The Reality Gap

For most of my career, communications has had a measurement problem. Not because we do not measure enough. If anything, we measure everything. Coverage, impressions, share of voice, sentiment, message pull-through, engagement, executive visibility, website traffic and dozens of other indicators can now be tracked, compared and turned into a dashboard.

The problem is that none of those things, on their own, answer the question that matters most: did communications change how the market understands the organization?

That is the job. Everything else is evidence that work happened.

I have spent enough time in communications meetings, client reviews, planning sessions and quarterly business reviews to know how easy it is to confuse the two. A team can deliver a tremendous amount of work. The coverage can be strong. The executives can be visible. The numbers can all move in the right direction. Everyone can leave the meeting feeling good about the program.

And the market can still believe exactly what it believed six months ago.

That is the problem I think our profession needs to confront.

We measure what we can count

There is a practical reason communications ended up here. Activity is relatively easy to measure. Perception is not.

We can count a story. We can estimate an audience. We can determine whether a message appeared. We can compare one company's media presence with another's. Those measures are useful, and I am not arguing that we should stop using them.

But we have allowed the things that are easiest to count to become proxies for the things that are hardest to understand.

A placement tells us that a reporter wrote about the company. It does not tell us whether the story changed the reporter's understanding of the company.

Share of voice tells us how much of a conversation a company occupies. It does not tell us whether the company owns the idea that matters inside that conversation.

Message pull-through tells us whether our language appeared. It does not tell us whether anyone believed it.

Even sentiment, which sounds closer to reputation, usually tells us whether coverage was positive, neutral or negative. A company can have overwhelmingly positive coverage and still be positioned in the wrong category, associated with an outdated idea or absent from the conversation it most needs to own.

None of these are bad measures. They are simply incomplete ones.

The mistake is treating evidence of communications activity as evidence of strategic progress.

There is always a distance between intention and reality

Every organization has an idea of how it wants to be understood.

Sometimes that ambition is written into a formal positioning strategy. Sometimes it sits inside a corporate narrative, a CEO's agenda or a transformation plan. Sometimes everyone in the company simply knows that the market still sees the business as what it used to be instead of what it is becoming.

A legacy technology company wants to be understood as an AI company. A manufacturer wants to be seen as an innovation leader. A financial services company wants to move beyond a product category it has outgrown. A startup wants to become credible enough to compete with incumbents. A company coming through a crisis wants to rebuild trust.

In each case, there is an intended reputation.

Then there is the reputation the market actually holds.

That reputation lives outside the company. It is visible in what reporters write, how analysts categorize the business, what customers say, which executives are quoted, what competitors claim, what investors believe and, perhaps most revealingly, how people describe the organization when nobody from the organization is in the room.

The distance between those two realities is what I call the Reality Gap.

It is the distance between how an organization wants to be understood and how the market understands it today.

That gap has always existed. What has been missing is a disciplined way of making it central to communications strategy and measurement.

Companies do not own their narratives

Communications people talk a lot about "owning the narrative." I understand what we mean by it, but I have never been convinced that companies actually own narratives.

Markets do.

A company can introduce an idea. It can make a case for that idea. It can provide evidence, put credible executives behind it, repeat it consistently and create opportunities for other people to experience it.

But eventually the idea leaves the building.

The market decides whether it survives.

That is a much more demanding standard than message delivery. It requires us to look beyond whether we said something and ask whether anyone else has started saying it without us.

Are journalists beginning to use the language? Are analysts reflecting the position? Are customers reinforcing it? Are competitors reacting to it? Is the organization appearing in conversations where it previously did not belong? Has an old description started to disappear?

That is what movement looks like.

The most meaningful communications success is not when a company repeats its own story more effectively. It is when the outside world begins telling some version of that story back to the company.

Reputation is movement, not a snapshot

Another problem with traditional measurement is that we tend to evaluate reputation in periods that are convenient for reporting rather than periods that reflect how markets actually behave.

Markets do not move quarterly.

Perception can change because of a competitor announcement on Tuesday, an earnings call on Wednesday and a major piece of coverage on Thursday. A CEO can alter the way an industry thinks about a company in a single interview. A product failure can undermine years of positioning in a weekend. A phrase can suddenly become the language of a category.

Meanwhile, the communications plan may still be operating against assumptions made months earlier.

That is why the Reality Gap can be expressed as a number. The number is not the reputation itself. It is an executive shorthand for the distance between intended perception and observed perception.

A score can show where the gap stands at a moment in time. The more important question is where it is moving. That is what makes the number useful: not as a verdict, but as a way to show whether communications is actually affecting perception over time.

Used properly, the score creates a common language between communications and leadership. It helps frame the executive conversation: where perception stands today, whether communications is changing it, how quickly it is moving, and where the distance remains greatest. The evidence explains why the number moved.

Where is the market moving? Which ideas are gaining credibility? Which ones are weakening? What language is beginning to appear independently? Where is the organization making progress? Where is it standing still? Where is the market moving in the opposite direction?

Those questions are far more useful than asking whether a company's reputation is "good" or "bad."

A good reputation in the wrong territory can still be a strategic problem.

The profession needs to be willing to find failure

This may be the hardest part.

A credible measurement discipline has to be capable of telling us that our work did not work.

Most communications reporting is designed, at least in part, to demonstrate value. That creates an understandable incentive to find evidence of success. Strong placements get highlighted. Positive metrics rise to the top. Weak results get context.

Over time, the report can become less of an evaluation and more of a defense of the program.

I do not think that helps us.

If every campaign is successful, success stops meaning very much.

Sometimes the strategy is wrong. Sometimes the story is not interesting. Sometimes the market does not believe the claim. Sometimes a competitor has already established ownership of the territory. Sometimes an executive is not the right person to carry the argument. Sometimes we are trying to force a conversation the market is not ready to have.

Finding that out is not a failure of measurement. It is the point of measurement.

The communications profession should be able to say, with confidence and evidence, "This did not move perception, and here is what we learned."

That is a much stronger position than presenting a successful activity report for a strategy that did not work.

Better evidence should make judgment more important

There is an understandable anxiety around technology and communications right now. The assumption is often that if machines can see more, analyze more and produce more, they will eventually replace the judgment that communications professionals bring to the work.

I think that gets the problem backward.

The value of a strategist has never been the ability to gather the most information. It is knowing what matters.

A strong communications leader understands context that is difficult to capture in any dataset. They know when a relationship is worth protecting. They know when a story is technically true but strategically wrong. They know when an executive should speak and when silence is the better choice. They know when a company has earned the right to make a claim and when it has not.

Those decisions are judgment.

More information does not eliminate the need for that judgment. It raises the standard for it.

The opportunity is to give strategists a clearer view of reality so they can spend less time assembling the picture and more time deciding what to do about it.

That distinction matters to me.

I am not interested in removing the strategist from communications. I am interested in giving the strategist better evidence.

Communications deserves a more consequential question

For decades, our reports have essentially answered some version of the same question: what did communications deliver?

It is a reasonable operating question. It just should not be the final one.

The more important question is: what changed?

Did the market begin associating the organization with an idea it did not own before?

Did an outdated perception begin to weaken?

Did an executive gain authority in a conversation that matters?

Did journalists start describing the company differently?

Did analysts change the way they categorized it?

Did customers begin reinforcing the narrative?

Did a competitor start responding to the company's position?

Did the gap between the reputation the organization has and the reputation it needs actually get smaller?

Those are difficult questions. They require more evidence, more context and more judgment than counting outputs.

That is precisely why they are worth asking.

This is not about proving communications matters

I do not believe communications needs another framework designed primarily to prove its value to the rest of the organization.

The work already matters.

A company's reputation affects its ability to sell, recruit, raise capital, enter markets, withstand crises, influence policy, attract partners and earn the benefit of the doubt when things go wrong.

The problem is not convincing organizations that reputation matters.

The problem is understanding whether our work is actually changing it.

That changes the purpose of measurement.

Measurement should not exist to make communications look successful. It should make communications more effective.

It should tell us where the market disagrees with our strategy. It should show us when an idea is beginning to take hold. It should identify where our assumptions are wrong. It should make it easier to decide what deserves more investment and what needs to stop.

It should help us make better decisions.

That is a much more ambitious role for measurement than reporting what happened last quarter.

I think it is also a much more useful one.

Why we built Maven

The idea behind Maven came from this frustration.

I have spent much of my career helping organizations shape how they are understood. Again and again, I saw talented communications teams making sophisticated strategic decisions while working from fragmented information, institutional memory and measurement systems that were much better at documenting activity than showing whether perception had actually moved.

The problem was not a lack of intelligence in the room. The problem was that too much of that intelligence was difficult to hold, difficult to share and difficult to measure over time.

Maven started with a simple belief: communications should be able to see the distance between intention and perception clearly enough to do something about it.

That is the Reality Gap.

It is a way of forcing ourselves to confront the outcome we have always been responsible for: did the work change anything?

That question should make us uncomfortable sometimes. It should challenge assumptions. It should occasionally tell us that an idea we loved did not land, that a position we wanted is not yet credible or that months of activity did not produce the change we expected.

That is useful.

Because the alternative is easier and far less meaningful: continue measuring what we did, continue showing that we did a lot of it and hope that activity eventually becomes reputation.

I think our profession can demand more from itself than that.

Communications should not be measured by how much we publish, how many stories we place or how much activity we can fit into a report. Those things matter, but they are inputs.

The outcome is whether we changed how the market understands the organization.

That is the standard.

That is the Reality Gap.

And that is why we built Maven.