By Samuel Marriott-Dowding, Marriott Communications
As entrepreneurs, as business owners, we are obsessed with attention.
Reach, impressions, followers, views, engagement. Somewhere along the way, visibility became the scoreboard by which communications success is judged. Yet, visibility is not relevance, and attention, without authority, is just noise.
For businesses operating at scale, particularly those competing in crowded global markets, being seen is no longer particularly diffi cult. There are more channels, more platforms and more ways to put a message in front of an audience than ever before.
The harder question is whether anyone actually cares. I think this is where much of modern communications has become confused. We have become so focused on generating exposure that we sometimes forget to ask what that exposure is supposed to achieve.
A billion impressions mean very little if the people who matter do not associate your organisation with something meaningful or impactful. Ten thousand followers do not constitute infl uence if nobody trusts your judgement.
Appearing everywhere does not make a business relevant, relevance has to be earned. It comes from understanding the environment in which a business operates, knowing what its audiences care about, identifying the conversations it has a legitimate role in shaping, and having something intelligent to contribute when those conversations happen.
That is fundamentally different from chasing attention.
At Marriott Communications, this distinction sits at the heart of how we approach strategic communications. Our role is not to make organisations louder for the sake of being louder, it is to make them matter to the right people, in the right places, at the right moments.
That requires strategy before storytelling. It means understanding reputation, markets, political and cultural environments, stakeholder expectations and emerging risks. It means finding the intersection between what an organisation wants to say and what the world is actually interested in hearing.
When that intersection is right, something interesting happens, visibility becomes a by-product.
Coverage follows relevance, conversations follow relevance, invitations follow relevance, stakeholders pay attention because there is a reason to pay attention.
This is particularly important for large organisations. The bigger the business, the more expensive irrelevance becomes. A global corporation does not need another campaign that generates temporary noise, it needs communications that strengthen authority, create confi dence and infl uence how it is understood by customers, investors, policymakers, partners, employees and the wider public.
That is a much bigger job than publicity, where the most infl uential organisations I encounter are rarely those shouting the loudest. They are the ones with a clear point of view, they understand their position in the world and communicate with enough confi dence to occupy it.
They do not chase every conversation, they know which conversations belong to them, and that, ultimately, is the diff erence between visibility and influence.
Anyone can buy attention, relevance has to be built. When relevance is built properly, visibility doesn’t need to be chased, it finds you.
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