What does the outside world actually see when it looks at your organisation?
Not what you hope they see. Not what you told them to see.
Just what’s out there in the public.
That’s the question the Perception Information Model (PIM for short) was built to answer. The PIM is a tool for a ‘blind’ assessment of public perception: a structured analysis of how an organisation is experienced by someone who has no internal context
No roadmap, no background briefings, and no benefit of the doubt.
It started as a diagnostic tool I developed for my own consultancy work; shaped by a pattern I kept encountering across clients and sectors: the gap between how organisations see themselves and how they actually come across. The more focus a team has on their work, the harder it becomes to see what an outsider sees. The PIM makes that gap visible.
How it works
The assessment is built entirely on publicly available information. No internal documents. No strategy decks, and no access to what’s still in development.
We look at what’s actually there: the website, the LinkedIn presence, public communications, and any other publicly facing materials. From that, we map the organisation’s perceived positioning, tone, clarity of proposition, and the coherence between different signals.
The output is a structured report that identifies:
- What comes across clearly: the strengths of the current external presence
- What doesn’t land as intended: messaging gaps, positioning ambiguity, mixed signals
- What’s invisible: capabilities, values, or differentiators that exist internally but haven’t made it outside
- What’s contradictory: signals that undermine each other or create unintended impressions
The PIM isn’t a sentiment analysis or a social tracking tool. It’s a qualitative assessment built on the same frameworks we use for brand positioning, stakeholder alignment, and communication strategy, but applied from the outside in.
Where it’s been applied
The Perception Information Model has been used across a range of sectors and organisation types. To date, engagements have included:
- A Dutch educational institution, where the assessment identified strategic gaps between their internal strengths and their external positioning; it informed a subsequent communication and brand strategy. Read more in this early case study.
- A medical institution, where the tool helped surface a significant mismatch between the organisation’s communication and the audience it was trying to reach. One of the outcomes was the suggestion to build a referrer experience program to close that gap.
- Industrial manufacturing companies, where unclear differentiation was limiting their ability to attract the right clients and partners. Moreover, their messaging was highly technical and jargon-filled; to the point that DMU’s estranged from buy-in incentives completely.
- A marketing agency, where the irony of perception misalignment in their own external presence became the starting point for a broader positioning exercise.
Each engagement produced a written report and a follow-up conversation. Some led to deeper projects. Some didn’t need to. The report itself is often enough to reorient thinking and reconsider whether a ‘soul purpose’ aligns with customer expectation.
What it’s not
The PIM doesn’t tell you what’s true about your organisation.
It tells you what’s perceived. And in most business contexts, those two things can be vastly different.
It’s not a scoring system or a benchmark report. It doesn’t produce a ranking or a competitive comparison. And it’s not a flattering exercise either.
The value is precisely in the discomfort it can bring: the list of things that are known internally but haven’t been communicated, the assumptions that have become invisible, the story that makes complete sense to an internal team but lands as diffuse messaging outside of it.
If you’re looking for validation, the PIM isn’t the right tool. If you’re looking for clarity, it usually delivers.
The broader context
The PIM sits within a wider set of frameworks and tools developed through years of work at the intersection of business development, brand strategy, and communication. It connects directly to the MKWG framework for evaluating stakeholder buy-in, and draws on the perception and influence principles that Yiist – Change Agents, The Persona Academy, and Lymbics have developed over the years.
It’s not a standalone product. It’s a tool that works best when it’s part of a broader conversation about where an organisation is, how it’s experienced, and where it wants to go next.
If You’re Curious…
The PIM isn’t something I pitch. But if you’ve read this far
— and especially if you recognise the pattern described —
it’s probably worth a conversation.
The outside world already has a perception of your organisation. The question is whether you want to know what it is.
…Get in touch