Your message is getting lost. You spent an hour crafting that email, assembled the perfect deck, or built a website that showcases everything your company does. But when you ask someone what they took away from it, you get a blank stare or a vague response that misses the point entirely.
The problem lies in a fundamental gap between how you want to receive messages and how you produce them. We crave clarity when we’re on the receiving end, yet when we become the sender, we add complexity. We include more details, extra pages, additional features. The result? Messages that fail to connect, proposals that get ignored, and websites that confuse more than they convert.
Coming up, you’ll learn the five principles of simple communication that can transform how your business connects with customers, employees, and stakeholders. These principles come from Ben Guttmann, author of Simply Put: Why Clear Messages Win and How to Design Them and a marketing executive who has worked with major clients including the NFL and Comcast NBCUniversal. We recently explored these ideas on the Deliberate Leaders podcast, where Ben shared the research-backed framework he developed after selling his marketing agency and reflecting on what makes some messages succeed while others fail.
Why Most Business Messages Fail
Before diving into solutions, you need to understand the forces working against clarity. There’s a cognitive phenomenon called fluency that explains why simple messages work better than complex ones.
When something is fluent, it flows easily from the outside world into your brain…
When something is fluent, it flows easily from the outside world into your brain. You can process it quickly and make use of it without mental strain. Research across dozens of domains shows that when messages are easier to understand, people like them more, trust them more, and are more likely to buy what they’re selling.
The opposite is also true. Messages that require effort to decode, that use complicated language, or that present information in confusing ways trigger mental resistance. People associate that difficulty with negative outcomes, even if the underlying idea is sound.
Here’s where business leaders trip up. When you’re creating a message, you face internal and external pressures to add more. You want to cover all the features, address every objection, include all stakeholders. Scientists call this additive bias, and it’s hardwired into how humans approach problems.
When we are tasked with improving something or changing something, we almost always go to adding, to putting more words in, to putting more pages on, versus doing the opposite.
This tendency gets reinforced by workplace dynamics. You get recognition for the new initiative you added to the project. Your LinkedIn profile grows longer with each accomplishment. Everything in your environment pushes toward more, while your audience desperately needs less.
The Five Principles of Simple Communication
Ben Guttmann’s framework provides a practical way to bridge the gap between sender and receiver. These five design principles work together to create messages that cut through noise and drive action.
1. Beneficial: Answer “What’s in It for Them?”
Every message you send needs to matter to the person receiving it. This sounds obvious, yet most business communication focuses on what the sender wants to share, rather than what the audience needs to know.
Before you write that email or create that presentation, ask yourself what benefit the receiver will get. How does this help them solve a problem, make more money, save time, or reduce stress? If you cannot clearly articulate the benefit from their perspective, you’re already starting from a weak position.
The shift from sender-focused to receiver-focused thinking changes everything. When a website leads with the company name and logo taking up prime real estate, that’s sender-focused. When it leads with a clear statement of the problem it solves for customers, that’s receiver-focused.
2. Focused: Say One Thing at a Time
Ben Guttmann teaches marketing at Baruch College, and every semester he sees the same mistake. Students create what he calls “Frankenstein ideas,” combining multiple concepts into one campaign.
Every single one of those things could be good, could be a compelling idea. But when you put them all together, you’re fracturing your attention and your focus. And it’s worse than the sum of its parts.
The same principle applies to your business communication. When you try to communicate multiple priorities in one message, you end up communicating none of them effectively. Choose the most important point and build everything around that single idea.
This becomes especially critical with limited attention spans. Your audience will remember one clear message far better than three competing messages delivered simultaneously.
3. Salient: Stand Out from the Noise
Salient means noticeable. Your message needs contrast to cut through the constant stream of information your audience processes daily.
This doesn’t mean being loud or gimmicky. It means being different in a way that serves your message. When everyone in your industry uses formal corporate language, conversational tone stands out. When competitors bury their value proposition three pages deep, putting it front and center creates contrast.
Think about how your message appears in context. An email subject line needs to stand out in an inbox full of other subject lines. A presentation needs to differ from the ten other presentations your audience heard that week. Finding the right contrast point requires understanding what your audience typically encounters and zigging where others zag.
4. Empathetic: Speak Their Language
Empathy in communication means meeting your audience where they are, both literally and figuratively. You need to use language they understand and address emotions, motivations, and concerns that matter to them.
Leadership involves understanding where others are coming from, whether it’s a team member, customer, or client. Practice active listening and approach challenges with empathy to foster effective communication.
This principle extends beyond word choice. When someone gives you feedback or pushes back on your idea, they’re revealing their perspective and priorities. A complaint about teamwork might really be a request for clearer communication. Resistance to change might stem from fear of losing control.
Understanding the empathetic layer beneath surface-level communication helps you craft messages that resonate at a deeper level.
5. Minimal: Cut Everything That Adds Friction
Minimal doesn’t mean fewer words. It means less friction. Sometimes more words actually reduce friction by providing clarity that prevents confusion.
Think about a well-designed checkout process on a website. It might span multiple pages, but each page removes options and distractions that could derail the purchase. The number of pages increases, but the friction decreases because the path forward becomes crystal clear.
Apply this lens to your communication. Every technical term that requires explanation adds friction. Every tangent that distracts from your main point adds friction. Every decision point that doesn’t need to exist adds friction. Your job is to identify and eliminate these friction points, even if doing so requires more total content.
How to Apply This Framework
Understanding the five principles intellectually differs from applying them in practice. Here’s how to put this framework to work in common business scenarios.
1. Simplifying Your Website
Most business websites fail because they’re built for the company, rather than for customers. Your website is the biggest offender when it comes to unnecessary complexity, especially when planning decisions start without a clear scope or budget. Using a tool like the Elyptic Rise website cost calculator can help teams define expectations before adding features that dilute the message.
The fix starts with your homepage. The most valuable real estate on your site shouldn’t repeat your logo or company name. People already know they’re on your site. That prime space needs to communicate a clear benefit that makes visitors think, “Yes, I’m in the right place.”
Your website is for your customers or for your partners or for whoever your major stakeholders are. It doesn’t really matter that much what you like about your website. It matters that it’s conveying what it is that you want to convey to that group.
Structure your content for scanning, rather than reading. Break text into short paragraphs. Use descriptive headers that tell visitors what they’ll learn. Add bullet points, callout boxes, and visual weight to guide attention toward key information. Eye-tracking studies show that people don’t read web content in a linear fashion. They jump from headline to headline, looking for signals that the content addresses their needs.
2. Writing Effective Emails
Email communication suffers from two common problems. Leaders either write too much, burying their request in paragraphs of context, or write too little, leaving recipients confused about what action to take.
The solution involves applying the beneficial and focused principles together. Start with your request or main point. Then provide the minimum context needed to support that point. If you find yourself writing more than three short paragraphs, you’re probably including information that belongs in a separate message or attachment.
One subtle shift makes a significant difference. Write to one person, rather than to a crowd. Even if your email goes to a large list, each individual reads it alone. When you write as if speaking to a single person, your message becomes more personal and compelling.
3. Improving Presentations
Presentations reveal the additive bias in full force. Leaders feel compelled to include every detail, address every possible question, and pack slides with information. The audience leaves overwhelmed and remembers nothing.
Challenge yourself to identify the one thing your audience needs to remember. Build your entire presentation around that single idea. Supporting points should reinforce the main message, rather than competing with it for attention.
Use slides as visual aids, rather than teleprompters. If your slides contain everything you plan to say, you’re creating friction by forcing your audience to read while trying to listen. Keep slides minimal and direct attention toward you as the speaker.
The Hidden Cost of Complexity
When messages fail to connect, the consequences extend far beyond wasted time. Unclear communication damages trust. Customers who can’t understand your value proposition buy from competitors who explain themselves better. Employees who receive confusing direction make mistakes or do nothing while waiting for clarity.
Research from SpyFu and other SEO platforms shows that simpler, clearer content performs better in search results. Google’s algorithms increasingly reward content that directly answers user questions with minimal friction. The same principles that make your communication effective with humans also make it effective with search engines.
The businesses that win in 2026 and beyond will be those that resist the urge to add complexity. They’ll craft focused messages, eliminate jargon, and respect their audience’s limited time and attention. This requires discipline, because every instinct pushes toward adding more.
Make Subtraction Visible
Ben Guttmann shares research showing that simply making subtraction an option dramatically increases how often people choose it. When given instructions that include “you can add or remove,” people suddenly see removal as a viable path.
You can apply this insight immediately. In your next planning meeting, explicitly ask what you should remove or simplify, rather than only discussing what to add. When editing a document, give yourself permission to delete entire sections that don’t serve your core message. When designing a new initiative, start by listing what you won’t do.
The path to simpler communication starts with recognizing that less really can be more. Your audience will thank you with their attention, their trust, and their business.
If you’re ready to clarify your business message and communicate with the strategic precision that drives results, consider booking a complimentary strategy session with one of our executive business coaches. We’ll help you identify where complexity is costing you opportunities and develop a focused approach that connects with your market.
Not sure if you're the bottleneck? Find out in 2 minutes →
