Why “Make This Punchier” Is A Dangerous Brief
A scream cuts across the river.
You look up.
A child is being swept downstream.
“Help, the current is too strong!” she shouts.
In what looks like a scene from Baywatch, you and your friend drop everything, kick off your shoes and dive in.
The current fights you all the way.
You grab the child and somehow drag her back to shore.
You collapse on the bank, soaked and breathing like hell.
“Help!”
Another child.
Without thinking, you jump back in.
Then another struggling child drifts into sight.
And another.
And another.
The two of you can barely keep up.
Your lungs are burning.
Your legs feel like concrete.
Suddenly, you see your friend wading out of the water, running away.
“Where are you going? Don’t leave me here. I cannot do this on my own!” you shout.
Your friend looks back and says:
“I’m going upstream to find the asshole who’s throwing all these kids in the water.”
That line is why I still remember the story.
And it’s a pretty good picture of how companies try to fix communication.
The homepage is unclear.
Rewrite it.
The deck does not land.
Fix the deck.
Sales keeps explaining the offer differently.
Give them better slides.
A campaign falls flat.
Change the copy.
Then the copywriter.
Then the agency.
Sometimes that is exactly what the job needs.
A bad sentence can just be a bad sentence.
But often, “make this punchier” is simply a request to rescue the next child faster.
And that is the trap.
It assumes the words are where the trouble started.
"A brilliant solution to the wrong problem can be worse than no solution at all: solve the correct problem." - Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things
So before you polish the copy, go one step upstream.
Maybe the words are fine, but nobody has decided what the message actually is.
What must the buyer understand?
What must she believe?
That is messaging.
Still muddy?
Go further upstream.
Why should she choose you over the alternatives?
What do you do differently?
Who values that difference most?
That is positioning.
Still vague?
Keep walking.
What are you trying to win?
Where will you play?
How will you win?
What will you say no to?
Because strategy is choice.
Upstream, you may have one fuzzy thought.
One choice nobody quite made.
One disagreement everyone politely stepped around.
One word five people use to mean five different things.
Leave it there and it travels.
By the time it reaches the website, deck, campaign and sales call, that one fuzzy thought has multiplied.
AI is the fastest swimmer you can hire.
It’ll generate twenty homepage rewrites before lunch.
Great.
If the thinking is muddy, you have just created twenty polished versions of the mud.
This is why I keep coming back to one belief.
“Clear thinking creates clear communication.”
Not because writing does not matter.
It matters a lot.
But writing is downstream.
By the time you start choosing words, the harder choices should already have been made.
Clear strategy gives positioning something to stand on.
Clear positioning gives messaging something sharp to say.
Clear messaging gives copy a job to do.
Only then does “make this punchier” become useful.
Because now you know where the punch is supposed to land.
And then the words get easier.
Not easy.
Easier.
And there is a cost to getting this order wrong.
Bad copy is often just the bill for something that was never made clear upstream.
The further the confusion travels, the more expensive the fix becomes.
Get out of the water.
Walk upstream.
PS. If you don’t know jewellery, know your jeweller. That’s Buffett’s rule. It’s the same with messaging. Smart ideas die in boring words. If you don’t know the game, find a partner who does, because your reputation is on the line. I help you think clearly so you communicate clearly. One story. Across your business. Even when you’re not in the room. That’s clarity for the bold, not the bland.