Clarity
Why “more content” is rarely the answer
When messaging stops landing, the instinct is to produce more. Usually, the problem isn’t volume – it’s clarity.
Philip Hayton
2 min read
Almost every organisation I speak to, at some point, reaches the same conclusion: we need to be putting out more. More posts, more articles, more campaigns. It feels like the obvious lever to pull. But more often than not, volume isn’t the thing that’s missing. When a message stops landing, it’s tempting to assume people simply haven’t seen it enough times. So the answer becomes frequency — say it louder, say it more often, fill the calendar. The trouble is that repeating an unclear message just produces more unclear communication. You end up busier, not better understood.
The real problem is usually upstream
If audiences aren’t responding, the issue is rarely how much you’re saying. It’s whether what you’re saying is clear, distinctive and built around them. Those are upstream questions — about strategy and story — and no amount of output downstream will fix them. Before producing anything new, it’s worth asking three honest questions:
- Could the people you’re trying to reach explain what you do, in their own words?
- Does your message say something a competitor couldn’t equally claim?
- Is it framed around what your audience needs — or what you want to tell them?
Repeating an unclear message doesn’t make it clearer. It just makes you busier.
What clarity changes
When the underlying message is right, everything downstream gets easier. The same channels start to work harder. The team tells a more consistent story. And crucially, you can often do less, because each piece carries more weight.
Start with the question, not the calendar
The most useful exercise isn’t planning the next month of posts. It’s stepping back to ask what actually needs to be understood, by whom, and why it matters to them. Once that’s clear, the content plan tends to write itself — and it’s usually shorter than you expected.
In short
If your communication isn’t working, resist the urge to simply make more of it. Get the message right first. Clarity, not volume, is almost always the lever worth pulling.
None of this means content doesn’t matter — it does. But content is the expression of a clear strategy, not a substitute for one. Get the thinking right, and you’ll not only communicate better; you’ll communicate less, and mean more.
