Company identity: define it before you communicate

In the video, in Italian, I say that many companies start communicating before they know who they are, and I quote Ludwig Wittgenstein. Here I tell the story of the book that line comes from, which passed through an Italian prison camp, and I bring in two scholars who turned the question “who are we?” into a test a company can actually run.

Video transcript (translated from Italian)

Many companies start communicating before they know who they are. They invest in campaigns, in digital presence, in messages. But without a clear identity behind them, those messages build nothing. They slide off.

The point is simple: you cannot communicate what you have not yet defined.

A company’s identity is not the logo, not the website, not the slogan. It is the deep answer to a question many avoid: what we are, and what we are not.

When that answer exists, everything else follows naturally. The language, the form, the positioning.

Every communication choice becomes consistent because it comes from a solid center.

When it is missing, you produce noise. Messages that do not recognize each other. An image that changes depending on who tells it.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century, wrote in the Tractatus that the limits of our language are the limits of our world.

The same is true of companies. A company that has not defined its identity does not yet have a language. And without language, there is no communication.

A manuscript in the Cassino prison camp

In August 1918 Ludwig Wittgenstein finished writing the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. On November 3 he was taken prisoner by the Italians near Trento, passed through a camp near Como, and in January was moved to Cassino, south of Rome. From there, on March 13, 1919, he wrote to Bertrand Russell: “I finished the book in August 1918 and two months after was made Prigioniere. I’ve got the manuscript here with me.”

A company cannot communicate an identity it has not yet defined.

The book Wittgenstein carried with him contains the proposition I quote in the video, 5.6. In the video I quote it the way it circulates. Wittgenstein, with “my” rather than “our,” wrote something else: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” He is talking about the individual subject and what it can say, not about a group.

Applying it to companies is therefore an analogy, and should be taken as one. It holds on one precise point: what you cannot say, you cannot choose either. A company that has no words for what it is has no criterion for deciding what to communicate, and leaves the choice to whoever writes the campaign of the moment.

Central, distinctive, enduring: identity according to Albert and Whetten

In 1985 two American organization scholars, Stuart Albert and David A. Whetten, published an essay that opened a whole field of study, organizational identity. Their definition fits in one line and takes effort to apply: an organization’s identity is what its members see as central, distinctive and enduring.

Each of the three criteria takes something away, and that is why they are useful. Central removes what is true but marginal, such as the color of the logo. Distinctive removes what everyone says, such as quality, passion or customer care. Enduring removes what was decided last week for a campaign. What is left is little, and usually it is precisely the part the company says least.

There is a simple way to test them. Ask five or six people in the company, separately, to write in a few lines what is central to their work, what sets them apart from competitors and what will still be true in ten years. If the answers resemble each other, the identity is there and only the form to express it is missing. If they diverge, the problem is not communication: each person is describing a different company, and customers hear all of them.

In this picture, the logo is a sign of identity, not its definition. Anyone who, like me, worked for years as a graphic designer knows this well: a successful logo gives form to something that already exists, and no logo can give form to something the company has not yet decided.

A company’s identity is the answer to what we are and what we are not; logo, website and slogan come afterward.

Identity shows when something has to be given up

The example Albert and Whetten develop at greatest length is the university. It has a dual identity, they write: it is at once a church, with a mission and values, and a business, which has to balance its books. As long as resources grow, the two identities coexist without friction. When cuts come, the conflict that had stayed latent becomes visible, and every decision shows which of the two prevails.

The lesson goes well beyond universities. An identity is tested at the moment of giving something up: when you have to say no to a customer, a product, a campaign that would bring numbers. As long as everything grows, a vague identity costs nothing; it costs when you have to choose, and by then it is too late to write it down.

In Italian companies that moment takes recognizable forms. A generational handover, in which the children and the founders describe the same company in two ways. A large customer asking to change the product, which would bring revenue and dependence together. A market closing and forcing a decision about which other to enter. In each of these moments the company discovers what it really is from what it gives up.

The most useful part of a written identity is the part that says what the company is not, because that is what makes it possible to say no.

Writing it is harder than it seems, because every renunciation has a visible cost and a distant benefit. A company that makes custom products can write that it does not do mass production; a quality brand can write that it does not take part in lowest-price tenders; a professional firm can write that it does not take clients from a certain industry. These are sentences that cost something right away and, over time, make the company recognizable precisely for what it chose not to do.

When communication comes first

Many of my engagements start from a specific request: rebuild the website. Behind it there is usually a bigger problem. The company has been communicating for years with different voices, because everyone has told its story their own way, and the website, the catalogs and the social media profiles resemble the people who made them more than the company.

In these cases the work starts from a short text, written with the owners, that says what we are, what we are not and who we work for. Only then come the language, the form and the positioning, and communication becomes simpler because it knows what to leave out. In my work on identity and positioning that page comes before everything else, and it is the substance of what I call company identity. On the side of individuals, I talked about it at TEDxMacerata too.

Wittgenstein, after all, closes the Tractatus with an invitation to silence about what cannot be spoken of. For a company a more modest version of the same caution applies: better to communicate less until you know what to say.

What to do and what not to do

• Before any campaign, write a page with the owners on what the company is and what it is not.
• Run every sentence through the three criteria: is it central, does it set us apart, will it be true in ten years.
• Use that page to say no: to a message, a channel, a proposal that leads elsewhere.
• Do not leave the definition of identity to the people who will have to communicate it.
• Do not mistake the logo, the website or the slogan for the identity.

Sources

• Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, proposition 5.6, translated by C. K. Ogden, Kegan Paul, 1922 (bilingual edition; original German edition 1921).
• Ludwig Wittgenstein, letters to Bertrand Russell from Cassino, March 13 and June 12, 1919 (the second in Bertrand Russell, Autobiography). On his imprisonment in Italy: Michael Nedo (ed.), Ludwig Wittgenstein: There Where You Are Not, 2005.
• Stuart Albert, David A. Whetten, “Organizational Identity,” Research in Organizational Behavior, 7, 1985, pp. 263–295.