By Ishola N. Ayodele
“The burden of understanding in communication does not lie with the audience, it lies with the communicator” Ishola Ayodele
In April 2017, employees of United Airlines forcibly removed Dr. David Dao from a fully booked United Express flight. The CEO’s initial defensive response describing the brutalised passenger as “disruptive and belligerent” was widely decoded as callous, amplifying outrage on social media far beyond the incident itself. Within weeks, the company lost $1.4 billion in market value. That episode marked the beginning of my Communication without Communicating series.
Similarly, the recent post titled “HOW EL RUFAI’s MUM CHANGED THE POLITICAL CALCULUS IN NIGERIA” by Dele Momodu particularly the line, “Thanks to the death of Mallam El-Rufai’s mum” is a classic example of this phenomenon.
The backlash that followed Momodu’s post, amplified by voices like Reno Omokri and Femi Fani-Kayode, underscores a principle I have long advised my clients:
Oftentimes, leaders or brands send messages they believe are clear, strategic, or even clever only for audiences to interpret them in entirely unintended ways. Yet, it is not the sender’s intent that drives consequences; it is the receiver’s interpretation.
It is not what you say, but what the audience hears, that shapes their reaction.
A New Communication Reality
In today’s era of hyperactive social media and AI-driven ideological amplification, leaders and brands must embrace a new communication mindset. Below are critical principles grounded in research, real-world cases, and established theories across sociology, psychology, and communication engineering.
- Talking Is Not Communication
“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place,” a principle often attributed to George Bernard Shaw though its earliest documented source is journalist William H. Whyte in a 1950 Fortune magazine article (Whyte, 1950).
Leaders and brands frequently share content they view as clever, timely, or strategic only to discover it lands as tone deaf or insensitive to the audience. If a message is intended for public consumption, it cannot centre on the sender’s opinion or agenda; the audience’s lens determines success.
Bringing someone’s deceased mother into a political statement exemplifies talking, not communicating. It was inevitably interpreted as gloating over a personal tragedy rather than making a broader point.
Sociology’s reception theory pioneered by Stuart Hall in his 1973 “Encoding Decoding” model explains this perfectly: Senders “encode” messages with intended meanings, but receivers “decode” them through their own cultural, emotional, and ideological frameworks. Hall demonstrated that there is often a “lack of fit” between encoding and decoding, leading to dominant, negotiated, or oppositional readings exactly what happened here (Hall, 1973).
- Accept the new reality.
Social media and AI have fundamentally altered communication dynamics. “Doing the same thing and expecting a different result,” as the saying goes, “is the definition of insanity.” Many leaders and brands still rely on the old press agentry publicity model one way persuasion without audience research or the hypodermic needle bullet theory of mass communication assuming messages inject ideas directly into passive audiences.
James Grunig and Todd Hunt’s seminal four models of public relations show why these fail today: the most effective approach is the two way symmetrical model, which uses dialogue, research, and mutual understanding to build relationships rather than one way broadcasting (Grunig & Hunt, 1984).
Dele Momodu’s post resembled a traditional newspaper advertorial something only the wealthy could counter in the old days. Social media has democratised response: every “Dick, Tom, and Harry” can reply instantly, publicly, and virally. AI algorithms further amplify emotional or oppositional interpretations.
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The Yoruba proverb captures it well: “When the rhythm of the drum changes, the dancing steps change too.”
3. Know your audience: This is the most frequently cited yet least practised principle in communication. Studies consistently show that a large percentage of communication failures stem from sending the wrong message to the wrong audience or failing to account for how they will interpret it. Poor communication costs US businesses up to 1.2 trillion dollars annually, with large companies 100000 plus employees losing an average of 62.4 million dollars per year and smaller firms 100 employees around 420000 dollars largely due to misaligned messaging, wasted effort, and reputational damage (Grammarly & The Harris Poll, 2022).
Psychology and sociology reinforce this through concepts like selective perception and audience reception: people filter messages through preexisting biases, emotions, and social contexts (Klapper, 1960).
Bringing family into political communication without deep audience insight was a grave error. A strong PR team should have flagged it. This is one of such situations where silence is Golden. Effective communication is not driven by the urge to speak, but by the necessity to be understood correctly.
Conclusion
Several other lessons emerge from Dele Momodu’s misstep, but they all converge on one inescapable truth: The time has changed. The old Aristotelian linear sender medium receiver model or its modern equivalents like Shannon Weaver are no longer sufficient in an age defined by feedback loops, digital amplification, and interpretive volatility.
This reality has given rise to what I call Message Engineering (ME), a communication paradigm I have championed for years.
ME is the art and science of implanting messages in the target audience’s mind so they internalise and own them, producing the desired interpretation and behaviour.
Leaders and brands must internalise this undeniable reality of the era because the onus of understanding in communication is not on the audience, it is on the communicator.
Without Message Engineering, communication is not strategy, It is gambling.
And in the AI-driven marketplace of perception, the house always wins.
Ishola N. Ayodele is a distinguished and multiple award-winning strategic communication expert and Author who specializes in the ‘Message Engineering.’ He helps Organizations, Brands and Leaders Communicate in a way that yields the desired outcome. He can be reached via ishopr2015@gmail.com or 08077932282 (WhatsApp only)
