“Just tell people what you’re selling”
This is the advice everyone gives.
It sounds obvious. Self-evident, even. If people don’t understand what you do, just explain it better. Be clearer. Simplify your message.
In practice, this is one of the hardest problems in marketing.
It’s especially hard as products mature, expand, or become more complex. What started as a simple value proposition becomes layered with features, use cases, technical nuance, and positioning considerations. Six months later, you’re explaining things in three different ways across your website, social media, and sales conversations—and none of them feel quite right.
Most businesses aren’t unclear because they’re incompetent. They’re unclear because the problem is harder than it looks.
And here’s what makes it harder: the real problem isn’t what most people think it is.
The Real Problem: You’re Optimizing for Impression, Not Understanding
People keep telling you they don’t understand what you do.
They visit your site and leave confused. They ask “but what do you actually offer?” They can’t explain you to someone else—because you never actually explained yourself to them.
This isn’t a copywriting problem. It’s a prioritization problem.
Most businesses explain what they do poorly because they’re optimizing for the wrong thing. They’re trying to sound advanced. Credible. Impressive. Technical.
The result? Buzzwords. Jargon. Abstract language. Catchy slogans that say nothing.
Examples you’ve seen a thousand times:
- “Revolutionizing the future of decentralized finance”
- “Next-generation AI-powered infrastructure for Web3”
- “Empowering seamless cross-chain interoperability”
What problem does “revolutionizing decentralized finance” solve? What does “next-generation” actually mean? What is “seamless cross-chain interoperability” and why should anyone care?
You’re using abstract or highly technical language because you think it makes you sound credible. In reality, it makes you sound pretentious and creates a disconnect from your audience.
People don’t want to feel impressed. They want to understand you—and they want you to understand them.
This shows up everywhere:
- Homepage — 3 seconds to make an impression, wasted on “revolutionizing the ecosystem”
- Social media — Bio full of buzzwords that sound like everyone else
- Content — Ranking for keywords but not explaining what you actually do
- Sales — Prospects asking “but what do you actually do?” because your pitch was all positioning
- Community — Users can’t explain you to others because your narrative is built on abstraction
Here’s what you need to understand:
Technical language doesn’t make you credible—it makes you inaccessible. Buzzwords don’t make you innovative—they make you sound like everyone else. Catchy slogans don’t create memorability—they create confusion.
The principle: Credibility comes from being understood, not from sounding advanced.
This is what separates companies that grow from companies that struggle. The ones that grow have figured out how to be clear. The ones that struggle are still trying to sound impressive.
Why Traditional Solutions Don’t Work Anymore
The traditional answer to this problem is the elevator pitch: a concise, memorable explanation you can deliver in 30-60 seconds.
The elevator pitch was designed for a specific context: synchronous, in-person communication with uninterrupted attention. You’re in an elevator. Someone asks what you do. You deliver your pitch. They either get it or they don’t.
That model made sense when most business conversations happened face-to-face.
But modern buying journeys are nothing like this. They’re asynchronous. Fragmented. Digital-first. Self-directed.
Most people never “hear” your pitch in a linear, controlled format. They encounter fragments of it across many touchpoints:
- A tweet that shows up in their feed
- Your homepage hero section when they visit for the first time
- A blog post they found through search
- A mention in an article or podcast
- A conversation with someone who uses your product
Each touchpoint offers a different level of attention, context, and prior knowledge. Some people are seeing you for the first time. Others are returning after weeks of research.
The elevator pitch assumes you control the narrative delivery. In an inbound world, you don’t.
You need something different. You need narrative infrastructure—a foundation that works across surfaces, contexts, and attention levels.
Introducing the Clear Value Narrative
A Clear Value Narrative is not a pitch. It’s not a slogan. It’s not a tagline you memorize.
It’s a system-level articulation of value—a foundational way of explaining what you do that’s grounded in the audience’s problem and outcome, adaptable across contexts, and consistent in meaning (not wording).
Think of it as narrative infrastructure. Your homepage, your content, your social presence, your sales conversations—all of these are expressions of the same underlying narrative, adapted for different contexts and constraints.
When this foundation is clear, everything else becomes easier:
- Writing your homepage doesn’t require starting from scratch
- Your team can explain what you do consistently
- New hires understand your value proposition quickly
- Partners and customers can articulate what you do to others
- Every touchpoint reinforces the same core understanding
When it’s unclear or inconsistent, every surface feels like a separate problem to solve. You’re improvising constantly, and the improvisation creates drift.
Here’s the key insight: A Clear Value Narrative is infrastructure, not messaging.
It’s designed once and adapted many times. It’s maintained over time as your business evolves. It’s the foundation everything else builds on.
This is why it fits into inbound marketing systems. Inbound relies on self-directed evaluation—people researching on their own time, across multiple touchpoints, before they ever engage with you directly. If your narrative isn’t clear and consistent across those touchpoints, belief formation stalls.
How Narrative Functions as Infrastructure (The TTN Connection)
The Clear Value Narrative plays a specific role in how belief forms.
In the TTN framework, three dimensions must align for trust to compound:
- Technology — What exists (is something real being built?)
- Trust — Why it’s credible (can claims be verified?)
- Narrative — How it’s understood (does it make sense to the audience?)
Narrative is sense-making infrastructure. It translates technical complexity into comprehensible value. It’s what allows someone to go from “I heard about this project” to “I understand what this project does and why it’s relevant to me.”
Without clear narrative, even strong technology and trust signals fail to convert attention into belief. People might acknowledge you’re legitimate and building something real, but if they don’t understand what it is or why it matters, they won’t act.
This is where most companies break down. They build real technology. They establish trust signals. But they can’t explain what they do in a way that resonates with their audience.
The Clear Value Narrative solves that problem.
The Shift: From Features to Outcomes
Here’s what most companies do wrong:
They lead with features. They lead with technology. They lead with mechanism.
Examples:
- “Decentralized protocol for cross-chain liquidity aggregation”
- “AI-powered analytics platform for Web3 ecosystems”
- “Permissionless infrastructure enabling seamless interoperability”
When you’re building something technical, you think in terms of how it works—the architecture, the features, the differentiation. This is natural. You’re immersed in the mechanism.
But your audience isn’t starting there. They’re starting from a problem they have or an outcome they want.
When you lead with mechanism, you’re asking them to do translation work: “Here’s how it works—now figure out why it matters to you.”
Most people won’t do that work. They’ll leave.
People recognize problems before solutions.
Someone searching for “how to reduce DeFi risk” immediately understands their problem. They don’t yet know what solutions exist. If you lead with the problem or outcome, you meet them where they are.
Jargon increases cognitive load. Every unfamiliar term requires the reader to pause and decide whether to keep going. Familiar language builds trust—when you speak the way they speak, they feel understood.
This doesn’t mean dumbing things down. It means starting with the outcome and working backward to the mechanism.
Instead of “decentralized protocol for cross-chain liquidity aggregation,” try “access liquidity across multiple blockchains without moving assets manually.”
Same technology. Different framing. One creates understanding. The other creates confusion.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Let me show you how this works using our own business.
Techtonic’s core value narrative: We design inbound marketing systems that turn attention into trust and trust into revenue.
That’s the foundational articulation. Everything derives from it. But it shows up differently across surfaces:
Homepage: “Inbound marketing systems for high-trust businesses. We design how people evaluate, trust, and decide.”
Social media: “Inbound marketing for crypto, DeFi, and high-trust businesses. Systems-first. No fluff.”
Content (this article): Educational deep-dives that demonstrate systems thinking without pitching services. The value narrative is implicit in the quality and approach. You’re reading an article about narrative as infrastructure—that’s the narrative being demonstrated, not stated.
Sales conversations: “We work with companies where trust is the bottleneck—DeFi protocols, technical platforms, capital-intensive businesses. We design the full evaluation journey, not just individual tactics.”
Notice what’s consistent:
- Inbound as systems, not tactics
- High-trust businesses as the target audience
- Focus on evaluation and decision-making
- Emphasis on design and architecture
Notice what adapts:
- Depth of explanation
- Technical vs accessible language
- Context-specific framing
- Whether the value is stated or demonstrated
Each surface serves a different function:
- Homepage needs to create immediate understanding
- Social media needs to work in a scrolling context
- Content demonstrates expertise through value delivery
- Sales conversations address specific fit and concerns
But the underlying meaning remains the same. This is what narrative infrastructure enables.
When your narrative is managed at the system level, every touchpoint compounds. Someone sees you on Twitter, visits your homepage, reads an article, and hears the same core story expressed in contextually appropriate ways. The repetition builds familiarity. The consistency builds trust.
Common Ways This Breaks Down
Understanding how narrative infrastructure fails helps you avoid the same mistakes.
Over-Explaining Instead of Clarifying
Products evolve. Features multiply. The instinct is to add more explanation to capture the complexity.
The homepage hero becomes a paragraph. The social bio turns into a feature list. The narrative becomes comprehensive but incomprehensible.
Comprehensiveness and clarity are often in tension. More words don’t create more understanding—they create more cognitive load.
Retreating to Vague Abstractions
When you can’t explain something clearly, abstraction feels safe. “The future of onchain passive income.” “Revolutionary infrastructure for the next generation of Web3.”
Vague abstractions can’t be proven wrong. But they can’t be understood either. When you’re unclear about what you actually do, people fill in the gaps with assumptions—and those assumptions are usually wrong.
Letting Each Channel Drift
Marketing writes the homepage. Product writes documentation. Sales improvises. Social media has its own voice.
No one coordinates. Each team optimizes for their channel in isolation. Six months later, the homepage narrative doesn’t match what the sales team says, which doesn’t match the documentation.
This isn’t a failure of individual teams. It’s a failure to treat narrative as infrastructure requiring system-level ownership.
Narrative Lagging Behind Product Evolution
What you built six months ago is not what you’re building now. Features were added. Positioning shifted. Use cases evolved.
But the narrative didn’t evolve with it.
The business moves faster than the narrative. By the time you realize messaging is outdated, you’re already explaining things differently in conversations than on your website.
Narrative drift compounds slowly, interaction by interaction, until the gap becomes obvious.
How to Build Your Clear Value Narrative
I’m not giving you a formula. But I can give you the right questions.
Start with the Problem They Already Know
Not the technical problem you’re solving. The felt problem they recognize and care about.
You might be building technology that enables permissionless cross-chain asset transfers. But your audience’s recognized problem might be “I can’t easily move my assets between Ethereum and Solana without paying high fees and waiting forever.”
The technical problem is interesting to you. The felt problem drives their behavior.
Your narrative should start where they are, not where you are.
Frame the Outcome, Not the Mechanism
Revenue? Security? Time saved? Risk reduced? Simplicity? Control?
Outcomes are what people evaluate. Features are how you deliver them.
This is where technical founders struggle. You’re proud of the elegant architecture. You want to talk about the novel mechanism. But if the outcome isn’t immediately clear, you’ve lost them.
Frame the outcome first. Let the mechanism follow for people who want to go deeper.
Use Their Language, Not Yours
Listen to how your audience describes their problems. What words show up repeatedly? What do they call the thing you’re building?
If you’re building a liquidity aggregator and your audience calls it “a way to find better rates,” your narrative should reflect that language, not force new terminology.
Language alignment is a trust signal. When you speak the way they speak, they feel understood. When you require them to learn your vocabulary, you create distance.
Track Where Confusion Appears
When someone asks “so what do you actually do?” after visiting your site, where did they get lost?
Confusion shows up in predictable places:
- Overly abstract language that doesn’t ground in concrete outcomes
- Technical jargon without context
- Missing the “why it matters” connection
- Assuming knowledge the audience doesn’t have
Track where people ask follow-up questions. Track where they disengage. That’s where your narrative infrastructure is breaking down.
Audit as You Evolve
Products change. Use cases shift. Audiences expand.
If your narrative was written when you were early-stage and focused on one narrow use case, but now you serve three different audiences with broader capabilities, the old narrative creates confusion.
Periodic narrative audits ensure the story still matches reality. Not constant rewrites—that creates instability. But intentional check-ins.
The goal is simple: Can someone who’s never heard of you read your explanation and immediately understand what you do, why it matters, and whether it’s relevant to them?
If yes, your narrative infrastructure is working.
If no, you know where to focus.
Why This Matters More in High-Trust Markets
Everything I’ve described applies broadly, but clarity becomes critical in high-trust environments.
If you’re building in DeFi, infrastructure, technical platforms, or any space where decisions are slow and stakes are high, narrative infrastructure compounds in importance.
Longer evaluation cycles mean consistency matters more. People research for weeks or months. Your narrative must remain coherent across that entire timeline. Drift or inconsistency creates doubt.
Higher perceived risk means vagueness raises flags. When capital, reputation, or technical integration is on the line, people scrutinize harder. If they can’t understand what you do, they assume it’s risky.
Trust compounds over time—so does clarity. Every touchpoint either adds to or subtracts from the trust balance. If your narrative is unclear at one touchpoint, confidence stalls at the next.
Clarity doesn’t just make evaluation easier. It accelerates confidence formation.
When someone can easily explain what you do to someone else—that’s when narrative infrastructure is working. When they struggle to articulate it, or describe it differently than you do, there’s a gap.
Build the Foundation First
Most businesses treat narrative as something that happens in the background while they focus on “real” marketing—traffic, conversions, leads.
But narrative is upstream of all of those things.
If people don’t understand what you do, traffic doesn’t convert. If they can’t articulate your value, referrals don’t happen. If your story drifts, trust erodes.
A Clear Value Narrative is infrastructure. It’s the foundational articulation of value that supports everything else in your inbound system. It precedes traffic, conversion, and growth. It’s what makes every other marketing effort coherent instead of fragmented.
Like all infrastructure, it must be designed intentionally. It doesn’t emerge naturally from shipping product updates or running campaigns. It requires deliberate thought, system-level ownership, and periodic refinement as your business evolves.
The businesses that win in high-trust markets treat narrative like infrastructure. They design it. They maintain it. They evolve it as the company evolves.
They understand that clarity isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the foundation everything else builds on.
The question isn’t whether your narrative needs work. It’s whether you’re treating it like the infrastructure it is—or leaving it to chance.
In This Series:
- The Inbound Marketing Guide for 2026 — How inbound functions as decision infrastructure
- What an Inbound Marketing System Actually Includes — The components and scope of inbound systems
- The Clear Value Narrative — How clarity enables understanding and trust across touchpoints
