Clarity is the most underrated advantage in business

Throughout most of my career, my parents referred to my job as ‘colouring in’.

When you work in the creative industries, working on exciting public campaigns, meeting ‘celebrities’ or going to glamorous events like Cannes can often be taken for granted, so telling my family the stories involving my work was a million miles away from the industries they worked in.

My folks ran country pubs (easy, straightforward sell). My older sister works in IT project management (so no one outside her field understands what she does). My younger sister is an award-winning hairdresser, so although we couldn't do what she does, we at least all understood it.

When I founded my own business, I can not tell you how hard it was to clarify what services I provided and what information was important or not for my website, but I knew exactly how I was going to test it.

Offering to write brand narrative frameworks for founders and leaders sounded simple enough - to me! ME, with 20 years of marketing experience, and ME, who is fully aware of the power of a brand story. But I am not my target audience. I needed my audience to fully understand it.

So, when I created my own website and launched it, re-edited it (100times) until I was almost happy with the copy (are any of us?), I sent it to my mum and dad and asked them to read it over and give me a call to explain what I do once they had.

Bar a few questions here and there, they nailed it. This meant I had almost nailed it, and I do this for a living. I’ve delivered this skill set to every brand I’ve ever worked on, and even I found it hard to apply it to myself.

So I can only imagine if marketing is not your core skill set and you have to market your own business, knowing what to keep and what to lose to explain is can be very hard indeed.

Too much complication

Most businesses don’t wake up one day and decide to overcomplicate things for the fun of it (despite how it might look from the outside); it usually happens gradually, almost politely, as layers of thinking, language and well-intentioned input build up over time until what was once quite simple becomes… something else entirely.

At some point, someone adds a bit more context, then someone else adds a bit more nuance, then another person suggests softening the language, just in case, and before long, you’re left with a version that technically says everything, but in reality lands very little.

You see it everywhere.

The strategy consultancy that talks about “unlocking transformational growth through integrated, insight-led frameworks”, when what they’re actually doing is helping businesses figure out what to focus on, and what to stop doing, which, when you say it like that, is both clearer and far more useful.

The creative agency, describing itself as “crafting culturally resonant, insight-driven ecosystems”, when what they really mean is that they come up with ideas people notice, remember and act on.

The tech platform positioning itself as an “end-to-end, AI-powered solution designed to optimise operational efficiencies”, which, translated into normal human language, is simply helping teams get things done faster, with less effort.

None of these are technically wrong, but they’re just doing a lot of unnecessary heavy lifting, and the problem with that isn’t just stylistic, it’s commercial.

The consequence of complicated

When you overcomplicate your message, a few very predictable things start to happen, none of which are particularly helpful if you’re trying to grow a business.

People take longer to understand what you do, which in a world where attention is already in short supply means they often don’t bother finishing the sentence, let alone clicking the next page or asking the follow-up question.

Your sales conversations become harder than they need to be, because instead of building momentum, you’re spending the first ten minutes trying to explain something that should have been obvious in the first ten seconds.

Your team starts to interpret the brand in their own way, not because they’re doing anything wrong, but because you’ve left just enough room for interpretation that everyone fills in the gaps slightly differently, and over time those small differences turn into something much bigger.

Internally, perhaps my personal favourite, you end up in meetings where everyone agrees you need to “simplify the messaging,” immediately followed by a 45-minute discussion that somehow makes it more complicated.

It’s almost impressive.

Overcomplication has a way of disguising itself as sophistication.

It feels considered, intelligent, and it even gives the reassuring impression that something substantial is being said, even if, on closer inspection, it’s surprisingly difficult to repeat back to someone else without losing the will to live halfway through.

Clarity, on the other hand, can feel slightly exposing.

It forces decisions and removes the comfort of saying everything “just in case'“, and it asks you to be precise about what you do, who you’re for, and why it matters, which is a much higher bar than it sounds.

If you get there, everything changes.

People understand you faster, which makes them far more likely to engage. Your sales conversations start in a completely different place, because you’re building on clarity rather than trying to create it in the moment and your team shows up more consistently because they’re all working from the same shared understanding rather than from their own interpretations.

Perhaps most importantly, your brand starts to feel easier to believe in, because it makes sense without needing to be explained.

Which, when you think about it, is exactly what most people are looking for.

Not more words - Just the right ones.

The impossible task

Once you work within a business or have founded one based on your own brilliant ideas, it is almost impossible to see your business the way your audience does. You know too much.

I do recall that when I joined Channel 4, my job was simple. Create the brand narrative to showcase to clients why advertising on Channel 4 works. The best bit of advice I was given at the time was “Write down everything you notice in the first month, as after that, it will be too late to see the business from the outside”, and they weren’t wrong. Reading back my notes a month later, it was almost as if someone else had written them.

I remember standing in a leadership meeting and stating that, despite over a decade of experience working in media, I was no TV expert. I also mentioned how much of a good thing this is, as I would be asking a lot of questions to understand the complicated ecosystem that made up Channel 4’s services and products. I regularly use the line ’Tell me as if I’m your mum' as it stops the jargon and acronyms we in the media use as our second language. It enabled me to understand the business implicitly, which created the narrative to tell their story.

So next time you’re thinking about your website copy, that LinkedIn post or your sales deck - maybe ask yourself - would my mum/dad/wife/boyfriend/mate from another industry get this?

If the answer is no, maybe give me a call.