There is a particular disorientation that comes from meeting a company in person after only encountering it online. The people are usually more interesting, if less polished. Teams that look austere or rigid on a careers page turn out to have warmth and humour. Senior leaders seem more human in a twenty-minute conversation than they have across a year of corporate communications.
Yet remarkably little of this reaches the brand itself. The photographs feel interchangeable with those of every other organisation in the sector, and the copy retreats into carefully neutral statements about values and culture. The in-person experience (a workplace full of real, relatable people) disappears behind something flattened and oddly impersonal.
Notice it once, and you’ll see it everywhere.
Most organisations now invest heavily in events. Conferences, leadership offsites, team gatherings, training programmes, and client functions fill the corporate calendar and account for a meaningful share of annual spend. Companies understand that relationships matter, that retention matters, and that people work better when they feel connected to the organisation around them. It is strange, then, how little of that reality survives in the way they present themselves publicly.
Part of the problem is that corporate branding has grown increasingly cautious. Public-facing material passes through layers of approval designed to remove risk, ambiguity, and inconsistency. But that filtering gradually trades distinctiveness for safety, until little remains that feels recognisable, or that conveys what an organisation is actually like in the real world.
This matters, because people increasingly judge businesses in more personal ways than companies tend to expect. For prospective employees, salary, progression, and role scope still count, but so does being able to picture themselves working there comfortably for the long term.
That perception usually forms through small signals rather than official messaging: the atmosphere around a leadership team, the way colleagues speak to one another when they are not performing for the camera, whether people seem genuinely at ease together. None of this can be manufactured convincingly. That is partly why people have become so sensitive to branding that feels over-managed, and why trust in corporate messaging has grown fragile. We are all exposed to polished branding constantly, and most of us have become fairly good at sensing when it is detached from lived reality.
Events expose this with particular clarity, because they cannot be fully scripted. A company dinner or a conference discussion often says more about culture than an expensive recruitment campaign does, precisely because it stays unpredictable enough to let personality through.
The irony is that most organisations already hold stores of event material that would let them communicate who they are more honestly. They just treat it as secondary to controlled branding. In our work covering corporate events, the most telling material is usually the unguarded moment between sessions, and it is almost always the part that never gets used. There is something self-defeating in this. Companies spend years building cultures that people want to join and stay in, then represent themselves publicly in ways that strip out the very texture that made those cultures appealing.
None of this means abandoning professionalism or replacing structure with forced informality. In many sectors, credibility still depends on a degree of restraint. But restraint and emotional flatness are not the same thing, even if corporate branding increasingly confuses the two.
The organisations that feel most convincing are the ones willing to leave themselves intact in their branding. In practice, that means ordinary, recognisable human behaviour: people listening closely, paying attention to one another. Small things — but often the very things people use to decide whether a business feels real.
Work itself is under growing scrutiny. People are choosing jobs, yes, but they are also trying to anticipate what daily life inside an organisation will actually feel like before committing years of themselves to it. A careers page of headshots and abstract language, however polished, conveys very little of what that daily life actually feels like.
And so a great many organisations end up in the same position. Internally, they may be collaborative, emotionally intelligent places to work. Externally, they present themselves through branding so controlled that it stops working.
Samer Bejjani is co-founder of Shootday, a global photography and video production partner for businesses, operating across 150+ cities worldwide.
