Why Growth Becomes Expensive When the Market Doesn’t Understand You
How organisations create the conditions that determine whether they are understood - and what that costs.
An organisation is a signalling system.
Every external expression of the business contributes to how it is interpreted:
• What the product does - and how clearly that is understood
• How pricing reflects confidence, positioning, and value
• Where and how the company shows up in market
• The quality and consistency of customer experience
• Who the company hires, and how those roles are described
• What leadership says - and where they say it
• Which partners, platforms, and events the company chooses to align with
The market doesn’t separate these. It combines them into a single judgement:
What kind of company is this - and is it relevant to me?
That judgement determines whether you are recognised, how easily you are compared, whether you are trusted, and how much explanation is required before a commercial conversation can begin.
This is the combined effect of product, price, place, and promotion—whether coordinated or not.
Why execution isn’t the only constraint
When communications or promotional activity underperform, the default response is to adjust message, channel, or spend.
There is some truth in that. Poor placement or timing reduces effectiveness.
But the same outcome occurs when the organisation itself isn’t clearly understood.
A campaign can reach the right audience, in the right environment, at the right time - and still fail to land if the company behind it is unclear, inconsistent, or difficult to categorise.
Media context determines whether you are seen.
Organisational context determines whether you are understood.
Where context fails: Product launches
Consider a major product or technology launch at a global industry event.
The execution is strong:
• coordinated customer communications across email and web
• updated product pages, video, collateral, PR, ads – all with clear calls to action
• sales briefed, motivated and aligned
• launch timed to coincide with peak industry attention
At the event itself:
• multiple competitors are announcing similar innovations
• buyers are moving between meetings, content, and conversations
• attention is fragmented and selective
What determines impact is how the launch fits with what the market already believes.
If the company is known for solving a specific problem, has a track record of delivering on its claims, and the product clearly addresses a recognised need, the market will engage—even if the category is competitive. Buyers will invest time, and in some cases take a calculated risk, if they can quickly understand what is different and why it matters.
If the company’s positioning is unclear, its product story fragmented, or its claims feel interchangeable, and they’re less well known or remembered, the same launch is processed as background noise.
The difference isn’t execution. It is whether the market can immediately place and interpret what it is seeing.
Launches don’t create significance. They expose whether the organisation has made itself understandable.
Where context is missing: Market expansion
A different constraint appears when organisations expand into new markets.
In an established market, the company benefits from accumulated understanding—recognition, credibility, category placement. In a new geography, none of that exists.
The go-to-market plan is typically sound:
• defined ICPs and account segmentation
• local sales teams and outbound activity
• hosted events in key cities
• selective industry media and partnerships
This generates engagement. Meetings happen. Pipeline begins to form.
But progress is slower than expected.
Because the market must first answer a more basic question:
Who is this company, and why should I take it seriously?
Sales teams bridge this gap in predictable ways:
• cold outreach supported by intent signals
• competitor anchoring (“we’re like X, but…”)
• extended time in meetings explaining category and capability
This works, but at a cost.
Every interaction carries the burden of explanation. Positioning is constructed in conversation rather than established in advance. Narrative control sits with the salesperson, not the market.
The result is slower conversion, inconsistent positioning across accounts, dependency on individual sales capability, and higher cost of acquisition.
You can build a market one conversation at a time. Or you can build it once and let every conversation start further ahead.
The practical implication is sequencing.
In new markets, organisations need to validate how they are currently understood, then invest in making that understanding clear before expecting demand generation and sales efficiency to scale.
The hidden cost of weak context
When the organisation is difficult to understand, the cost shows up across the business in practical ways:
• Sales: time is spent explaining what the company does and how it compares before progressing a deal; deals stall or default to better-known competitors
• Product: new features are released but not fully valued because their relevance isn’t immediately clear
• Customer success: onboarding includes re-framing what was sold, increasing time to value
• Hiring: roles attract volume but not quality, or candidates hesitate because the company’s direction is unclear
• Partnerships: potential partners require additional effort to understand positioning and fit
• Investor relations: more time is spent explaining strategy and differentiation to sustain confidence
The cost sits in payroll, in cycle time, and in the underutilisation of capability.
When positioning is clear—when the proposition is expressed simply, the category is well defined, and the organisation is consistently understood—the dynamic changes.
Sales conversations begin with context already established. Product value is recognised more quickly. Customers adopt faster. Candidates understand why they should join. Partners align more easily. Investors require less interpretation.
Commercial effort shifts from explanation to progression.
Scale introduces complexity
In global organisations, maintaining this clarity becomes harder.
Headquarters may define a strong narrative, but regions adapt messaging, pricing, partnerships, and execution to local conditions. Each decision is rational.
Without guidance, the result is divergence:
• different ways of describing the same capability
• inconsistent category framing
• local adaptations that dilute core positioning
Effective localisation isn’t translation. It is interpretation with discipline.
It requires understanding what the core narrative means in each market, and equipping regional teams with language, examples, and assets that reinforce—not reinterpret—that meaning.
Without that, scale introduces noise rather than reach.
Interpreters of your signals
Some audiences shape how others understand you.
Industry analysts, technical publications, and financial analysts don’t simply receive information—they interpret it, compare it, and position it within a broader narrative.
They define categories, validate claims, and influence how buyers and investors evaluate options.
If organisational signals are clear, these groups reinforce them. If not, they resolve the ambiguity themselves—often in ways that are difficult to shift later.
Reframing the role of marketing
Marketing isn’t just responsible for communications or promotion.
It is the function that most consistently measures how the organisation is understood—and where that understanding breaks down.
That creates a broader responsibility.
Not to control every signal, but to help define and monitor the framework through which the organisation is interpreted.
This sits alongside the CEO.
The CEO defines direction and intent.
The CMO ensures that intent is recognisable, coherent, and usable in market.
A more useful metric
Most organisations track revenue, pipeline, awareness, and campaign performance.
Few track whether they are understood clearly—and what that means commercially.
A more useful construct links revenue efficiency and reputation strength:
• how easily the market recognises the company
• how accurately it understands what the company does
• how much effort is required to convert that understanding into commercial outcomes
When this is strong, sales cycles shorten, conversion improves, pricing holds, and marketing and communications work more efficiently.
When it is weak, effort increases across every function, cost rises in less visible ways, and growth depends on sustained, manual explanation.
Conclusion
Organisations don’t operate in a neutral environment.
They operate within conditions they are continuously creating through their own signals.
Those signals determine whether the business is easy to understand, easy to trust, and easy to buy from—or invest in, partner with, and work for.
Over time, that condition compounds.
It can be built deliberately. Or it can be left to form by default.
If the organisation were assessed solely on how clearly the market understands it, what would that reveal?
Where signals are fragmented or contradictory, the commercial cost is already being paid—often in places that are not immediately visible.
The question then becomes: are we producing a consistent, interpretable set of signals as a business?
That work doesn’t sit within a single function. But it does require a clear owner, a shared framework, and a willingness to align how the organisation presents itself with how it expects to grow.
Two Jacks Communications works with CEOs and CMOs to diagnose how their organisation is understood in market, and to build the frameworks that improve commercial efficiency over time.
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