There’s an idea that’s been circulating in business communication for many years, and it goes like this: the problem with companies that struggle to sell is that they don’t communicate well enough. You have to know how to say it. You have to find the right words. You have to choose the right channels. There are consultants who sell exactly this: we’ll help you communicate your value better.
In many cases that promise starts from a wrong assumption. Value isn’t communicated. It’s framed.
Communicating implies that you have something clear to say and only the way of saying it is missing. Framing implies something that comes earlier. It implies deciding the context in which that value takes on meaning. Without context, any communication, however perfect, leaves the reader with a generic idea of what you do, indistinguishable from the fifty similar ideas they’re getting from fifty competing companies.
Think of a consultant who says I help companies grow. It’s a sentence you can communicate in endless ways. You can improve the copy, find stronger images, build an elegant landing page on top of it. None of this moves the problem. The problem is that the sentence, in the context that exists today, is invisible. Hundreds of consultants say the same thing. Communication, in that case, can only amplify a sound that blends into the background noise.
The same consultant who says I work with B2B service companies past the two-million-revenue mark, stuck on the second sales hire is doing something else. They’re framing. They’re declaring a narrow, recognisable field, where whoever falls inside feels seen and whoever falls outside knows it isn’t their place. The sentence, in itself, isn’t yet communication. It’s a decision about what the value covers and what it doesn’t. Communication comes later, and becomes much simpler.
Framing requires subtraction. It requires saying out loud who you aren’t useful to, what situations you don’t work in, what results you can’t promise. It requires giving up the temptation of keeping all possibilities open. It’s, usually, the hardest part of all positioning work. Harder than communication, which is just the consequence.
When a client asks me how do we communicate better what we do, my first question is almost always the same. What is clear, today, about what you do, to the point that it could be reduced to three sentences that exclude fifty similar things in the market?. If the answer comes in half an hour, the problem is communication and gets solved quickly. If the answer requires four leadership meetings, the problem was never communication. It was the decision about what the value is.
This distinction changes where you intervene. Changing the copy without first framing is like changing the frame on a painting when you don’t yet know what the painting represents. It feels like you’re doing something, but the real problem is on the canvas, not on the edge.
The work of framing is less glamorous than communication. It doesn’t produce colourful slides, doesn’t present well in a meeting, doesn’t generate immediate consensus. It generates choices. The choices cost in the short term because they exclude. They pay back in the medium term because they let value emerge in a way the market can finally read.
When value is framed well, communicating it becomes almost easy. When it isn’t, no amount of communication saves it. You can only amplify it, and amplifying something unclear produces confusion at a larger scale.
The cure, again, is upstream. Frame first. Communicate second. Not the other way around.