Two Jobs, One Playbook
On day one of MKTG 701, my professor defined marketing as the art and science of creating and retaining customers. That's stuck with me.
I see two fundamentally different jobs.
The first job is closing a knowledge gap. They don't know you. They don't understand what you offer. They haven't thought about you recently. The tools here are well understood: reach, frequency, mental availability, salience. Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute built the framework. It works. For new brands, challenger brands, brands entering new categories, this is the foundational playbook.
The second job is very different. The audience already knows you. They've already decided. And what they decided is in the way.
That's a belief problem. It doesn't respond to awareness tools the way a virus doesn't respond to antibiotics. It's a totally different type of problem and it needs a totally different way of thinking.
For older brands, legacy institutions, brands that have earned or somehow inherited a negative perception, the issue isn't recall. The issue is what people recall. Mental availability is high. What's available is the problem.
Why The Misdiagnosis Happens
Awareness is comfortable, measurable, fits in a media plan. It has KPIs the CFO can read. The entire measurement infrastructure of modern marketing was built to track it. We're really good at this.
Belief change is different. It's uncomfortable, it's slow, it's ambiguous. It's harder to put in a deck. And it starts with an admission most organizations don't want to make: the perception problem isn't a misunderstanding. The brand, rightfully or wrongfully, earned it.
Organizations avoid belief-change strategy for the same reason people avoid hard conversations. It's easier to turn up the volume than to question what you're saying.
The marketing funnel reinforces the status quo. Awareness, consideration, conversion. It assumes a rational decision-making process and assumes the journey starts from zero. But for brands with perception baggage, the audience isn't at the top of the funnel. They're standing outside the building with their arms crossed. They know you. They just don't like you.
What's Happening Underneath
Two well-established findings that create a tension.
The mere exposure effect (Zajonc, 1968) shows that repeated contact with a stimulus increases favorable evaluation. This is the psychological engine behind mental availability: more impressions, more familiarity, more warmth. It works. But Zajonc's own research showed it works from neutral to familiar, not from negative to positive. When there's already a negative association in place, more exposure doesn't dilute the belief. It gives the audience more room to reinforce the negative perception.
Then it gets worse. The backfire effect (Nyhan & Reifler, 2010) showed that correcting a misbelief with factual information didn't just fail. It strengthened the original belief. It's connected to cognitive dissonance. People shown direct evidence against their position held it more firmly afterward. For brands, this means messaging designed to counter a negative perception ("We've changed," "We're not what you think") can reinforce the exact thing it's trying to correct.
Long story short: You can't inform someone out of a belief they didn't inform themselves into.
And when the belief is tied to identity, the resistance deepens. Identity-protective cognition (Kahan) shows that when a belief connects to someone's sense of who they are, what group they belong to, how they see the world, the defense mechanism goes beyond disagreement. They're protecting a piece of themselves. More information doesn't persuade. Full stop. It triggers people to double down.
People hold beliefs because those beliefs still work for them. A project I'm working on has led me to really dig into this and try to excavate the structural requirements of changing a long-held negative (or narrow) perception.
What Belief Change Actually Requires
You can't change a belief by talking about it. You can only change a belief by making it harder to defend, even to yourself.
A belief-change strategy has to make the old belief stop working. Not by attacking it (that just leads to doubling down), but by building a reality that makes holding onto it feel like the less informed, less current, less honest position.
I've been cataloging what this looks like IRL. Successful belief-change efforts share a three-part sequence, even when the surface tactics look nothing alike.
- The product or experience has to change first. Whether it's operations or experience, brands are not entitled to a new perception they haven't earned yet.
- The audience has to encounter the new reality firsthand or through trusted proxies. Not through a message or an ad. It has to be through an experience, a confession, a person they trust, evidence they can't dismiss.
- The old belief has to become harder to defend than the new one is to adopt. The new truth has to be so clear and unassailable that the old belief just doesn't match reality anymore.
Let's look at some examples.
Case Study
Domino's made the old belief outdated.
Domino's didn't run an awareness campaign about its new recipe. They just straight up confessed they knew their pizza was bad. They disarmed the audience's defense mechanism because there was nothing to argue against. The brand agreed with the customer before asking them to reconsider. Yes, Domino's had to make better pizza (that's the experience piece). But the confession was what lowered the defense in the first place and took the argument away before it started. After the confession, holding the old belief meant arguing with someone who already agreed with you. That's an uncomfortable position, and discomfort is the engine of belief change.
Case Study
Hyundai made the old belief embarrassing.
The "cheap Korean car" perception survived decades of quality improvement because awareness of improvement is not belief change. Two moves cracked it. The 10-year, 100,000-mile warranty removed the risk of finding out for yourself (opened the door for a new experience). And hiring Peter Schreyer from Audi, followed by Luc Donckerwolke (the designer behind the Lamborghini Murciélago and Gallardo) to lead design, meant the product itself became impossible to reconcile with the old perception. Hyundai put a car on the road that was designed by the guy who designed Lamborghinis. The old belief became inaccurate. When someone changes something right in front of your face, you can't help but notice.
Case Study
Boston Medical Center made the old belief incomplete.
BMC is New England's largest safety-net hospital. Level 1 trauma center, 75% low-income patients. The perception that it was "the hospital for people without options" wasn't wrong. It was earned. Which is exactly why awareness couldn't fix it. You can't inform someone out of a belief that's actually true. You have to expand it. BMC's "Rewriting Healthcare" campaign, its first in nearly a decade, did something structurally specific: Phase 2 literally crossed out existing healthcare messages (like "Quality Care is a Lifesaver for People Who Can Afford It") and rewrote them on the ad. The audience watched the old belief get edited in front of them. Their campaign approach disregarded healthcare conventions (no blue backgrounds, no white coats) because those conventions were part of the perceptual cage. Later phases brought in patient voices and community presence, trusted proxies from inside the identity group, not outside it. The old belief didn't get disproven, but what they did made it feel reductive. You were right about what BMC was. You just didn't know everything it had become.
Three flavors of harder to defend, even to yourself.
I'm currently writing this brief for a client. The belief is real, it was earned, and no amount of awareness is going to move it. But in our research, I've found and framed my client's perception problem as "not necessarily bad, but narrow." The narrowness is what my work needs to change, and these words are my thinking on the page to achieve that.
The Brief Before the Brief
The most consequential decision in any campaign isn't the message, the channel, or the creative territory. It's the diagnosis.
Before the brief is written, someone has to answer one question: is this a knowledge gap, or is this a belief structure? Because if it's a belief problem and the brief is built for awareness, the campaign will run, the easy numbers will move, and the perception will stay exactly where it started. You'll get in front of people but you won't see the translation of awareness into consideration or into conversion (if you still believe in the traditional funnel; that's a different article).
But what if it wasn't awareness, consideration, conversion but knowledge gap, belief structure, behavior design?
What if the first question on every brief was not "what do we want them to know?" but "what do they already believe?"
The most important question a strategist can ask has to do with what the audience has already decided. And whether holding that belief is about to get a lot harder to defend. Even to themselves.