Why Leaders Confuse Messaging With Alignment
Several years ago, I was asked to help a technology company that believed its messaging had stalled. The products were strong. Customers were loyal. But externally, the company sounded generic. Analysts lumped it into an older category, and prospects struggled to understand why it belonged alongside newer competitors. Leadership wanted a clearer story.
What became clear early was that everyone agreed the company had a real advantage, but no one described it the same way.
Engineering talked about architecture. Product emphasized features. Sales focused on outcomes. Marketing framed it as innovation. Each explanation was accurate on its own, but together they produced language that was long, careful, and oddly unconvincing. The more we tried to reconcile those perspectives in messaging, the more the story flattened. The issue wasn’t that the technology’s “secret sauce” was unclear. It was that leadership hadn’t aligned on what that difference actually meant in the market.
Once we moved upstream, the problem sharpened quickly. The company wasn’t simply better than its competitors; it was built on a different assumption about how the market worked. That assumption dictated which problems it solved best, which competitors mattered, and which deals it should walk away from. Until leadership aligned on that distinction, messaging could only describe the technology — not position the company. When alignment finally clicked, the messaging became shorter and more decisive. We stopped explaining everything, narrowed the category the company claimed, and de-positioned competitors by being specific rather than comparative.
That experience reinforced something I’ve seen repeatedly since. Messaging is downstream. It reflects strategic decisions that leadership has already made — or avoided making. When alignment is weak, messaging grows cautious and overworked because it’s trying to carry multiple unresolved truths at once. When alignment is strong, messaging becomes confident not because it’s aggressive, but because it’s precise. The same dynamic shows up in crises, earnings calls, and reputation work more broadly: language breaks down not when words fail, but when leaders haven’t aligned on what a situation means or what they’re willing to stand behind.
This is why communications teams are so often asked to project clarity before it exists. They’re expected to smooth over unresolved decisions and present a unified front that leadership hasn’t fully agreed on internally. From the outside, it looks like a messaging problem. Inside the organization, it feels like asking words to do the work of strategy. Experienced communications leaders recognize this pattern quickly. They don’t start by rewriting language; they listen for misalignment in how leaders describe the business, the market, and their own priorities.
That perspective sits at the core of how I work as a Fractional Chief Communications Officer. My role isn’t to manufacture differentiation through language or dress up complexity for external audiences. It’s to help leadership teams align on what truly makes them different — and what that difference costs them — so the messaging can be disciplined, credible, and durable. When that alignment is real, messaging stops feeling fragile. It reflects a company that knows where it stands.
If communications feel harder than they should, the fix is rarely better words. It’s a clearer agreement upstream on what the organization is actually willing to commit to publicly.
