Walk through the marketing language of almost any African business website and you will encounter the same word, sometimes ten times on a single page. Solutions. Customer care solutions. Productivity solutions. Affordable business solutions. A range of solutions to meet your needs. The word has become so default in business writing that founders use it without noticing, and customers read past it without registering, and everyone involved has agreed to a transaction in which actual meaning is absent and no one objects.
I want to argue that the word “solutions” is the single most expensive word in most ventures’ marketing copy. Not because it is grammatically wrong; it is not. Not because customers consciously dislike it; they barely notice it. The word is expensive because it is the tell that the founder has not yet done the work of articulating what their venture actually does, and customers can feel the absence of that work even when they cannot name what is missing.
The cure is not to find a synonym for “solutions” and use that instead. The cure is to do the work of specificity that the word “solutions” has been allowing the founder to skip.
Why “solutions” became the default
It is worth understanding why the word became so common, because the explanation reveals what the word is hiding.
“Solutions” is a generic noun that can stand in for any specific offering. A venture that sells productivity software, or productivity consulting, or productivity training, or productivity coaching, or productivity tools, or any combination of these, can describe all of them as “productivity solutions” and not have to choose. The word lets the founder defer the choice. It also lets the founder describe the venture in a way that does not exclude any potential customer, because anyone with a productivity problem might in principle be a buyer of “productivity solutions,” whatever those are.
This is the seduction. The founder gets to keep all options open. The venture does not foreclose any potential customer by being too specific about who they are for or what they actually deliver. The marketing copy can be approved by everyone in the company because it offends no one and excludes no one and commits to nothing.
The cost of this seduction is exactly proportional to its appeal. Every prospective customer who reads “productivity solutions” has to do the work of figuring out what the venture actually offers and whether they need it. Most prospects will not do that work. They will glance at the marketing, fail to immediately understand what is being offered, and move on. The venture has not said no to any prospect through specificity, but it has said no to most prospects through vagueness, because vagueness is itself a form of rejection in a market where attention is the scarcest resource.
The founder who uses “solutions” has not protected the venture from foreclosing customers. The founder has foreclosed almost all customers, more efficiently than specificity ever could.
What specificity actually looks like
The replacement for “solutions” is not another word. It is a sentence that describes a specific outcome the customer will experience as a result of paying for the venture’s offering.
Compare two sentences. “We provide workplace productivity solutions” versus “We help teams of fifteen to fifty cut meeting time by thirty percent within ninety days.” The second sentence does several things the first does not. It names the customer specifically: teams of fifteen to fifty, not generic businesses. It names the outcome specifically: cut meeting time by thirty percent, not generic productivity gains. It names the timeline specifically: within ninety days, not on some unspecified horizon. The customer reading the second sentence either recognises themselves and continues reading, or recognises that they are not the audience and leaves. Both responses are useful. The first sentence produces neither.
The structural pattern is: specific customer, specific outcome, specific timeline. Each element makes the marketing more useful and less universal, and the more useful is what produces the conversions that the more universal cannot.
A few more examples drawn from common venture types:
Replace “training solutions” with “We train customer service teams of ten to fifty to handle complex complaints in a single call, reducing escalations by forty percent.” The reader either runs a customer service team in that size range and has an escalation problem, or they do not. Either way, they know within seconds whether to keep reading.
Replace “digital marketing solutions” with “We help South African manufacturers build the inbound marketing engine that fills their sales pipeline without depending on trade shows or referrals.” Specific industry, specific dependency being broken, specific outcome.
Replace “affordable customer care solutions” with “We help small businesses deliver enterprise-grade customer support on a budget under five thousand rand a month.” Specific customer, specific quality reference, specific budget envelope.
In every case, the specific version is harder to write than the generic version because it requires the founder to have decided who they are for and what they will deliver. The generic version preserves the founder’s options. The specific version closes some options and opens others. The opening that follows specificity is where the conversions come from.
Why customers respond to specificity
There is a structural reason customers respond to specificity that goes beyond clarity, and it is worth naming explicitly.
When a customer reads a generic marketing message, they have to perform two distinct tasks before deciding whether to engage. First, they have to decode what the venture actually offers. Second, they have to evaluate whether what is being offered would help them. The decoding work is unrewarded; if they decode wrong, they have wasted their attention. Most customers, faced with this combined task, simply move on. The cost of decoding outweighs the expected benefit of the offering, and the venture has lost the prospect before any evaluation could begin.
When a customer reads a specific marketing message, the decoding work has been done for them. The venture has named the customer, the outcome, and the conditions. The customer’s only task is evaluation: does this match my situation, and if so, does the venture’s claim seem credible. Evaluation is rewarded. If the match is good and the claim is credible, the customer engages. If the match is poor, the customer leaves quickly without resentment. Either way, the venture has done its work, and the customer has done less work, which is the basic exchange that conversion depends on.
This is also why specificity produces fewer but better-fit prospects. The customers who self-select into engagement after reading specific marketing are doing so because they recognised themselves. They are not browsing; they are responding to a description that matched their situation. The conversion rate from these prospects is dramatically higher than the conversion rate from the larger pool that engaged with vague marketing because they were not yet sure whether the venture was for them. Quality of pipeline beats quantity in almost every category, and specificity produces quality.
The audit, and the discipline that follows
If this piece has landed, the smallest concrete thing you can do this week is to audit your own marketing copy for instances of the words that signal absent specificity. Solutions is the most common. Services is another. Tools, platforms, options, offerings, capabilities, value adds: each of these is a placeholder where specificity should be.
Take your homepage, your top three landing pages, your most-used sales email, and your LinkedIn bio. Highlight every instance of these placeholders. For each instance, write the specific version. Specific customer, specific outcome, specific timeline. The exercise will produce, on average, three or four sentences per page that are sharper than what they replaced. Replace the placeholders with the sharpened versions. Watch the conversion rate over the following month.
In every venture I have run this exercise on, the conversion rate has improved. Not dramatically, in most cases. By two or three percentage points on landing pages, sometimes more on outbound emails. The improvement is modest because the underlying offering has not changed; only the way it is described has. But the modest improvement compounds, and over a year of compounded conversion improvements, the venture’s effective marketing budget has increased by twenty to thirty percent without any additional spend.
The deeper benefit is harder to measure but more important. The discipline of writing specifically forces the founder to make decisions they have been deferring. Who is the customer, exactly. What is the outcome, exactly. Within what timeline, exactly. The decisions, once made, ripple through the rest of the venture. The product roadmap sharpens. The hiring profile sharpens. The sales script sharpens. The pricing rationale sharpens. The whole venture moves into focus, because the founder has done the work that the word “solutions” had been letting them avoid.
That is the move I want to recommend. Stop saying solutions. The word is not the problem. The avoidance the word enables is the problem. Make the avoidance impossible by removing the word from your vocabulary, and the venture will, by necessity, become specific in ways that customers reward.
For the related question of which positioning discipline fits your situation, see The Unique Value Proposition Most African Founders Should Stop Trying to Write. For why customers’ price objections often signal a vagueness problem rather than a price problem, see When Customers Say Your Prices Are Too High. For the underlying vision discipline that makes specificity possible, see The Vision That Does Work.
