Information doesn't move people. Meaning does.

1. Drowning in information 

We have never known more about the people we need to move, or had more ways to send them messages. It has become a binary obsession, and it’s big business. 

Outside, the data broker market is worth an estimated $298bn and is forecast to pass $540bn by 2034 (IMARC). Customer data platforms, built to join all that data together, are set to nearly double from $7.3bn in 2026 to $14bn by 2031 (MarketsandMarkets). Marketers put about a quarter of their budgets into technology. Yet Gartner found they use only a third of what their technology stack can do, down from 58% in 2020. 

Inside, it’s the same story. Employee communication software is worth about $1.2bn and growing at nearly 11% a year (The Insight Partners). HR analytics software is heading from $4.1bn in 2026 to $6.1bn by 2030 (Research and Markets). And many organisations still hope a 250-slide PowerPoint and a few well-meant all-staff emails will do the job. 

The result? Gallup’s latest State of the Global Workplace puts employee engagement at 20%, the first fall two years in a row. Manager engagement has dropped to 22%. Gallup estimates the cost of low engagement at around $10 trillion in lost productivity, or 9% of global GDP. More information, more channels, less movement.

2. The science: why information alone doesn’t move us 

The idea that people act once they have enough facts is intuitive. It’s also wrong, and decades of behavioural science show why. 

• Facts can reduce action. In a well-known study by Small, Loewenstein and Slovic (2007), people gave more to help one named child, Rokia, than to a case built on statistics about millions in need. When the statistics were added to Rokia’s story, donations fell. More information made people care less. 
• Emotion is what lets us decide. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio studied patients whose brain damage cut off their emotions but left their logic intact. They struggled to make even simple decisions. Feeling isn’t the opposite of reason; it’s what turns reason into a choice. 
• Stories change minds in ways arguments don’t. Research on “narrative transportation” (Green and Brock, 2000) shows that when people are absorbed in a story, their beliefs shift towards it, and they argue back less. 

None of this means information doesn’t matter. It means information only works once people can see what it means for them.

3. Inside: work serves a human purpose 

Work isn’t just there to hit the metrics. It serves a basic human need for meaning, and when that need is met, people do more. 

Two experiments show it plainly. In Dan Ariely’s Lego study, people were paid to build Bionicle figures for a fee that shrank with each one. When their finished figures were kept, they built about 11. When each one was taken apart in front of them, they stopped at about 7. The pay was identical; only the meaning had gone. 

Adam Grant found the same with university fundraisers. Callers who spent five minutes meeting a student their work had funded went on to raise far more money, almost three times as much in one study. Callers who only read letters from students saw no change at all. Same information, different meaning. 

That is the problem with change and transformation programmes built on slides, cascades and FAQs. They tell people what is happening. They rarely show people why it matters, or what part they play in it.

4. Outside: meaning moves markets

The same is true for customers and prospects. Since the platforms brought machine learning and optimisation, marketing has drifted towards targeting, data and messages tuned for clicks. It is very good at reaching people, and far less good at giving them a reason to care. 

The long-term evidence points the other way. Les Binet and Peter Field analysed 30 years of IPA effectiveness case studies in The Long and the Short of It (2013). They found that campaigns built on emotion outperformed rational, information-led ones. That held for brand measures such as trust and differentiation, and for business results including profit, sales and market share. 

Precision tells you who to talk to and when. Meaning decides whether they listen.

5. Making it more human

Any strategy succeeds only through collective action, whether that’s change and transformation inside or sales and marketing outside. Getting it means being less binary and less convinced that information is everything. Five shifts make the difference: 

1. From data to insight. Use what you know about people to understand what they care about, not just to target them more precisely. 
2. From messages to meaning. For every message, answer the question your audience is really asking: what does this mean for me? 
3. From facts to stories. Lead with a person, a moment or a consequence, then let the facts support it. As the research shows, piling on statistics can work against you. 
4. From volume to coherence. One clear story, told consistently by every leader and every channel, beats a stream of disconnected updates. 
5. From telling to showing. Let people see the difference their work or their choice makes. Five minutes with a real outcome outperforms a stack of letters. 

Information tells people what’s happening. Meaning tells them why it matters, and that’s what they act on.

The meaning test

We have more data about our audiences, and more ways to reach them, than ever before. And in a world that often feels short of meaning, people crave it more than ever. That’s what they’ll act on. 

So before your next transformation launch, campaign or all-staff email, put it through one test. Would the person receiving it understand what it means for them, why it matters, and what part they can play? If not, more information won’t fix it. Meaning will.