Your company walks into the market in three versions. The client buys only one.

 Open ten company pages from any industry you like, one after another. The same promises about quality and dedicated teams, the same photographs of handshakes above a laptop, the same sentences from which you learn only that the company would rather not stand out in any way. 

I read pages like these for a living, and the question that interests me is never how they sound. It is who wrote them. Because whoever it was, it is never the company you actually meet afterwards.

Psychology has been working for close to a century with a map of the person that, every time I go back to it, gives me the same suspicion, that it was drawn in secret for small businesses. 

The map says that inside each of us live three versions of the same person, and they rarely live in peace: the one you actually are, with everything you know and everything you hide; one stitched together over the years from other people's expectations, convinced it must appear a certain way; and one hoping to become something else someday.

You can watch the three of them quarrel whenever something matters. They quarrel in the way you choose clothes for a meeting a contract depends on, in the way you describe your work to a stranger who seems important, in the tone you take in an email to someone above you. 

An American psychologist, E. Tory Higgins, measured this quarrel in the eighties and earned his place in the textbooks with an observation of real finesse, namely that the distances between the versions do not hurt the same way. The distance to the person you hoped to become feels like dejection, a livable sort of pain. The distance to the person others expect of you feels different, like restlessness, like guilt, like the fear of being found out. Keep that second kind of pain in mind. It writes most of the business communication passing before our eyes every day.

A company has no psyche. It feels nothing, whatever the motivational posters say, and any text that lends it inner states is writing cheap fiction. What a company does have is an equivalent for each of the three versions, and all three enter through the same door, the person who runs it.

Its real identity looks almost banal up close. It is what the company is genuinely good at, what it refuses to do, what the person at the top believes, how work gets done inside when nobody is watching. The social uniform is that same person's idea of what a serious company in his industry must look like so that nobody laughs. And the ideal projection is the company of ten years from now, the one from the year-end speech. Now go back to those ten pages from the beginning. Not one line of them was written by anyone's real identity, because a real identity cannot possibly resemble the neighbor's. They were all written by the imposed self, which always writes the same way because it writes out of fear. Winnicott described a False Self in people, a shell of compliance that thickens until even its wearer no longer knows what lies underneath. I have yet to find a more accurate description of how company presentations sound.

This uniform gets paid for. First at the point of sale, because ten identically dressed companies leave the client a single criterion to choose by, the price. Then it gets paid for in a place no accounting system tracks, in the energy with which the founder maintains, day after day, the distance between what the company is inside and the character it plays in public. A character needs sustaining at every post, every offer, every phone call, and that small fatigue never ends, because the character does not exist and therefore cannot rest. The client, meanwhile, senses the mismatch without being able to name it. Carl Rogers built half his psychology on the overlap between who you are and how you show yourself, but you do not need Rogers for this; it is enough to have listened, once, to a salesman reciting a part. Trust is never given to the character.

The third version, the ideal one, is nobody's enemy, and this is where the nuance sits. A company needs to communicate its direction too, not just the inventory of what it is today, and ambition put into words can be the most attractive thing about a brand. The trap begins at the point where the dream replaces reality instead of steering it, where the company on the website is the one in the founder's imagination, and the client buys the dream and receives what exists. Karen Horney had a phrase for a life confiscated by its idealized version, the tyranny of the should. In companies, that confiscation is easiest to read in the reviews.

Branding done properly is the reverse operation of everything I have described so far. It does not add another layer to the company, it removes layers. It separates what the company actually is from what fear has glued on top, keeps from the ideal version only the direction, and puts the result in writing, refusals included, as a written portrait of the company you actually are. Once that portrait exists, communication stops demanding daily imagination. It only demands reading out loud.

The test takes a minute. Open your own company page and read it asking who wrote it: the company you are, the company you think you must appear to be, or the company you would like to become. If the honest answer is the second one, the question that remains is no longer about writing at all. Which of the three is your client looking for?