Why complicated companies have a communications problem before they have a marketing problem
Why isn't our marketing working when our product is genuinely better?
Short answerBecause marketing amplifies an explanation the organization has not agreed on yet. If five executives describe the company five different ways, more campaign spend produces five louder versions of the confusion. The fix is upstream: one decided position, one message architecture, then amplification.
There is a particular kind of company that arrives at an agency convinced it has a marketing problem. Revenue is fine but flat. The product is technically excellent — often demonstrably the best in its category. The pipeline is full of people who seem interested and then quietly disappear. The natural conclusion is that not enough people have heard of them.
Almost always, the diagnosis is wrong. Enough people have heard of them. Not enough people can repeat what they do.
The five-answer test
Ask five people at the company — the CEO, the head of sales, a product lead, a support manager, someone in their first month — to describe what the company sells in two sentences, without using the product name.
In a company with a marketing problem, you get five versions of the same answer. In a company with a communications problem, you get five different answers, each one defensible, each one incompatible with the others. That second company cannot be fixed with budget. It will simply distribute its ambiguity more efficiently.
Advertising an unresolved position doesn't clarify it. It scales it.
Why complexity makes it worse
Complicated companies have a structural disadvantage here, and it is not that their product is hard to understand. It is that every internal group has a locally correct description of it. Engineering describes the architecture. Sales describes the outcome the last customer got. Product describes the roadmap. Finance describes the revenue model. Nobody is wrong, so nobody concedes.
The market, meanwhile, needs exactly one sentence — the one a buyer will repeat to a colleague who was not in the meeting. That sentence is the entire product as far as your pipeline is concerned, because in a considered B2B purchase most of the selling happens in rooms you are not in.
What the fix actually involves
- 01Decide the position. Not workshop it — decide it, in writing, with the trade-offs named. A position that excludes nothing is not a position.
- 02Build the message architecture. One spine, expressed in the register each audience needs, with no version contradicting another.
- 03Give it to sales first. If sellers cannot use it in a live meeting, it is not finished, no matter how well it reads.
- 04Then amplify. Campaign, content, PR and demand generation work extremely well once they have something unambiguous to carry.
None of this is an argument against marketing. It is an argument about sequence. Amplification is the highest-leverage thing you can do to a clear position and the most expensive thing you can do to an unclear one.
Common questions
- How do we know if we have a positioning problem or a demand problem?
- Look at where deals die. Losses at first contact usually mean a demand or targeting problem. Deals that progress and then stall in the middle, especially after an internal champion takes it to their own team, usually mean the explanation does not survive being repeated.
- How long does repositioning take?
- The decision itself takes weeks, not quarters, if leadership is genuinely in the room. The rollout across sales materials, website, content and campaigns typically runs one to two quarters depending on how much collateral exists.
By
Jonathan Potter
Founder & Strategic Lead
Founder of Boisvert-Gayle™ | BGprod. Works across corporate positioning, reputation and commercial strategy for technology, mobility and infrastructure organizations, and directs the studio's film and creative output.
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