There is a particular kind of meeting that happens at a typical “complicated business. Somebody asks the beautifully simple question, “So, what exactly do you do?” and several people immediately make the answer worse.
The founder begins with the technology. The sales director adds the three most important service lines. Product points out that the technology description isn’t technically accurate unless you also explain the platform architecture. Marketing attempts to turn everything into a proposition. Legal adds an important qualification. Somebody says something about an “ecosystem” and “culture”. Somebody else says “end-to-end”. By the time everyone is satisfied, the description is 94 words long and contains at least one acronym that requires its own explanation.
Then somebody decides the real problem is that the website needs a new logo.
For companies in technology, finance, professional services, engineering, healthcare, data, energy and increasingly almost everything else, this is a very real creative problem. Many modern businesses do genuinely complicated things. Their products connect systems that customers never see. Their services combine expertise from several disciplines. Their value might only become apparent across months or years. They can have one explanation for investors, another for procurement, another for end users and another for the poor person running the LinkedIn account who has somehow been asked to turn all of this into a carousel by Thursday.
Complexity in the business is not necessarily a weakness. Complexity in the explanation usually is.
The important distinction is that simplification does not mean pretending the company is simpler than it really is. It means creating a way into the complexity. A customer does not necessarily need to understand the machinery before they can understand why the machinery matters. A buyer of cybersecurity technology does not need to become a cryptographer. Someone choosing an investment platform does not need to understand every layer of its infrastructure before they can understand what it enables them to do.
This is why creative people can be unusually useful in categories that often imagine themselves to be too technical for creativity. Strategy, writing, design, animation, information architecture and storytelling are not there to paint something pretty over the difficult bits. At their best, they organise difficult information into something another human brain can actually use.
Or, as SomeOne Founder Simon Manchipp puts it rather less delicately:
“Show them the lightbulb. Most B2B brands sound like they’re reading the instruction manual for a toaster in a burning building. Commercial Creativity is about weaponising clarity. If your business is complicated, your brand probably needs to be violently simple. Think of our mates over at Apple, nobody cares about the silicon architecture, they care that the phone takes better photos of their cat. Sell the advantage, because confusing your audience is a hostage situation.”
It’s a provocative way of saying something surprisingly practical. The job isn’t to remove the intelligence from the business. It’s to stop demanding that the customer absorb all of that intelligence before they are allowed to care.
Why Is It So Difficult to Explain What Your Business Does?
Seventeen
Part of the problem is familiarity. The people closest to a complicated business spend every day surrounded by the distinctions, terminology and internal structures that make it work. Those distinctions genuinely matter to them, which makes leaving any of them out feel slightly dishonest. A customer encountering the company for the first time has none of that context.
The result is communication built according to the organisation’s internal map rather than the customer’s mental one. Companies describe departments rather than outcomes, products rather than problems and methodologies rather than value. Websites end up organised around how the company sells its services instead of how customers look for help.
Public-sector content design offers a surprisingly useful corrective here. GOV.UK’s content standards are built around helping users find and understand what they need, and the Office for National Statistics explicitly advises using plain language even for expert audiences. Its guidance notes that preference for plain language increases rather than decreases as subject matter becomes more complex.
That is worth dwelling on because there’s still a strange assumption in B2B communication that complexity signals expertise. Long sentences feel more authoritative. Technical terms demonstrate seriousness. The prospect is imagined to be impressed by phrases such as “multi-layered integrated enterprise transformation architecture” rather than wondering whether anybody in the company is capable of explaining what they sell without a diagram.
Expert audiences are not offended by clarity. They are usually grateful for it.
The second problem is organisational. Complex businesses accumulate messages. Every new product launch adds a claim. Every acquisition adds capabilities. Every new market creates another audience. Somebody commissions a “brand messaging framework”, but instead of becoming a filter it becomes a filing cabinet containing every phrase the organisation has ever approved.
That is why clarity is rarely achieved through copywriting alone. A writer can improve a sentence, but they cannot fix a company that has not decided which of six competing ideas deserves to be the sentence.
IMG’s first major brand refresh in decades illustrates the problem at a much larger scale. IMG had expanded across events, rights, digital, production, partnerships and data, creating a gap between what the wider business had become and how the market understood it. The rebrand therefore needed to clarify the organisation before it could simply modernise how the organisation looked.
That is an important order of operations.
When people say “nobody understands what we do”, there are at least three possible problems hiding inside the sentence. The business may understand itself perfectly but communicate badly. Different parts of the company may actually understand the offer differently. Or the offer itself may have become so sprawling that there is no simple explanation because nobody has made the strategic decisions required to create one.
Only the first of those is fundamentally a copy problem.
Start With the Value, Not the Machinery
AKQA
This is where value proposition design becomes considerably more useful than writing a better company description.
A value proposition separates the customer’s world (the jobs they are trying to complete, the pains they experience and the gains they want) from the company’s products and services, then asks where the two genuinely overlap.
That sounds obvious until you look at how most complicated businesses describe themselves.
Imagine a fictional enterprise software company. Internally, its advantage may be an AI-assisted orchestration layer that sits across several legacy systems and normalises data through a proprietary interoperability framework.
All of that might be true.
The operations director buying it may be thinking: Can I stop five systems disagreeing with one another every morning?
That sentence is not less intelligent. It is closer to the value.
A strong proposition therefore works from the outside in. What is somebody trying to achieve? What keeps getting in the way? What changes because the business exists? Which part of that change is genuinely different from what a competitor could promise?
That final question matters because simplification can easily produce sameness. Take too much specificity away and every software company “makes work easier”, every consultancy “helps businesses grow” and every financial-services company “gives you confidence about your future”. The aim is not to sand every detail off until nothing remains. It is to find the detail with the greatest explanatory power.
A useful brand messaging framework might therefore have several layers rather than one universal paragraph:
- The customer problem: the situation people recognise immediately, described in their language rather than yours.
- The value proposition: the most important change you create for that customer.
- The differentiating idea: why your way of creating that change is meaningfully different.
- The proof: evidence, capabilities, credentials or product features that make the promise believable.
- The depth layer: technical detail for the audiences who genuinely need it.
The hierarchy is the important bit. Technical information has not been deleted. It has simply stopped standing in the doorway.
This layered approach is particularly useful when one company has multiple audiences. An engineer, procurement lead, investor and end user may all need different levels of explanation, but they should still be able to recognise the same underlying proposition.
Think of the structure as progressive depth:
- At ten seconds, I understand why you exist.
- At thirty seconds, I understand why I should care.
- At two minutes, I understand roughly how you do it.
- At ten minutes, I can start examining whether the claims are credible.
- At an hour-long technical meeting, by all means show me the architecture diagram.
The mistake is starting the homepage at hour one.
When Visuals and Storytelling Explain More Than Words Alone
WMP Creative
Some businesses struggle with words because the idea they are trying to explain is fundamentally spatial, systemic or invisible. There is only so much prose can do before another medium becomes more efficient.
This is where visual communication design moves beyond aesthetics. A good diagram externalises relationships the audience would otherwise have to construct mentally. A motion sequence can show how one thing causes another. A simple metaphor can give an unfamiliar concept a familiar shape. Photography can make scale visible. A before-and-after can explain transformation faster than a paragraph.
The important word here is appropriate. A visual is not automatically clearer because it contains colours and arrows. Representation works best when it matches the task the audience is trying to perform; different formats help people see different kinds of relationships. The wider principle is straightforward: the designer’s job is not to turn information into decoration, but to decide which representation makes the necessary relationship easiest to perceive.
Among Equals’ identity for STEP is almost comically well suited to this discussion because the underlying subject is nuclear fusion. The agency was dealing with complex science, an organisation that did not yet physically exist in its eventual form, multiple stakeholder groups and audiences ranging from physicists and engineers to investors and young people who might one day consider careers in fusion.
Trying to explain the science in full would have been hopeless as a brand strategy, so the team concentrated on something almost anybody could understand: the scale of the ambition and the sense of a shared mission. The visual identity borrowed intelligently from the technical reality (the form of the tokamak, the colours associated with fusion, the star at the heart of the emblem) but it did not require the audience to pass an exam before the identity made sense. Mission patches inspired by space programmes supplied another familiar cultural reference, while the line “The boldest endeavours start with practical steps” balanced the enormous ambition with a sense of pragmatism.
That is a far better model for simplifying a technical business than simply hiding the technicality.
The expertise is still there. In fact, it makes the creative richer. It just enters at the right level.
Another useful example is D8’s work for Carlton Collection. The company’s problem was not that individual hotels were difficult to understand; it was that the relationship between them wasn’t clear. Each property had its own identity and personality, while the parent collection lacked a coherent role in the minds of customers and even some people inside the organisation.
The strategic work was eventually distilled into the mantra “Don’t duplicate, complement”. That was not intended to tell a consumer everything about every hotel. It gave the company an organising idea: the parent brand should celebrate the individuality of the properties instead of competing with them. The broader “family” concept then gave that structure an intuitive metaphor, allowing different personalities to belong to one recognisable whole. D8 says the resulting framework gave people across the organisation, from board level to hotel teams, a strategy they could understand and use.
Again, the important achievement is compression.
A complicated organisational relationship becomes an idea people can repeat.
That is storytelling at its most commercially useful. It isn’t necessarily a cinematic narrative involving a protagonist, conflict and triumphant resolution. Sometimes storytelling simply means giving complicated facts a structure that helps the audience understand what matters first.
Clarity Is a Business Differentiation Strategy, Not Dumbing Down
Neil Walshe Creative
There is an understandable nervousness around all this, particularly in technical businesses. If we simplify too much, won’t we look less sophisticated? If competitors talk about their methodology in exhaustive detail, won’t we look lightweight by comparison? What if an expert buyer thinks our explanation is basic?
The answer is that a simplistic business and a simply explained business are not the same thing.
The most effective simplification preserves the important distinctions while removing unnecessary effort. This is one reason plain-language guidance repeatedly emphasises changing complex wording without losing meaning rather than merely making everything shorter.
That distinction should sit at the heart of any business differentiation strategy.
Imagine two cybersecurity firms. One says:
“Our next-generation adaptive threat architecture provides integrated real-time observability across heterogeneous hybrid-cloud environments.”
The other says:
“See an attack crossing your systems before it becomes an incident.”
The second line is easier to understand, but it has not prohibited the company from explaining adaptive architecture, hybrid-cloud monitoring or whatever else proves the claim. It has simply given the reader a reason to ask.
Creative people are particularly useful here because they can often identify the demonstration that eliminates the explanation altogether. A film might turn forty years of financial-market uncertainty into one continuous visual journey. A diagram might show six software platforms becoming one workflow. An interaction might let somebody experience the benefit. A metaphor might turn an invisible technical function into something people already understand.
The work becomes especially powerful when the simplification itself creates distinction.
Most professional-services firms can credibly claim expertise. What they may not share is a distinctive way of framing the customer’s problem. Most enterprise technology businesses can produce feature lists. Fewer can express the value of those features through a memorable organising idea.
Our previous article on turning business problems into creative opportunities makes the useful observation that what appears to be an advertising or design problem may actually be a proposition problem. A business asking for more content might need one clearer idea; one asking for a digital platform may need to simplify the offer first.
The temptation, particularly now that content is so easy to manufacture, is to explain complexity by producing more material.
- Another landing page.
- Another PDF.
- Another animated explainer.
- Another forty-seven-slide sales deck entitled “What We Do”.
But adding more explanation to an unclear proposition is like adding road signs to a map with no destination.
Before producing anything else, try the sentence.
We help [specific customer] achieve [specific valuable outcome] by [meaningfully distinctive method or advantage].
It does not need to become the tagline. In fact, it probably shouldn’t. The point is diagnostic.
If the company cannot agree what belongs in those brackets, the brand does not yet have a copy problem. It has a decision problem.
How Do You Know If Customers Actually Understand What You Do?
La Cuevita Publico
This is where internal confidence becomes particularly dangerous. Organisations are very good at convincing themselves that language is clear because everybody in the meeting understood it.
Everybody in the meeting works there.
The only meaningful test is whether somebody who lacks all that accumulated context can interpret the message correctly.
One pretty literal method for testing difficult terminology is to put words and phrases in front of actual users and ask them to explain what they think those words mean. Don’tt merely ask whether the language is “clear”; people are often reluctant to admit confusion, and recognition is not the same as comprehension.
Teams should validate assumptions about customer jobs, pains and gains with actual customers rather than treating internal workshops as evidence. Map assumptions first and then test them in interviews, looking for concrete behaviour and evidence rather than accepting hypothetical opinions at face value.
For a complicated company, that can translate into some wonderfully low-tech tests:
- Ask someone to explain the business back to you. After seeing the homepage or pitch for a few moments, what do they think the company does, who is it for and why might somebody buy it?
- Test the proposition without the logo. Does the message contain a meaningful difference, or could three competitors plausibly claim exactly the same thing?
- Listen to sales calls. Which explanation causes the prospect to say “Right, I get it”? That sentence may be more valuable than six weeks of internal messaging workshops.
- Audit recurring questions. If prospects repeatedly ask something the website supposedly explains, the website probably does not explain it as well as everybody thinks.
- Compare expert and non-expert understanding. The technical buyer may need more depth, but both audiences should recognise the same fundamental value.
There are quantitative signals too. Changes in conversion rate, quality of leads, time to qualified enquiry, branded search and the behaviour of visitors around key pages can all contribute evidence, but none tells you precisely why something became clearer. A/B testing can help compare alternative presentations at scale, while qualitative research remains valuable for understanding the mental model behind the behaviour.
Sales teams can be particularly revealing. One of the clearest signs that communication has improved is that prospects arrive further into the conversation. The salesperson spends less time explaining the basic category and more time discussing fit, proof and implementation.
That is what a good brand messaging framework should ultimately do. Not produce an impressive slide headed “Messaging Architecture”, but reduce the amount of translation required between the organisation and the people it wants to reach.
How Creativepool Can Help You Find the People Who Make Complexity Simple
RENAISSANCE
“Nobody understands what we do” is also one of those problems where businesses frequently hire the wrong person because they diagnose the output before the issue.
They decide they need a new website.
So they hire a web designer.
The web designer quite reasonably asks what the site should say.
Everyone looks at one another.
A truly complicated communication problem may require several different kinds of creative expertise, and the useful first step is identifying where the confusion actually lives.
If the proposition itself is unclear, the right starting point may be a brand strategist or branding agency. Creativepool’s brand strategy agency rankings and branding agency directory let brands compare strategic and identity work through case studies rather than choosing purely on an agency’s own sales language. Creativepool’s guidance recommends examining who will actually lead the strategy and creative work, the quality of before-and-after case studies and whether an agency demonstrates genuinely different answers for different clients rather than repeatedly applying the same aesthetic.
If the strategic idea is essentially right but the words have become impenetrable, the more useful hire may be a senior copywriter or verbal strategist. Creativepool’s copywriter directory spans brand voice, advertising, UX, web, long-form and other specialisms, and its own hiring guidance makes an important distinction: senior copywriters often contribute to messaging and positioning, not merely the final execution of copy.
That distinction matters for complex businesses. You’re not necessarily looking for somebody who can make the existing 94-word paragraph more elegant. You may need someone willing to ask why 83 of those words are there in the first place.
Where the problem is visual, Creativepool’s graphic designer directory is a natural starting point. The platform describes graphic design explicitly as visual communication (using typography, image, colour and layout to make messages clear and distinctive) which is precisely the skill a business needs when a complicated proposition has to become a repeatable visual system.
For digital products and services, particularly where the complexity continues after the marketing site, a UX designer may be more relevant. Creativepool’s UK UX designer directory allows businesses to explore portfolios, CVs and experience, including specialists working in enterprise software, SaaS, fintech and other areas where turning technical systems into understandable experiences is the actual job.
And sometimes the sensible answer is a small multidisciplinary team: strategist, writer and designer working together before a UX specialist, animator or filmmaker translates the idea into particular touchpoints. Diagnose the problem before choosing the discipline, rather than hiring generic “creative support” and hoping the right answer emerges.
When reviewing portfolios, look specifically for evidence of simplification.
Not minimalism.
Not lots of white space.
Simplification.
Can the case study explain what was confusing before? Does the finished work create a clearer hierarchy? Did the creative team turn an abstract service into a proposition you can repeat? Is there evidence they understood a technical subject deeply enough to decide what could safely disappear? Do they show diagrams, messaging, digital journeys or systems rather than just polished identity shots?
The best person for a complicated business is not necessarily someone who knows the least about the subject and can therefore “make it simple”. Quite the opposite.
They need enough curiosity to understand the complexity before they can responsibly compress it.
Otherwise, simplification becomes misinformation.
The Best Explanation Is the One Someone Else Can Repeat
Born Ugly
There is a strange vanity in complexity.
Companies spend years building something difficult, so it feels slightly disappointing to reduce all that work to a sentence a teenager could understand. Surely the explanation ought to reflect the sophistication of the operation?
But the sophistication should sit in the product.
The explanation has a different job.
Creative clarity is ultimately an act of prioritisation. Value proposition design decides which piece of customer value deserves the foreground. A brand messaging framework establishes the order in which information arrives. Visual communication design gives difficult relationships an easier form. Storytelling supplies context and consequence. A strong business differentiation strategy ensures that the result is not merely easy to understand, but difficult to confuse with anybody else.
None of those disciplines removes complexity from the company.
They remove complexity from the customer’s route into it.
That is what Among Equals did with STEP. Nuclear fusion did not become less complicated because the brand found a clearer language of ambition and mission. IMG did not suddenly become a smaller organisation because its rebrand created a stronger organising vision. Carlton Collection did not make its individual hotels identical in order to make the parent brand easier to grasp. In each case, the creative work created a coherent front door while allowing the rooms behind it to remain as detailed as necessary.
This might be the best way to think about the instruction to simplify complex information. You are not reducing the building.
You are designing the entrance.
A customer should be able to walk through it without an escort.
They should understand what problem you solve, why it matters and why your approach deserves another minute of their attention. The technical architecture, detailed methodology, regulatory framework, proprietary process and complete service catalogue can all be waiting further inside for the people who need them.
And the ultimate test is not whether your leadership team approves the wording.
It is whether somebody who heard it once can explain it to somebody else.
Because if understanding your business requires the founder to be permanently standing beside the customer with a whiteboard, you do not have a complicated-business problem.
You have a communication problem.
And that, fortunately, is exactly the sort of problem creative people are very good at making simpler.
