Why isn’t our messaging working?

Most companies don’t wake up one morning and decide they have a messaging problem. Usually, something else starts the conversation.

A salesperson asks for better materials because “the brochure isn’t really helping anymore.” You lose a deal you thought you should have won. A competitor launches a website that suddenly makes yours feel dated. You come home from a trade show wondering why another company’s booth had more traffic than yours. By the time someone finally asks whether the messaging is working, they’re usually questioning several things at once.

In our experience, messaging is rarely the first problem companies notice. It’s one of the symptoms that surfaces after something else has already gone wrong.

How smart companies get messaging wrong

Messaging almost always comes from a good place.

Whether it’s written by a founder, a leadership team, a subject matter expert, or someone in marketing, the people creating it know the business inside and out. They know why a feature was added, why a process matters, why customers should appreciate the way they do things, and how much work went into building the company. Unfortunately, customers don’t have any of that context.

They’re encountering your business for the first time, and they’re trying to answer a much simpler question: Can you help me?

It’s surprisingly easy to describe your business in a way that’s completely accurate but doesn’t help a prospective customer understand why they should care. The words aren’t wrong. They’re simply answering questions customers weren’t asking yet.

Companies don’t market to companies. People talk to people.

Good messaging starts before anyone writes a headline

When someone tells us their messaging isn’t working, we don’t open a blank document and start rewriting headlines.

The first conversation is almost never about words. It’s about what changed. What are salespeople hearing? Where are deals stalling? What questions keep coming up? Why does leadership suddenly feel like competitors are telling a more compelling story?

Those conversations matter because messaging is usually revealing something, not causing it. If customers are confused, if sales keep answering the same questions, or if competitors seem to be connecting in ways you aren’t, rewriting the copy might improve the symptoms without ever addressing the cause.

That’s why we treat messaging as a strategic exercise, creatively executed. Before anyone writes a headline, we want to understand what customers actually value, how they make decisions, and whether the story the company is telling matches the story customers hear.

The trap of talking to yourself

We’ve heard founders accuse their marketing team of drinking its own Kool-Aid. We’ve heard marketing teams say exactly the same thing about leadership. They’re usually describing the same problem from opposite sides of the table.

Everyone inside the company knows why the new app matters. They know how much work went into the feature release. They know why the new process is better because they lived through the process of building it. Naturally, those things start showing up in the marketing.

Customers are coming to the conversation from a very different place. They’re still trying to decide whether you understand their problem and whether you’re the right company to solve it. Until your content answers those questions, it won’t be relevant enough to connect.

One client was convinced customers chose them because of the quality of their ingredients. They talked about those ingredients everywhere. When we interviewed their customers, we learned something very different. Customers talked about product innovation, shelf appeal, and a service policy that made their lives easier. The ingredients weren’t unimportant. They simply weren’t driving buying decisions.

We’ve seen versions of that story for years. Inside the company, everyone already knows the ending. Outside the company, customers are still deciding whether they want to hear the story at all.

Professional isn’t the same as persuasive

Somewhere along the way, companies decided they had to sound “professional.” They stopped talking like the people you’d actually enjoy having coffee or beer with and started sounding like they were trying to win buzzword bingo.

We’ve been pushing back on marketing jargon since the beginning because we’ve watched what it does to otherwise smart companies. Plain language gets replaced with polished language. Personality gives way to corporate-sounding copy. People start choosing words they’d never use in a real conversation because they think that’s what professional companies are supposed to sound like.

Around here, we call words like quality, solutions, innovation, trusted, industry-leading, and customer-focused invisible words. They’ve been used so often that readers skip over them. They may all be true, but they rarely help someone understand why your company is different.

The same thing happens when messaging focuses on the company instead of the customer. “We’ve been in business for 35 years.” “We offer comprehensive solutions.” “Our customer service is second to none.” Those statements may all be true, but they’re talking about what the company wants to say instead of answering what the prospect needs to hear. Worse, they sound like the copy on half your competitors’ websites.

Good messaging is both unique and meaningful

Over the years, we’ve found ourselves coming back to the same test.
Is it unique? Is it meaningful? Both have to be true.

Different isn’t enough if customers don’t care. Meaningful isn’t enough if every competitor is making the same claim. The work is uncovering the overlap.

That’s one reason we believe messaging is a strategic exercise, creatively executed. It’s easy to mistake it for a writing assignment because the final deliverable is words on a page. But the writing is only the visible part of the work. The real work is understanding what customers value, how you’re different, and why someone should choose you. Without those answers, you’re left guessing which words people might want to hear.

Before you rewrite your messaging, listen

If your messaging isn’t working, resist the temptation to jump straight into a rewrite.

Start by talking to the people closest to your customers. Sales, account managers, and customer service hear conversations that marketing and leadership rarely hear. They’ll tell you where customers get confused, what questions keep coming up, and what people consistently value. If you want even more confidence, talk to customers directly.

We’ve yet to find anything more powerful than the voice of the customer. Once you understand what customers actually value—not what you hope they value—positioning becomes clearer, messaging gets stronger, content becomes easier to create, and campaigns have a purpose. You’re no longer guessing – you’re acting confidently.

Years ago, we’d spread customer interviews, competitor websites, sales notes, and research across a conference room table looking for patterns. It probably looked like we were trying to solve a crime. We weren’t trying to invent positioning. We were trying to uncover it. The clues were already there. We just knew where to look.

We’d rather improve our odds than guess.

Is your messaging actually the problem?

Maybe.

If you’ve reached the point where you’re questioning your messaging, it’s probably overdue for attention.

Just don’t assume the words themselves are the root cause. More often than not, they’re revealing something deeper that hasn’t been understood yet. Before you rewrite the message, make sure you’ve identified the problem it’s trying to solve.