How to Tell If Your Content Problem Is Really a Clarity Problem

Ask five people inside the same company what it actually does, and you might get five different answers: The VP of sales talks about solving one problem. Marketing’s slide deck talks about another. The newest hire on the support team simply repeats whatever’s on the website. Customers notice the mismatch even when they can’t name it, and the result is hesitation, not conversion.

It’s tempting to solve that hesitation with more content: another landing page, another explainer video, another round of ads. But volume rarely fixes what’s actually broken. According to a Forbes Agency Council analysis of e-commerce checkouts, a Baymard Institute study found that the average cart-abandonment rate is more than 70%, driven largely by confusion and surprises at checkout—not by a lack of information. The same pattern shows up well before checkout: When a brand’s story shifts depending on who’s telling it, messaging confusion sends buyers straight to a competitor, no matter how much content sits behind it.

So how does a leadership team tell the difference between a company that needs better content and one that needs a clearer story altogether? And once that diagnosis is made, where’s the right place to start? Below, members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank, whose backgrounds span brand strategy, performance marketing and high-stakes corporate communications, share the signals they watch for and the first moves they’d make to turn a fuzzy narrative into one everyone in the building can repeat with confidence.

“It’s easy to default to internal language, industry jargon or assumptions that make perfect sense inside the organization but not to the people you’re actually trying to reach.”

– Erin Lentz, Executive Director of Design at ArtVersion

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The Confusion Starts Internally Before It Reaches Customers

Erin Lentz, Executive Director of Design at ArtVersion, an independent creative agency in Chicago known for branding and UX work with clients like Hilton and Caterpillar, says the first sign of a clarity problem rarely appears on a dashboard. It shows up in conversation.

“We often uncover this during stakeholder interviews,” Lentz says. “Leadership, sales, marketing, customer-facing teams and others are all describing the company a little differently.”

That internal inconsistency doesn’t stay internal for long, according to Lentz.

“It’s a lack of shared clarity internally that’s naturally reflected in the customer experience,” she says.

Once those gaps surface, Lentz doesn’t reach for a messaging document. She starts with the audience.

“We start by gaining a deeper understanding of the audience and the personas we’re designing and communicating for,” she says.

Skip that step, Lentz warns, and teams default to language that only makes sense from the inside.

“Without that foundation, it’s easy to default to internal language, industry jargon or assumptions that make perfect sense inside the organization but not to the people you’re actually trying to reach,” she says.

“The issue is rarely a lack of content; it’s that the brand’s value proposition, differentiation and messaging are not clear or compelling enough to resonate with the right audience.”

– Jessica Hawthorne, CEO of Hawthorne Advertising

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When Stalled Conversion Points to a Deeper Positioning Problem

Jessica Hawthorne, CEO of Hawthorne Advertising, a performance-driven agency that blends storytelling with data science for clients ranging from startups to Fortune 500 brands, sees the same diagnosis play out across a very different symptom: stalled conversion.

“Failing to attract the right customers or convert prospects into paying clients is often a clarity problem, not a content problem,” Hawthorne says.

She’s quick to point out where the confusion typically lies.

“The issue is rarely a lack of content; it’s that the brand’s value proposition, differentiation and messaging are not clear or compelling enough to resonate with the right audience,” she says.

For Hawthorne, that distinction isn’t academic. It’s fundamental.

“Clear positioning and messaging are the foundation for effective marketing and sustainable growth,” she says.

“When companies simplify their story and repeat it consistently, trust, engagement and conversion usually improve quickly.”

– Kurt Allen, Vice President of Enrollment, Marketing and Communications at Notre Dame de Namur University

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A Shifting Pitch Signals More Than a Messaging Fix

Kurt Allen, Vice President of Enrollment, Marketing and Communications at Notre Dame de Namur University, a Catholic university in California that has served adult learners since 1851, has spent 25 years watching organizations mistake motion for progress. He names a specific set of symptoms that separate a content gap from a clarity gap.

“A clarity problem arises when teams keep producing content, but customers still ask basic questions, sales stall or employees describe the company differently depending on who you ask,” Allen says.

He points to one telltale sign in particular.

“Another signal is when messaging changes constantly because no one can clearly articulate the organization’s core value,” Allen says.

More content isn’t the fix, according to Allen. Discipline is.

“Content volume cannot fix strategic confusion,” he says. “The first step is to pause the content treadmill and identify the single most important message the organization wants audiences to remember. Then align leadership, marketing, sales and customer service around consistent language, priorities and proof points.”

The results, he says, tend to show up fast once that alignment sticks.

“Clarity comes from disciplined positioning, not more posts,” Allen says. “When companies simplify their story and repeat it consistently, trust, engagement and conversion usually improve quickly.”

Being Heard and Being Understood Aren’t the Same Thing

Evan White, Chief Marketing Officer at ERIN, an enterprise employee referral platform that automates referral policy and analytics across the HR tech stack, draws a sharp line between the two problems this article set out to distinguish.

“A content problem is when people aren’t hearing you,” White says. “A clarity problem is when they hear you and still don’t get it.”

He offers a test any executive can run today, using their own website as the proving ground.

“If prospects can’t explain what you do after visiting your website, reading your content or hearing your pitch, the issue isn’t volume,” White says. “It’s clarity.”

His first move isn’t to produce more, either.

“The first step isn’t creating more content,” White says. “It’s simplifying the message until everyone from the CEO to the newest hire tells the same story. Then amplify it.”

A Full Calendar Can Still Mask a Deeper Disconnect

Kurt Uhlir, Chief Marketing Officer at ez Home Search, a fast-growing real estate portal built around consumer privacy and transparent search, says a full calendar can hide the exact problem it appears to solve.

“The clearest signal is when things are busy, but nobody inside the company can answer the simple customer and company questions the same way,” Uhlir says.

That confusion, he explains, doesn’t stay confined to strategy meetings. It reaches individual employees.

“People inside the company may know their tasks, but they cannot explain the outcomes the company expects from them, the customer pain the company removes or why their work matters to long-term customer success,” Uhlir says. “That gap weakens everything marketing touches: positioning, brand trust, sales enablement, BOFU content, onboarding content and product usage education.”

Uhlir’s starting point isn’t another meeting about messaging.

“The best first step is not another messaging workshop,” he says. “The first step is to create a ranked list of the outcomes the company needs, then ask every team member to connect their role to those outcomes. Next, each person should be able to say, in plain language, the customer pain the company solves and how their work helps a customer stay happy for five years.”

He’s candid about the pace this requires.

“This feels slow, but it is critical to be able to go fast and build revenue momentum,” Uhlir says.

When More Activity Means Less Alignment, Not More

Paul L. Gunn Jr., Founder of Signal & Anomaly, a strategic advisory that helps leadership teams read operational and decision-making conditions before they surface in the numbers, watches for a specific mismatch between output and understanding.

“When alignment declines while activity accelerates, it often signals a clarity issue rather than a content issue,” Gunn says.

He describes how that misalignment tends to spread through an organization.

“Teams create workarounds, ownership becomes less clear and decisions increasingly require translation,” Gunn says. “Priorities become interpreted differently while meetings, communication and information continue increasing, often amplifying the problem rather than solving it.”

The instinct to respond with more output, Gunn says, usually backfires.

“Many organizations respond with more messaging, dashboards and updates,” he says. “Often the deeper issue is fragmented human systems, where teams hear the same information but operate from different assumptions.”

His starting point is deliberately unhurried.

“The first step is not creating more content but slowing down enough to identify where interpretation diverged,” Gunn says. “I would begin by listening across functions because clarity problems often emerge before metrics reveal them.”

One Question, Three Answers: The Real Depth of the Problem

Kathleen Lucente, Founder and CEO of Red Fan Communications, a B2B technology communications firm built for high-stakes moments like IPOs and M&A, has spent three decades listening for the exact inconsistency that gives a clarity problem away.

“The clearest signal of a clarity problem disguised as a content problem is when smart people inside the company give three different answers to the same question about what the company does,” Lucente says.

She’s seen the pattern play out the same way across industries.

“The marketing deck says one thing. The CEO says another. The sales rep on the floor says a third,” Lucente says. “The content team is producing volume to compensate for a center that hasn’t been defined.”

Her first move is to stop producing and start gathering information instead.

“The first step is to stop writing and start listening,” Lucente says. “We use a Brand Authority Index to diagnose where the gaps actually live across seven dimensions, including how employees describe the company in their own words and how AI engines describe it back to a buyer.”

She closes with the line that ties the whole diagnosis together.

“You cannot fix a clarity problem by writing more,” Lucente says. “You fix it by deciding what the company stands for and getting everyone fluent in the same answer.”

Diagnose First, Create Content Second: Your Clarity Action Plan

• Audit how different departments describe the company before customers notice the gap. Clarity problems typically surface first in stakeholder interviews, where leadership, sales and customer-facing teams give inconsistent answers about who the company is.
• Anchor messaging in what the customer needs to hear, not internal shorthand. Stalled conversion is often a sign the value proposition doesn’t resonate with the right audience, not that there isn’t enough content promoting it.
• Identify the single most important message before producing anything new. Pause content production entirely until leadership, marketing, sales and customer service agree on the core message and repeat it consistently.
• Test whether prospects can explain your business in their own words. The clearest diagnostic is simple: If someone can’t describe what you do after visiting your site or hearing your pitch, no amount of additional content will fix that.
• Connect each employee’s daily work to a ranked list of company outcomes. Alignment starts at the individual level, where every team member should be able to explain the customer pain their role helps solve.
• Slow down enough to find where interpretation diverged across teams. Listen across functions rather than adding more meetings, dashboards or updates, since those often mask the disconnect rather than resolving it.
• Diagnose the gap before writing another word of copy. Stop content production altogether until leadership can agree on one consistent answer to what the company actually stands for.

Clarity Is a Discipline, Not a Deliverable

There is one theme that repeats across every contributor’s answer: content can’t compensate for a story that hasn’t been agreed upon. Whether the symptom is stalled conversion, inconsistent internal answers or busy teams who can’t connect their work to outcomes, the fix rarely starts with a content calendar. It starts with listening, simplifying and getting every voice in the organization, from the C-suite to the newest hire, saying the same thing.

As AI-generated search summaries and buyer research increasingly compress a company’s story into a single answer, the cost of internal inconsistency will only grow. Organizations that invest now in a clear, shared narrative won’t just convert better; they’ll be the ones AI engines and human buyers alike can describe accurately.