I sat down on Marketing Smarts with Steve Woodruff, author of The Point: How to Win with Clarity-Fueled Communications, expecting a fun conversation about writing better emails. What I got instead was a gut check.
Steve said something in the first two minutes that has not left me since. Companies pour enormous time, money, and creativity into their work, and then fall flat at the moment of truth: actually getting the point across. That is not a small marketing problem. That is the whole game.
If you have ever sent a campaign, written a proposal, or run a meeting and felt it just did not land, this one is for you.
The Nightmare and the Dream Behind Every Message
Steve framed it as a nightmare and a dream living side by side. The nightmare is labor in vain. You build the deck, write the email, launch the campaign, and the point never actually reaches the other person's brain. The dream is the opposite: saying something so precisely, so vividly, and so clearly that it turns the light on in someone else's mind almost instantly.
Here is the part most business leaders skip past. This is not only a marketing issue. It shows up in career interviews, sales calls, internal memos, and every meeting that runs long because nobody said what they actually needed. Every one of us has stood in that fog, waiting for someone to just get to the point.
Reflective question: Think about the last presentation, email, or pitch you sent. Did the reader know what mattered within the first few seconds, or did they have to go hunting for it?
You Are a Communication Designer, Whether You Know It or Not
This idea reframes everything. Steve put it simply: every single one of us, professionally and personally, is a communication designer. We are all crafting words to transmit ideas. Some of us are good at it. Some of us are not. But nobody gets to opt out of the role.
The tricky part is this. Two people can use the exact same words and walk away with two different meanings. Steve calls this the mental metadata problem. Every word carries hidden tags built from someone's experience and history, so when you say a word, you cannot assume the other person heard the same thing you meant. Communication is not what you send. It is what actually lands.
That means miscommunication is not a rare glitch. It is the default setting, unless you design against it on purpose.
Stop Delivering the Haystack: Why Stratifying Your Message Wins
Here is the strategy Steve leans on hardest, and it might be the single most useful idea in this whole conversation: information stratifying.
Picture a pyramid with three levels.
- Top of the pyramid: the distilled point. What matters, what is relevant, what is important, delivered in seconds. This is your only shot at earning attention.
- Middle of the pyramid: background, a bit more story, a few supporting details, but only once you have earned the right to keep talking.
- Bottom of the pyramid: the full detail, reserved for the people who are already leaning in.
Most business communication does the opposite. It backs the truck up to the front door and dumps the whole haystack on the reader at once, then hopes they will dig through it to find the needle. The brain does not work that way. Faced with too much unstructured information, it simply shuts down.
Practical takeaway: Before you send anything, ask yourself what the top of your pyramid is. If you cannot say it in one sentence, you are not ready to write the email yet.
The Clarity Fuel Formula: Four Rules for Every Kind of Message
Steve built his book around a formula that applies to email, presentations, branding, leadership, and yes, marketing content. He calls it the Clarity Fuel Formula, and it starts with four rules.
- Have a point. If you cannot state your purpose in one sentence, you have nothing to communicate yet. This sounds obvious, and it is astonishing how many people talk without ever landing on one.
- Get to the point, fast. Human attention is under brutal competition. The classic estimate in communication science, often traced to Nørretranders' research on consciousness, puts the human sensory system at processing around 11 million bits of information per second, while conscious attention handles roughly 50 bits at a time. Britannica Newer research out of Caltech in 2025 pushes this even further, suggesting the brain's actual decision-making speed may run closer to 10 bits per second. Technology Networks Either way, the math is not in your favor. You are fighting for a sliver of bandwidth against everything else competing for someone's brain.
- Get your point across. This is where you turn the light on. You are not done once words leave your mouth or your keyboard. You are done when the other person actually understands what you meant, not just what you said.
- Get on the same page. Communication has a job to do: move people toward alignment and action. A 30 second drug commercial does not try to explain the whole pharmacology. It ends with one clear ask: talk to your doctor. Every piece of business communication should know its version of that ask.
The Eight Brain-Friendly Tools, All Starting With S
Once you have the four rules in place, Steve's book hands you eight practical shortcuts for making your point unforgettable. He calls them brain-friendly because they match how the human brain actually likes to receive information.
- Statements: clear, direct declarations of what you mean.
- Snippets: short, quotable chunks that are easy to repeat.
- Specifics: concrete details instead of vague generalities.
- Stories: narrative moments that make an idea memorable.
- Stakes: naming what is at risk if the point is missed.
- Symbols: metaphors and comparisons that do heavy lifting in a few words. Steve's example in our conversation: calling someone "the Mercedes of podcasters" instantly signals quality, luxury, and top tier, all in one phrase.
- Side by sides: direct comparisons that make a distinction obvious.
- Summaries: a tight wrap-up that reinforces the point one more time.
Practical takeaway: Pick your next piece of content, whether it is an email, a landing page, or a sales deck, and see how many of these eight tools show up. If the answer is zero, that is likely why it is not landing.
Why This Matters More in 2026 Than It Did a Few Years Ago
This conversation would have mattered in any decade. It matters more right now.
Screen time keeps climbing rather than leveling off. Global average daily screen time sits around 6 hours and 45 minutes in 2026, with US users averaging just over 7 hours a day. Blank Spaces That is more competing content, more competing notifications, and less patience for a message that takes too long to get to the point.
At the same time, B2B content itself has gotten noisier. AI tools have made it easy to generate a high volume of content fast, which means buyers are wading through more generic material than ever. Industry analysis in 2026 points to storytelling and genuine clarity as the last real differentiators once everyone has access to the same AI-generated facts and lists. CMSWire In other words, volume is no longer the advantage. Clarity is.
This is exactly why Steve's warning lands so hard for marketers specifically. It is not enough to publish more. You have to design for a brain that is more distracted, more skeptical, and more overwhelmed than it was even two years ago.
The Biggest Myth: Communication Is Not Automatic
Steve shared a quote that has been circulating in business books for decades: the single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place. It is often credited to George Bernard Shaw, though researchers who trace quotes back to their origin have found that attribution shaky at best, with some pointing instead to writer William H. Whyte. Quote Investigator Whoever said it first, the point holds. Sending a message is not the same thing as landing one.
This connects directly to something Steve called the reticular activating system, or RAS, the part of the brain that filters incoming information down from millions of bits to the handful your conscious mind can actually use. The RAS is asking one question on repeat: what's in it for me, right now? If your message does not answer that question in the first few seconds, the RAS filters you out before you ever get a real chance.
Reflective question: Where in your own communication are you assuming understanding instead of designing for it?
You Cannot Measure Fog
One of Steve's lines from our conversation deserves to be written on a whiteboard in every marketing department: you cannot measure fog.
If your point is vague, you have no way to know whether you succeeded. Success has to be defined before you start, whether that is an email open rate, a signed contract, or three clear decisions coming out of a meeting. Steve's suggestion for meetings specifically is worth stealing: open by stating exactly what will exist by the end. Not a vague agenda. A concrete outcome. That single habit turns a meeting from an open-ended ramble into something people can actually measure.
Practical takeaway: Before your next campaign, email, or meeting, write down the one sentence that describes what success looks like. If you cannot write that sentence, you are not ready to start.
Clarity Is Kindness
Steve closed our conversation with a phrase that reframes the entire topic: to be unclear is to be unkind. It is a line popularized by finance personality Dave Ramsey, though the phrasing traces most directly to author Brené Brown's "clear is kind, unclear is unkind" in her book Dare to Lead. Brené Brown Wherever you first heard it, the idea is the same. When you are vague with your team, your customers, or your audience, you are not being gentle. You are making them do the work of guessing what you meant.
Clarity, done well, is an act of respect. It tells the other person you value their time enough to hand them your point instead of burying it.
One Step at a Time: How Sidekick Strategies Helps
Here is what most businesses get wrong. They treat clarity as a talent some people have and others do not. Steve's whole body of work, and honestly this entire conversation, proves the opposite. Clarity is a skill you design for, using the same rules and tools every time, no matter the channel.
At Sidekick Strategies, this is exactly the work we love. We do not hand you a hundred tactics and walk away. We start with the one message that matters most right now, whether that is your homepage headline, your next sales email, or the opening slide of your pitch deck, and we help you find the actual point buried underneath all the good intentions.
If you are ready to stop assuming your message landed and start designing so it actually does, let's have that conversation. Bring us your foggiest message and we will help you find the needle hiding in the haystack.
