Most Organisations Don’t Have a Storytelling Problem. They Have a Clarity Problem.

.More marketing doesn’t help an organisation that doesn’t know what matters. Clarity requires finding the authentic truth on which all the offers, and the way clients view and relate to them, are built.

How do you know if the problem is clarity rather than marketing?

I usually start questioning whether marketing is really the problem when an organisation has already changed its website, increased its content or commissioned new campaigns, but people still struggle to understand what makes it different. The same applies when people inside the organisation describe the business in completely different ways, or when the marketing looks good but could just as easily belong to one of its competitors. In those cases, I would look at clarity before producing more communication.

I have seen organisations turn very quickly to marketing when things are not going as well as they would like. Customer numbers begin to fall, repeat business slows, competitors seem to be getting more attention, or demand for a service is simply not what it used to be. The conversation then moves quite naturally towards the website, social media, advertising, photography or the need to tell a better story.

There is nothing unusual about that. Marketing is one of the most obvious things to look at because it is visible and something can be done about it relatively quickly. You can commission new photography, redesign a website, employ someone to manage social media or start producing more articles and posts. The organisation becomes busier and there is at least a feeling that the problem is being addressed. What I question is whether the problem has always been identified correctly in the first place.

I have noticed this particularly in tourism and around some of the game lodges I have visited. When there is pressure to attract more guests, the response can become quite one-dimensional. More photographs are taken, more posts appear and the usual themes around wildlife, food, rooms, sunsets and experiences are presented again, perhaps more beautifully than before. The work itself may be very good, but I am often left asking whether anything important has actually changed. Does someone looking at that lodge now understand it better? Is there a clearer reason for choosing it over another one nearby? Does all the new material tell me something particular about the place, or has it simply made the same general message look better?

For me, this is where a marketing problem starts becoming a clarity problem.

What does brand clarity actually mean?

For me, brand clarity is knowing what really matters in an organisation, what you want people to understand first and what truth the offers and communication should be built around. When I look at an organisation that feels unclear, I try to find something central that the rest of it can pivot around. It might be an idea, an experience, a particular way of doing things, a history or even the personality and thinking of the people behind it. I am looking for an anchor or positioning that helps explain why all the other parts belong together.

I see clarity and positioning as closely related, but they are not quite the same thing. Clarity is understanding what matters and what is genuinely true about the organisation. Positioning is deciding how that truth should be understood in relation to the alternatives around it. I would find the clarity first and then decide how to position it.

In a game lodge, for example, there may be wildlife, accommodation, food, guiding, conservation, community involvement, landscape and history. Each of these may have genuine value, but that does not mean they should all carry the same weight in how the lodge presents itself. Perhaps the most interesting thing about that particular place is the land and how it has changed. Perhaps it is the philosophy behind the guiding, a particular conservation story, the history of the family or something about the way guests experience the environment that is difficult to find elsewhere. It becomes a point of difference.

The answer will be different in every case, and I think that is precisely the point. If every lodge talks about luxury, wildlife, conservation and unforgettable experiences in much the same way, adding better photographs to those claims does not necessarily make the lodge more distinctive. Sometimes the really important step is deciding which part of the truth is actually yours.

Too many stories can also be a problem

I came across something similar in St Helena. The island has an extraordinary number of stories. There is history, isolation, landscape, marine life, community, heritage and an unusual collection of people and events that could probably keep a writer busy for years.

Over time, I encountered tourism plans, consultants and discussions about how the island should be promoted. What I noticed was that the same recognisable stories and attractions tended to come forward again and again. They are important parts of St Helena, but there is a lot more to the island than those few familiar references.

The problem, as I saw it, was not a shortage of stories. There were almost too many, and the harder task was deciding which ones mattered most, how they related to one another and whether there was a central idea that could help somebody understand the island without reducing it to a collection of tourist attractions.

I think businesses often have exactly the same problem. They believe they need more stories because they have not found the relationship between the stories they already have. An organisation can therefore have plenty to say and still be unclear about what it wants people to understand.

The person making the decisions matters

Another thing I look carefully at is leadership, because in my experience this has a much bigger influence on clarity than people sometimes realise. I have met many people who are extremely good at running businesses. They understand operations, staffing, logistics, finances and customers, and they know how to solve practical problems and keep complicated organisations working.

Strategic and creative thinking can be quite different. Someone can know every part of their organisation and still find it difficult to stand outside it and decide which parts matter most to somebody else. What feels important internally may have very little relevance to a potential customer, while something the organisation regards as ordinary may actually be the thing that makes it different.

This is where I think outside perspective becomes useful. The marketing person, photographer or writer will often be brought in after most of the important decisions have already been made. They are asked to improve the way the organisation presents itself, but sometimes what they are really being handed is a collection of unresolved ideas. They can certainly make those ideas look better and may even make them more successful for a period, but the question remains whether anybody has decided what should sit at the centre of all that communication.

That is why I think some organisations can go through several websites, campaigns or agencies and still feel that the same problem remains. The presentation changes, but the central question has never really been resolved.

Being seen is not the same as being understood

It is very easy to confuse visibility with clarity. A strong photograph can make someone stop scrolling. A good social post can generate a lot of engagement. A campaign can increase traffic to a website and a new design can make an organisation look substantially more professional. All of that has value, but someone seeing you does not automatically mean they understand you.

This becomes particularly important when several organisations in the same sector are producing good marketing. Eventually everyone has attractive photography, everyone has a modern website and everyone talks about personal service, authenticity, sustainability or memorable experiences. The quality of the marketing may have improved while the difference between the organisations has become harder to see.

This is where I think more content can sometimes work against the organisation. There is more being said, but very little hierarchy in what is being said. The audience is presented with everything and expected to decide what matters, whereas I would rather make that decision first.

What carries the frame?

Photography gives me a very practical way of thinking about this. When I look through a camera, I do not only look at the subject. I look at everything around it: the background, the light, its position in the frame, where it is moving and how the other elements affect what I am seeing.

Sometimes the context is essential. An animal in a wide landscape may tell me far more than the animal alone. At other times I want to come much closer because a particular detail ,such as an eye, the texture of skin, a trunk, a paw or an expression, can say everything I need from that photograph. Either way, I still have to decide where I want the viewer's attention to go.

I see organisations in much the same way. There may be many things in the picture, and I do not believe they all need to disappear, but something still needs to carry the frame. Once that is understood, the other parts have a clearer role and decisions about story, photography, writing and design become much easier.

Finding the authentic truth

This brings me back to what I mean by clarity. For me, clarity is not about reducing an organisation to a clever statement or removing anything that might make it complicated. It is about finding the authentic truth underneath what it does and building the way it presents itself around that.

That truth also needs to survive contact with reality. If a lodge places conservation at the centre of its identity, I would expect to see conservation in how the business operates and not only in its marketing. If an organisation claims that personal service is what separates it from competitors, clients should actually experience that difference. If a destination places its community at the centre of its story, the people living there should have a meaningful place in how that story is understood.

That connection between what an organisation says and what somebody actually encounters matters to me. It is also why I prefer not to begin with the wording. It is very easy to write something that sounds good, while it is much harder to find something true enough to carry the weight of everything that follows.

I prefer starting from the other direction. Look at what is actually there, understand what people value, look at what the organisation does particularly well, where its history comes from and what people experience when they deal with it. Then decide which part of that truth is strong enough to build around. The language should follow from that understanding rather than trying to create it.

Clarity requires choices

The difficult part is that clarity usually means making choices. There may be six good stories, but one of them may need to lead. There may be several types of customers, but one may be far more important to the future of the organisation than the others. There may be ten benefits to the service, but only two or three that really affect why someone chooses it.

Organisations often find this uncomfortable because choosing one thing can feel as though the others are being dismissed. I see it differently. Giving something priority does not make everything else unimportant. It simply gives people a way into the organisation, after which there is plenty of room to discover everything else.

The wider thinking around positioning supports much of this. Effective positioning is not simply about claiming to be different; it requires understanding the frame in which customers compare an organisation, what genuinely differentiates it and which areas still need to meet basic expectations. For me, that makes clarity a strategic decision before it becomes a marketing one.

This is why clarity and simplicity are not the same thing for me. Something can remain rich, complicated and layered while still being clear about where the reader, guest or client should begin.

What should come before more marketing?

So when I hear that an organisation needs more marketing, I think it is worth spending a little more time on what really sits behind that request. What is the business really trying to change? What does it want to be known for? Why should someone care about this particular offer? What is genuinely different about it? Which of its stories matter most, and which ones are perhaps being given too much attention simply because they are easy to tell?

I would also ask what can be left out, because marketing has a natural tendency to add things: another post, another image, another claim, another service or another story. Clarity sometimes comes from deciding what no longer needs to compete for attention.

Once the central idea is understood, marketing becomes much more useful. Photography has a purpose, stories have context, the website has a clearer job and the people producing the communication are no longer trying to work out the organisation while also communicating it.

More marketing does not help an organisation that does not know what matters. Find that first, and everything that follows has a much better chance of making sense.

Sources & further reading

American Marketing Association. Branding — including brand positioning, identity and differentiation.
https://www.ama.org/topics/brand-and-branding/

Keller, K.L., Sternthal, B. & Tybout, A.M. (2002). Three Questions You Need to Ask About Your Brand. Harvard Business Review.
https://hbr.org/2002/09/three-questions-you-need-to-ask-about-your-brand

Aufreiter, N.A., Elzinga, D. & Gordon, J.W. (2003). Better Branding. McKinsey & Company.
https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/better-branding

Wise, W. & May, D. (2026). Do Your B2B Customers See the Value You Deliver? Harvard Business Review.
https://hbr.org/2026/08/do-your-b2b-customers-see-the-value-you-deliver