverage. It is the accumulation of what strategists call “brand evidence”: the real interactions, demonstrated values, published thinking, and observable behaviour that give the people in those conversations material to work with. When someone introduces your organisation to a potential client, partner, or investor, they are drawing on the brand evidence they have accumulated through their exposure to you. If that evidence is thin, the introduction will be thin. If the evidence is rich and specific, the introduction will be rich and specific. The investment in brand evidence is the investment in the quality of every introduction that will ever be made on your behalf.
Thought leadership is the most undervalued brand evidence mechanism available to most organisations. When a founder or senior leader publishes a piece of thinking that is genuinely original and genuinely useful, it does something that advertising cannot: it gives people something specific and credible to say about that person and that organisation in the conversations they have without you. “Have you read what [name] wrote about [topic]?” is one of the most valuable things any professional can have said about them. It is the warmest possible introduction to a room you were not in. It positions you before you arrive. And it is built not through a campaign but through the consistent practice of making genuinely valuable thinking publicly available.
The organisations that manage this most effectively have made a specific structural decision: they treat thought leadership as a strategic function rather than a marketing activity. They identify the two or three questions that their ideal clients, partners, and investors are most urgently trying to answer in their domain. They build a content and engagement strategy designed to make their organisation the most credible, most cited, most recommended source on those specific questions. They do not publish broadly. They publish specifically, on the questions that matter most to the people who matter most to them. The result, over 18 to 36 months of consistent investment, is a brand that arrives in rooms before the organisation does.
This approach requires patience that the quarterly pressure of most organisations makes difficult. The brand evidence accumulated in year one does not produce its full commercial return in year one. It produces it in year two and year three, when the conversations it shaped, the introductions it enabled, and the trust it built begin to convert at a rate that campaign-based communications rarely achieves. The organisations that make this investment and maintain it long enough to see its return are not more patient by nature. They have simply understood that the timeline of reputation building is not a constraint to work around. It is the mechanism through which durable competitive advantage is built.
