Know your audience.
It’s the first thing communications students are taught in school. No other principle is as foundational, or as frequently forgotten.
Understanding who your audience is, how they communicate and why is the difference between a PR success and a PR disaster. Content that resonates deeply with one audience can confuse, alienate or even infuriate another.
We’ve all seen it happen. A beverage brand inserts itself into a political moment it doesn’t fully understand. A clothing company misreads what its Gen Z audience actually values. A CEO delivers a layoff announcement that sounds less like leadership and more like it was drafted by a defense attorney. When organizations get audience alignment wrong, the fallout can trigger domino-like consequences across nearly every dimension of a business.
Financially, the impact can be immediate. Stock prices can dip within hours of a controversial statement. Advertising budgets poured into a failed campaign are effectively burned, followed by additional spending on crisis communications and reputation repair. For consumer-facing brands, backlash can quickly turn into lost sales, canceled subscriptions or organized boycotts. In business-to-business environments, a poorly worded disclosure or response can invite regulatory scrutiny, legal action and strained partner relationships.
Reputational damage tends to linger even longer. Trust is hard-won and easily lost. A message perceived as tone-deaf can become a defining moment for a brand, resurfacing years later in future controversies.
How Communicators Understand Their Audiences
More than intuition, strong communicators rely on research to understand their target audiences. Qualitative data is gathered from interviews, social listening and media monitoring, while quantitative data is taken from surveys, engagement metrics and sentiment analysis.
An important part of the research and development process is message testing. Drafts are reviewed internally, pressure-tested by peers and sometimes tested externally through focus groups or limited releases.
Success is then measured through a combination of hard and soft signals: engagement rates, media pickup quality, sentiment shifts, stakeholder feedback, employee responses, and, critically, the absence of negative escalation.
How AI is Changing the Equation
As we’re all coming to realize, the rise of AI has fundamentally altered how content is created and reviewed. Used well, it can dramatically enhance a communicator’s ability to understand and adapt to different audiences. Used poorly, it can amplify the very mistakes communicators are trying to avoid.
On the upside, AI can synthesize massive volumes of data, surface emerging sentiment patterns and generate summaries at a speed no human team can match, which can be extremely helpful for media monitoring and reporting.
The risks, however, emerge when AI agents are treated as content creators rather than analytical tools. Beyond the all-too-familiar “AI tone,” these models can make up facts, fabricate sources, mirror hidden biases or produce language that sounds confident but lacks situational awareness. At first glance, the content will look perfectly polished, but underneath it might be fundamentally misaligned with its intended audience. This is the danger with using as a content generator with minimal human oversight.
A different model of AI use offers a better path forward. Rather than replacing the communicator, platforms like Lexient function as an automated red team, pressure-testing drafted content the way an experienced colleague, legal reviewer or crisis advisor would. By surfacing how different audiences might interpret a message before it’s released, Lexient helps communicators reduce risk under intense time pressure and make more informed decisions.