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How to fix stitched-together messaging

A lot of multi-product companies build their messaging the same way they build their products: one team, one story, ship it.

Then another team, another story. Then another. Each product becomes its own world with its own voice, its own angle, its own claim on the customer’s attention. And sometimes those individual stories are actually good. Really good. The copy works, the positioning is tight, and the product team is happy.

But nobody at the company can tell you what common thread, or big idea, or point of view holds it all together.

I recently had a chat with someone running marketing at a company like this, and they described it exactly: each product has its own vibe and feel and it works great. But there’s not a cohesive view, not a cohesive message coming out. It’s hard to pin down, unless you start getting clear signals like a decrease in conversions, confusion from prospects in sales calls, or hard conversations with investors.

The natural reaction is to write new copy. I’ve had clients come to me thinking they need a better way to say what they already have, but digging deeper it’s almost always a positioning problem.

Here’s why this happens. Product teams get formed, they ship, they bring in their own copywriter or agency, they create messaging that works pretty well for that specific product. But… nobody is responsible for the company’s overall story, not really. The CEO might have a version of it. The founder definitely does. But there’s no role whose job is to sit in the ambiguity of “what does this company stand for that no one else can claim” and actually answer it. That work is slow, doesn’t “ship” anything, and often feels like a meeting that could have been an email.

Monday.com is the case that proves the rule. They started as “dapulse”: a simple team task tracker. Then expanded into a full Work OS — project management, CRM, marketing tracking, software development, and the original positioning no longer fit. Customers who knew dapulse struggled to recognize the expanded Monday.com.

The product had become a platform and nobody had done the work of deciding what the platform stood for. The only fix was the full rebranding to Monday.com with the “Work OS” positioning, restructuring the product narrative from scratch. Only then could the copy carry the weight it needed to.

The status quo is that the company story is whatever you get when you mash all the product pages together. Not great.

The test for whether you have this positioning and messaging architecture problem or just a copy refresh problem is simple:

After a prospect has scrolled through your homepage, do they instantly “get” what you do, who you do it for, and how you deliver it to them?

That last part, is especially important if you’re a multi-product company, because other than understanding what you stand for, and how you help customers, it tells them all the ways you do it, too (your products). If the individual products are still telling their own stories in their own voices with their own claims, and prospects have to go and look at their product pages to figure it out, there’s work to do.

Real change starts upstream. It starts with someone, one person, maybe, being willing to sit in the hard question of what the company actually stands for. Not the product, the company first. And then cascading that story down to how each product fits into it.

Copy can only carry the weight it’s designed to carry. If the architecture is broken, every piece of copy has to work twice as hard to hold things together.

DISCOVERY

Here's three great pieces I've read this week.

1. “The Narrative Is the Business” by Jihad Esmail​

Writing is no longer a byproduct of work—it is the work. In the age of AI, what an organization writes (prompts, specs, narratives) directly determines what gets built.

Writing = thinking = building

Every time anyone at your company sits down to write, they're building your messaging architecture.

2. “Sell the Work, Not the Tool” by Vladyslav Podoliako​

The next wave of billion/trillion-dollar companies won’t sell software tools. They’ll do the work instead of helping you do it.

When you sell outcomes and not capabilities, the unifying story needs to be even more consistent and cohesive.

3. “Handmade Designs: The New Trust Signal” by Megan Chan (NNGroup)

In a world flooded with AI-generated content, “handmade” design has become a trust signal. People are starting to value things that feel human, imperfect, and intentional. Does your copy feel like that too?

RESONANCE

Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow

Have a great weekend!

Cheers,

Chris

Chris Silvestri Founder & conversion alchemist

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