Marketing and communications professionals obviously work with the intention of appealing to their audience and swaying their opinions toward a favorable impression of the brand, and thus toward favorable behavior. But marcom professionals are constrained to thinking from within their own experience as much as anyone else. As good marcom professionals, we try and understand the motivations of our audience before we seek to influence their opinion – it would be folly to think that we can persuade someone we don’t understand.

But the Insider’s Bias at its most insidious has this very problem, it lets us assume that we are just like the average reader (or the reader is just like us), or assume that we at least understand the reader’s field of perceptions and motivations. Thus, if we write something that seems positive to us, we are confident it will perceived as positive by the reader. But not all readers are like us. To begin with, they don’t work for our company, and they don’t think about our brand as much (or as positively) as we do. They process in a few seconds what we spent hours or days making, if they find our message at all amidst the torrent of efforts to influence their perceptions that pour on them each day.

Planning optimal communications, and evaluating our effectiveness in influencing readers, requires a willingness to step outside of our comfort zone and think like someone totally indifferent to our message, someone whose indifference will be pelted daily with a barrage of other messages also seeking to influence their opinion. This is really tough to do as purely a mental exercise. Thus, to get outside our comfort zone, to stop operating in a world we expect will perceive things our way, to develop messages that anticipate the indifference and competition and therefore stand out and have an impact, to create truly impactful communications that drive behavior, we need objective insight into the whole of what influences our target audience and how they are influenced, and we need objective measurement as to whether our communications will be/were effective in that context.

This returns this thread from a digression into the notion of bias back to the question of measures by which we can move from assuming that because they saw our stuff they’re now thinking our way, to really understanding what people think of us – i.e. taking an honest look at our reputation’s reflection in the mirror.