What Happens When Marketing Leaders Step Into Unclear or Nonexistent Brand Messaging?
Every new marketing leader walks into a story already in progress. Some chapters are brilliant. Some are confusing. Some were written by people who no longer work there. And somewhere inside the mix of old taglines, mismatched logos, scattered campaigns, inconsistent narratives, and mixed executive opinions, you’re expected to climb in and say, “Don’t worry — I’ve got this.”
And it’s… a lot.
Most new CMOs and marketing leaders inherit fragmented messaging. Usually, it looks like a patchwork of one-off campaigns, sales deck band-aids, contradictory value propositions, and a tone of voice that shifts depending on who wrote the copy that day. Product says one thing. Sales says another. Founders toss in phrases or words they love. And everyone agrees the messaging feels “off,” but no one can articulate why. Then you’re expected to sort it out.
This is often where overwhelm sets in because you’ve been handed a mess, have no outlined guideposts, and are newly responsible for shaping brand perception. On top of that, expectations are internally and externally directed. And, if the brand message isn’t clear, aligned, and cohesive, nothing else in the marketing department performs the way it should. Even if you’re the only one in it.
Clear brand messaging is communication that drives organizational momentum.
When the brand message is clear, teams move faster, campaigns click into place and sales conversations sharpen. Marketing finally becomes a multiplier instead of a constant fire drill.
This article is aimed to help give you the clarity you need in your brand messaging as a new marketing leader. And not through “inspiration,” but through a simple, strategic framework designed specifically for Brand Messaging for Marketing Leaders — especially those stepping into chaos and expected to deliver quickly.
Let’s simplify the noise and build something strong.
The Core Problem: Brand Messaging Gets Bloated and Degrades Over Time
Brand messaging is like a shared Google Doc left open too long: eventually someone overwrites something important, someone else adds a strange analogy, and someone else quietly pastes in messaging from a competitor’s deck.
It happens gradually, then when you need it most it’s all a mess. Here are three causes and symptoms to broken brand messaging.
1. Too Many Contributors, No True Owner or Brand Central Station
If no one owns messaging of your brand, everyone owns messaging.
The sales team tweaks lines to close deals. Development and technicians add jargon to sound “professional.” And owner/founder phrases survive on sentiment, their gut-feeling, or simply ‘the way they’ve always done it’.
The result? A Frankenstein’s monster as a system — stitched, patched, and internally contradictory.
In order to have a clear brand, there must be one owner over it all.
2. Multiple Audiences or Too Many Personas
As cliche as it might sound, when companies try to speak to everyone, they end up speaking to no one. Marketing teams fall into the “persona inflation” trap, namely: Messaging diluted so heavily that it could describe any competitor in the category. There’s no unique use case, and therefore no differentiation in messaging.
3. Legacy Messaging That Never Got Retired
Every organization collects messaging “debt.”
- Old taglines that linger
- Positioning statements from three versions ago
- Campaign phrases that were clever once, but confusing now
- Sales deck bullets grandfathered in because “they’ve always been there”
Messaging loses clarity as layers accumulate like layers of dirt on your window. It becomes a bundled mess where everyone uses what they prefer, and you have a different ‘brand’ for every person in the organization. And while I’m all for people marching to the beat of their own drum, an orchestra sounds better than a barrage of disparate drums.
Step 1 – Clarify Your Brand Core Before You Write Any Messaging
Most marketing leaders start writing messaging too early. They feel pressure, urgency, and expectation to make progress from day one. But messaging without strategy is shouting a prayer to the breeze. Your first job is to rebuild the foundation, ie. what we call the Brand Core.
Define Your Purpose, Promise, and Values
- Your purpose: why you exist.
- Your promise: what you consistently deliver.
- Your values: how you operate and show up.
Every message should align with them, reinforce them, and express them. We’ve got a whole article dedicated to your Brand Core here.
Re-Evaluate Your Target Audience
Great messaging is always customer-first — but only if you know which customer matters most.
This often requires hard choices:
- Who buys fastest?
- Who spends the most?
- Who is most aligned with your solution long-term?
When leaders stop writing for ten personas and focus on the few that shape the business, messaging sharpens instantly.
Identify the Core Transformation You Offer, and if Your Audience can Tell
When it comes to brand messaging, it’s more important to show the transformation that your clients and customers can expect, rather than lay out services. You’ve never heard of an airline brand talk about waiting at the airport, carrying bags around for hours, sitting next to strangers in a too-small seat, getting to eat lightly flavored dust, losing all feeling in your legs, and finally arriving at your destination, just without one of your bags. That would be horrible messaging about the actual features.
Instead, airlines talk about the destination: the beach, warm weather, a dream location that’s been on your bucket list, seeing friends and family thousands of miles away, etc. They sell the after state, and you should too. Some examples are:
Before our product → After our product
Before:
- Frustrated
- Slow
- Uncertain
- Disconnected
After:
- Confident
- Efficient
- Aligned
- Empowered
Step 2 – Build a Messaging Framework That Scales
Scalability can mean a lot of things, and in the rise of SaaS and Technology brands, it’s a hot topic. In that sense, scalability means building a framework that many people can see, use, and execute on with confidence.
But not all brands are massive conglomerates with thousands of employees—it might just be you. In that case, scalability still means consistency and efficiency. If every time you need to create content, a post, or send a newsletter you’re looking for all your brand foundations, colors, or appropriate verbiage, then a scalable brand means that you’re able to do those things more efficiently and scale your output while being on-message.
Here are a few tips for building messaging that scales.
1. Create a One-Liner to Anchor the Brand
Every strong brand has a sentence at its center — a short, memorable line that aligns leadership, marketing, sales, and product around a shared understanding of what the company does and why it exists.
This one-liner acts as the internal “Core” for all messaging decisions. If leaders can’t remember it, teams can’t repeat it, and campaigns can’t reinforce it, it’s not doing its job.
The goal isn’t cleverness or polish, but more like utility. A great brand one-liner should be simple, functional, and internal-facing first. Even better if its something people can believe in. When done well, it reduces debate, accelerates decision-making, and gives everyone a common language to build from.
2. Develop a Value Proposition With 3–4 Messaging Pillars
Once the anchor is set, your value proposition gives your messaging depth. This is where you clearly articulate what you do, who it’s for, and why it matters. (Tip: avoid drifting into buzzwords or feature lists). A strong value proposition should feel obvious in hindsight, not over-engineered.
Messaging pillars then take that core idea and make it scalable. These are the three or four repeatable stories your brand tells over and over again, across channels and teams. They reinforce differentiation, clarify value, and give your organization a consistent narrative structure to work from. When pillars are sturdy, marketing stops reinventing the message and starts amplifying it, adding reinforcement to your brand brick-by-brick.
3. Establish Brand Voice Guardrails
Brand voice is often misunderstood as a stylistic exercise, when in reality it’s a behavioral one. It defines how your brand sounds in real situations: how it explains, persuades, responds, and shows up under pressure. Voice guardrails help teams make consistent decisions about tone without needing approval for every sentence.
Rather than dictating exact phrasing, effective voice guidance answers key questions: Are we confident or collaborative? Direct or conversational? Precise or expressive? These guardrails ensure that even when the words change, the brand still feels like itself.
4. Cut 80% of Legacy Messaging
Pruning is how you keep a good garden, and good brand messaging. Over time, brands have an overgrowth of phrases, taglines, positioning statements, and campaign language that never gets retired. The result is clutter, contradiction, and confusion. A tangled mess.
The strongest marketing leaders take a subtraction-first approach. They simplify aggressively by removing repetition, retiring outdated language, and stripping away jargon and filler that no longer serves the brand. This process can feel uncomfortable, but clarity almost always emerges through reduction. You have to trim the dying ends of your brand messaging in order to let the best buds flourish.
Step 3 – Roll Out Your New Messaging Without Chaos
Most organizations derail by trying to change everything at once, and without naming purpose or farming with story. The goal at this stage isn’t speed for its own sake, but control. When messaging moves deliberately and convincingly, teams understand it, trust it, and actually use it.
Alignment starts at the top. If the CEO and sales leadership aren’t speaking the same language, the message will fracture the moment it leaves the marketing team. The CEO sets direction; sales communicates value every day. When those voices are aligned early, messaging becomes a shared tool rather than a marketing initiative that others feel “handed down.”
Equally important is internal adoption before external exposure. Teams don’t repeat what they don’t understand. Introducing new messaging internally — through walkthroughs, real examples, and open dialogue — ensures the organization feels ownership before the market ever sees a headline or homepage update. Remember: messaging that lands internally moves faster externally.
Finally, restraint matters. Not every asset needs to change on day one. High-impact touchpoints — sales decks, homepages, product summaries, and daily communication tools — shape the majority of brand perception. Updating those first creates consistency where it matters most, while templates and simple tools make on-brand communication the easiest option. When clarity is accessible, adoption follows.
For those who are checklist-oriented, here are 5 steps to rolling out your new messaging.
1. Executive Alignment
Ensure the CEO and leadership team clearly understand and support the new messaging, as they set the tone for the entire organization. Sales leadership must also be aligned early, since they are the ones translating brand messaging into daily conversations with customers.
2. Internal Adoption First
Introduce the messaging internally before it ever reaches the market. Teams need clarity, context, and real examples so they can confidently apply the message without hesitation or reinterpretation. This can be done weeks or months in advance.
3. High-Impact Assets Updated
Focus first on the assets that shape the majority of brand impressions, such as sales decks, your homepage, and core product materials. Updating these touchpoints creates immediate consistency without overwhelming the organization.
4. Repeatable Tools in Place
Provide templates, examples, and messaging blocks that make on-brand communication easy and repeatable. When the right language is accessible, teams are far more likely to use it correctly and consistently.
5. Controlled, Phased Rollout
Resist the urge to change everything at once. A deliberate, phased rollout builds momentum, reinforces clarity, and allows teams to adopt the messaging without chaos or fatigue.
Common Messaging Mistakes Marketing Leaders Should Avoid
Most brand messaging failures don’t happen because leaders lack talent or vision. They happen because pressure sets in early, and sets in hard. New marketing leaders are expected to move fast, show impact, and “fix” things—often before they’ve had the chance to truly understand what’s broken. In that rush, messaging becomes a surface-level exercise instead of a strategic one.
Common pitfalls to watch for:
- Rewriting messaging before completing discovery
- Prioritizing cleverness over clarity
- Forgetting internal teams are the first audience
- Overcomplicating messaging frameworks
- Relying on vague or inflated marketing language
- Creating messaging that isn’t rooted in real positioning
When leaders choose simplicity and alignment, messaging stops being a constant source of friction and starts becoming a multiplier.
Tools and Templates to Simplify Brand Messaging
If you want a shortcut to clarity (and speed), use these:
Brand Messaging Workbook
Our Brand Messaging Workbook is designed to help marketing leaders move from scattered language to a clear, repeatable messaging system. It walks you through defining your core one-liner, value proposition, messaging pillars, and brand voice—so every message has a consistent backbone. For leaders stepping into unclear or bloated messaging, this workbook provides a structured way to simplify without oversimplifying, giving teams a shared language they can actually use.
Brand Meter Report
The Brand Meter Report helps you pressure-test your messaging against reality. Instead of guessing whether your brand is clear or differentiated, it benchmarks how your brand is perceived relative to competitors and identifies where confusion, dilution, or misalignment exists. Marketing leaders can use this insight to validate messaging decisions, prioritize what needs fixing first, and confidently align leadership around a shared view of brand performance.
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If you’re stepping into a new role or inheriting unclear messaging, the Brand Meter Report gives you the clarity to know what to fix, what to protect, and where your brand has the most leverage.
