Getting scale wrong in communications

Human behaviour hasn’t changed nearly as much as our strategies assume.

People don’t build trust at scale and they never have, yet we’ve been duped into trying to optimise to make this happen.

Across psychology, sociology, and organisational research, the same pattern appears, humans form meaning, loyalty, and confidence in small, relational contexts. We are wired for limited numbers of trusted connections, not thousands.

Communication that we frame to behave like a broadcast system often ends up feeling quite impersonal, or even hollow, even when it performs well on paper. It may be looked at, but it doesn’t mean the message has been received as we planned or intended.

This creates a fundamental mismatch between how organisations communicate and how people actually receive our communications.

For at least a decade, communications strategies have been shaped by the idea that success equals visibility or volume. If enough people see the message, hear the statement, or encounter the campaign, impact will follow. The way we track our metrics reinforces this thinking: reach, clicks, shares, impressions, more is more.

Visibility though, is not the same as connection or understanding and this is what those specific metrics miss out on.

Research into trust formation shows that people don’t assess credibility by exposure alone. They assess it through consistency, relevance, and also perceived intent. They ask questions subconsciously along the lines of: Is this meant for me? Does this organisation understand my context? Do their actions align with their words?

When communications chase scale, it can really kill trust because the messaging becomes generic, language is usually cautions to try and “appeal to all” and audiences feel anything but engaged. There are endless memes about this, organisations saying their audiences is “everyone” whilst the communications team eyerolls or cries.

This is literally the perfect recipe for how organisations can achieve being “seen everywhere” and trusted nowhere.

Whether internal or external, trust-based communications are less like broadcasts and more like conversations with someone who explicitly knows you. Not necessarily because they are informal either, but because they usually acknowledge who they are speaking to, they understand what matters to that group, and what the organisation can realistically offer in response.

This is true in employee communications, public-sector messaging, crisis response, and brand storytelling. People are far more likely to trust an organisation that speaks clearly to them than one that tries to speak to everyone.

Importantly, though this doesn’t mean shrinking ambition for reach, but it does mean the aim has to change from trying to reach as many people as possible, to reaching the right people in a way that feels coherent and respectful.

As AI becomes more embedded in communications systems, there’s a temptation to use it to accelerate what we already do: faster content, more output, more broad targeting, more automation. That would be a mistake in our opinion, we’re diluting what we’re great at.

The opportunity we see here is rather than using technology to speak louder to all audiences, organisations can use it to listen better, recognise intent earlier, and guide people toward meaningful interactions, whether that’s a real conversation, a relevant service, or an aligned next step.

Success in this instance isn’t measured by how long someone stays engaged with a message, but by how effectively that communication has helped the audience move from one place to another.

One of the least discussed aspects of trust-building, we think surprisingly, is restraint.

Trust increases when organisations know when not to communicate. When it works well, silence can become reassurance and prioritising explanation over spin is rarely a bad move. But again, this works to the right audience, not everyone, it’s important to accept that not every message needs to be everywhere at once to be effective.

In organisations that reward constant output this can be challenging, but it’s worth having the fight. Audiences are highly sensitive to overcommunication, especially when it feels defensive or self-protective, too much messaging can signal anxiety rather than confidence.

As audiences become more informed, more sceptical, and more selective, the cost of shallow communication rises because people are quicker to disengage and interestingly less willing to grant the benefit of the doubt.

Showing up in ways that reflect understanding, accountability, and respect for how people actually relate to information and to each other is the key.

When building trust scale tends to follow doing the right thing for the right audience.

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