Media is obsessed with rewriting the past to make it comfortable.
Take The Odyssey- a 3,000-year-old Greek epic – and the current debate over how it should be cast and staged, as if the “authentic” version is under threat from a stage adaptation.
Or take Enola Holmes, set in 1890s England, which shows women simply leaving unwanted situations and men casually giving up aristocratic titles – as if titles didn’t come attached to income, land, and survival. Give one up and you’re not “free,” you’re on the street while your big mean uncle inherits everything.
Different eras, same move: strip out the friction, and the story stops teaching you anything. It’s just comfortable noise.
People think they’re simplifying the narrative. They’re not. They’re sanitising it.
It’s the same reason most B2B marketing fails.
Open most agency decks and you’ll find the same sentence wearing a different logo: “we help ambitious businesses scale through strategic, data-driven marketing.”
No budget owner has ever forwarded that to their boss and said “finally, someone gets it.”
That sentence isn’t wrong. It’s sanitised. It assumes your buyer has no internal politics, no scar tissue from the last agency that overpromised, no boss asking why marketing spend keeps climbing while pipeline doesn’t.
True simplification isn’t pretending that friction doesn’t exist. It’s naming it, then handing over a plan sharp enough to cut through it.
If your marketing sounds like every other competitor, that’s not an accident, it’s what happens when a message gets safety-checked until nothing’s left that could offend, surprise, or actually be remembered.
👉 Talk pricing before your prospect has to ask.
👉 Name the exact reason clients leave.
👉 Give away the thinking you’d normally save for 3 months down the line.
Respect how messy your customer’s world actually is, and they stop skimming. They start trusting you have their actual problem, not the templated version of it.
At Refinery23, our entire Unselling Philosophy is built on rejecting this sanitised approach. We do not hide the complexities of business; we uncomplicate them.
We recently applied this framework to a client in the highly competitive construction sector. We stopped publishing generic, polished updates about their latest projects. Instead, we published the raw, unvarnished truth about upfront preliminary fees, basement conversion regulations, and renovation insurance liabilities.
The results proved that audiences are starved for reality. Total page views grew by 39%, and the time users spent reading our thoughts on the site rose to an average of 6 minutes and 48 seconds per visit. In a world of fleeting attention spans, people will stay when you provide wisdom instead of noise.
True simplification does not mean making reality look simple. It means providing a clear, step-by-step path through the complexity.