Esri Survey Exposed Employee Knowledge Gaps on Competitors

By Priya Raman

An internal survey at Esri asked employees whether they were confident they knew the company's competitors. They said yes. Asked to actually name those competitors, many could not.

Laura Krenek, head of brand marketing at Esri, shared the finding at Ragan's Internal Communications Conference, held last month at Microsoft HQ. Her account turns on a simple diagnostic: employees' self-assessed knowledge and their actual knowledge are two different things, and only a follow-up question exposes the distance between them.

"Immediately, you start to see those gaps that exist in the knowledge, and it's okay," Krenek said. "But let's tell the truth. Let's understand where these gaps exist, so that we can properly design around them."

That quote carries the practical instruction for practitioners. The goal of the exercise was not to embarrass anyone. It was to map the gaps accurately, then build internal communication around the map rather than around assumptions of what staff already know.

How Esri structured the program

Krenek said her team ran the internal effort with the same discipline as an external marketing campaign. Two assets anchored it:

• A brand hub, serving as the central destination for campaign material
• A monthly newsletter, carrying recurring updates to staff

The framing matters for internal comms teams that still treat employee communication as ad hoc announcements. At Esri, the internal audience received the same campaign architecture an external agency would apply to a paying market: consistent channels, a hub, and a publishing rhythm.

What does seven touch points change?

The most concrete figure in Krenek's account is frequency. "We found that on average, it was helpful to have seven touch points," she said. "Any less, and most people had no idea what we were doing. 'Oh my gosh, you're doing a series of videos?' We've emailed you like 17 times!"

That closing line, delivered as an imagined exchange with a colleague, captures the arithmetic internal communicators face. Seventeen emails can still fail to register as awareness if the effort lacks coherent structure, while roughly seven well-designed touch points proved the working threshold at Esri for most employees to register what the team was doing.

The implication for practitioners is a planning rule: budget a minimum of seven structured exposures per internal campaign, delivered through a hub and a fixed newsletter cadence, and treat volume alone as no substitute for design.

Krenek's method also gives teams a repeatable audit. Ask employees whether they know a fact, then ask them to state it. The gap between the two answers becomes the brief for the next campaign cycle — and, at Esri, the justification for running internal communication with external-grade rigor.