Time to Get on The Cluetrain
Closing the Reciprocity Gap
"Companies that do not belong to a community of discourse will die."
— The Cluetrain Manifesto, 1999
That was the warning. The authors argued that markets were becoming conversations, moving faster and getting smarter than the companies trying to serve them. That was 27 years ago and we're still catching up today.
When we founded Poke in 2001, that insight sat at the heart of everything we did. The Cluetrain Manifesto had landed a year earlier. Markets are conversations not passive recipients of branded messages. People want authenticity, dialogue, genuine reciprocal exchange. That was radical at the time. Most brands were shouting and not listening...They’re still mostly shouting today.
The reason I was inspired to focus on digital media in the beginning was the interactivity. The network effect. The potential for reciprocity, mutuality and alignment. And yet this potential has been largely ignored. And by ignoring it a gap has emerged and continues to grow. What Avansere term “The Reciprocity Gap”
We have the evidence to prove the thesis. Avansere's new research is stark: 85% of consumers say brands put their own interests first. 74% of brand leaders agree that putting people first is essential. Yet only 12% actually believe their brand is delivering on it.
This is The Reciprocity Gap. The distance between what brands promise and what people actually get. Where brand promises break and advantage begins.
The gap isn't just a messaging problem. It's structural. It lives in how your digital products work, how your services respond (or don't), how your communications are designed to extract rather than exchange. Most brands have built systems around extraction without reciprocating, using optimisation to paper over the growing cracks. They've optimised for efficiency, not generosity.
As part of the Avansere collective I’d like to connect with leaders who want to face this issue and explore ways to close this gap.
Over three decades, I've watched how reciprocity either gets engineered into systems or engineered out of them. In digital experiences, in product design, in how organisations actually treat their customers at scale. I've seen how those choices connect to sustainability, to whether a brand is truly building trust or just performing it.
Closing the reciprocity gap isn't a briefing exercise. It requires rethinking how value flows through every system you control: digital, product, communication, operational. It means designing for generosity at the architecture level, not just in the optics.
Tom Savigar and Alex Bradley at Avansere are offering live Reciprocity Gap Briefings. We can work alongside your team to decipher where the gaps are and what to do about it, helping you redesign the systems and experiences where reciprocity can be nurtured.
If your brand is serious about closing this gap, this is the moment. The seeds were sewn for me 27 years ago. The data confirms it today. The question now is whether you'll act on it.