If someone asked you to describe an elephant, how would you begin?

You might talk about its size: the sheer mass of the animal, impossible to miss in the wild. You might point to its gray, wrinkled skin, or the way it flaps its ears like giant sails. Perhaps you’d start with its trunk, the feature everyone remembers. Or you might lean on metaphor: “It’s like a living bulldozer, with tusks instead of steel.”

All of those descriptions would be true. But the question is: would they actually help the person asking understand what an elephant is?

That’s the paradox we face when we try to describe anything complex. There isn’t one truth about an elephant; there are many. The “right” description depends not only on the elephant itself, but on who’s asking and why they care.

If a child asked, you might say: “It’s like a really big cow with a long nose it can use like a hand.” If a zoologist asked, you’d give details about taxonomy, behavior, and habitat. Both are rooted in truth, but they meet the listener where they are.

That, to me, is the essence of messaging.

Messaging vs. the Message

The message is the elephant — the truth of what you want to say. Messaging is the act of shaping, contextualizing, and delivering that truth in a way the audience can absorb.

It’s similar to the difference between philosophy and philosophizing.

Philosophy is the body of ideas: the texts, the arguments, the systems of thought that stand on their own. Philosophizing is the act of grappling with those ideas: of talking, testing, and shaping them so they can live in conversation.

Philosophy is content. Philosophizing is craft.

In the same way, your message is the substance of what's true about your product, your company, your cause. Messaging is the craft of bridging the gap between that truth and someone else’s understanding.

And when we mistake one for the other, we can lose sight of what matters most: the messages needs to resonate so that the audiences understands.

Why Messaging Matters to Growth

This is also why messaging is not just a branding exercise or a “nice-to-have.” It sits at the heart of growth.

Given my own career, I have a natural bias to spending time here. I’ve seen again and again that when messaging is off, growth suffers — not in abstract ways, but in the mechanics of how the funnel works.

Good messaging results, at its core, in saying the right thing to the right person at the right time. When you fail at that, everything downstream starts to wobble.

• If you don’t get the right people engaged, you end up with less relevant volume at the top of your funnel.

• If your story introduces friction or fails to resonate, deal cycles slow down, reducing velocity.

• And if your message doesn’t land in a way that makes someone want to buy, adopt, or champion your product, you’ll see weaker conversion at the bottom.

But beyond those mechanics, poor messaging creates tremendous waste. It wastes marketing dollars spent bringing the wrong people into your funnel. It wastes sales teams’ time chasing deals that were never viable. It wastes product and operations resources that are forced to rework, reposition, or defend against confusion that could have been avoided. In high-growth companies, where every quarter counts, this wasted effort compounds, dragging down efficiency and morale in equal measure.

In other words, messaging isn’t just about saying things clearly. It’s about protecting the entire system of growth from unnecessary drag.

The Risks of Getting It Wrong

When we confuse messaging with the message, we risk falling into two traps.

1. Over-simplification. This is when we sand off the edges of the truth just to make it palatable. On the surface, this seems harmless; after all, it makes the story easier to tell. But for audiences whose context requires subject-matter depth, over-simplification can quickly backfire.

   In risk-based arrangements in US healthcare, for instance, I’ve seen how critical it is to speak in ways that reflect genuine understanding of clinical context, actuarial analyses, and government policies. Doctors or health systems executives who hear messaging that glosses over the nuances of Value-Based Care won’t just think the story is incomplete; they may perceive it as inauthentic. That perception creates distrust. And distrust doesn’t just block engagement at the top of the funnel; it poisons conversion rates at the bottom.

   
   

2. Over-complication. The opposite trap is overwhelming the audience with detail. This often happens when we mistake comprehensiveness for clarity. But too much information becomes noise, and noise fails to resonate. I’ve seen this most clearly when engaging with senior executive clients, like the Fortune 500 strategy leaders engaged at clients at a prior company where I worked. These were brilliant, seasoned people, but they were also time-pressed. They didn’t need the 30-slide taxonomy of our product’s capabilities. They needed the synthesis: the two or three truths that made our solution matter in their world. Without that, they tuned out.

The art of messaging lies in avoiding both extremes. It’s about striking a balance: giving enough substance to be credible and authentic, while distilling enough to be clear and resonant.

Your Company as the Elephant

Imagine your company — and, more specifically, the products or services it offers to clients — as the elephant. It's real, massive, and full of moving parts. The truth of it exists whether or not anyone sees it clearly.

Your job in messaging is to help people make sense of it. For a prospect at the very top, you might emphasize the big picture: the value your company creates and the pains you solve. For someone deeper in the process, you might highlight specific proof points: customer stories, ROI metrics, or product features.

It’s the same elephant, but different slices of truth matter in different contexts.

And when you get this right — when you help the person in front of you actually see the elephant — they’re more likely to walk with you, to trust you, and eventually, to buy.

Messaging as an Ongoing Act

One last thought: messaging isn’t static. Just like philosophizing, it’s an ongoing act.

Philosophy doesn’t end once the text is written or the book is published; it lives as people engage with it, argue about it, reinterpret it. In the same way, messaging isn’t just the slide deck you publish or the tagline you settle on. It lives in the conversations your sales team has, in the way your product team explains a roadmap, in the language your customers use when they describe what you do to their peers.

It’s dynamic, adaptive, and alive.

And if you treat it that way — not as a one-time deliverable, but as an act of continuous bridging between truth and understanding — you’ll find it not only clarifies what you’re saying, but also shapes how others see you, your product, and your company.

What Others See

So, how would you describe an elephant?

There’s no single answer. But there is a right answer for the person standing in front of you. And the craft of finding that answer? That’s messaging.

Not the whole truth, not a distortion of it, but the slice of truth that helps someone genuinely understand.

Because at the end of the day, messaging isn’t just about what we say. It’s about what others are able to see.