In the world of business, marketing, and digital optimization, performance problems rarely come from the obvious places. It’s not always the failing ad campaign, the underwhelming piece of content, or even the mediocre product. More often, the issues arise in what I call theinbetweeners—the spaces, handoffs, and connections between systems.

Every system—ads, landing pages, products, CRM platforms, sales teams, customer support—has its own purpose and performance metrics. Yet the biggest performance loss often comes not from their individual functions but from how they link, align, and reinforce one another. This is what separates businesses that keep spinning their wheels from those that compound growth consistently over time.

In over a decade of consulting for e-commerce, B2B SaaS, and direct-to-consumer brands, I’ve seen a common thread: companies spend enormous time optimizing the parts, but little effort examining the alignment between the parts. Ads get redesigned, blogs rewritten, products upgraded. Yet sales still stagnate. Why? Because the message promises one thing, the content amplifies something else, and the product solves a third, totally different set of problems.

What follows is a deep exploration of this alignment problem—why it happens, the hidden costs it creates, and the frameworks and case studies that reveal how leaders fix it.

Systems Thinking and The Hidden Leverage of Alignment

The concept of “inbetweeners” is best framed through systems thinking, a discipline pioneered by thinkers like Peter Senge ("The Fifth Discipline") and Russell Ackoff. In systems theory, performance is rarely determined by the strength of individual parts; it’s the quality ofinteraction among parts that creates emergent behavior.

Business processes are essentially chains of connected systems:

• Ads → Landing Page → Product Page → Checkout → Customer Support → Word of Mouth

Each step has its measurable KPI. Click-through rate. Bounce rate. Cart abandonment. Net Promoter Score. But the handoffs between these systems—where expectations are transferred—are where customers fall through.

Consider the law of bottlenecks, popularized by Eliyahu Goldratt inThe Goal. The slowest or most misaligned link determines the performance of the whole chain. In marketing, the true bottleneck is often not the slowest-performing system but the least-aligned handoff.

Classic Example: The “Great Ads, Dead Leads” Trap

Many startups scale their paid media budgets rapidly. Ads perform by the numbers: high click-throughs, low CPCs, engagement is strong. Content teams create beautifully researched landing pages. Yet sales hears the consistent complaint: “these leads are bad.”

The numbers mislead, because the alignment is broken. Ads promise a “free trial with no hassle,” but the product page asks users for credit card commitment upfront, creating friction. Or the content emphasizes a brand value (“sustainability,” “community-driven”), but the actual product page focuses on discounts—leading the customer to distrust both.

Here, each team technically performs well. The failure lies in the seams.

Why Misalignment Creeps In

Alignment drifts silently. It happens in garage startups as much as in Fortune 500 corporations. Here are the root causes:

1. Functional Silos

When marketing, sales, and product marketing operate under different KPIs, they optimize independently.

• Marketing chases clicks

• Content chases engagement

• Product chases reviews

None take responsibility forcontinuity.

2. Growth Pivots

As companies scale, positioning evolves. What started as “budget software” pivots to “enterprise-grade.” Teams don’t all update their narratives at the same time, creating subtle mismatch across touchpoints.

3. Over-specialization

In digital marketing, specialists are celebrated: PPC experts, CRO professionals, UX designers. While specialists improve parts, they rarely step back to see if the whole experience aligns.

4. Leadership Distance

Founders often begin hyper-aligned—they embody the brand. As responsibilities spread, the frontline loses sight of the original narrative. Every “small tweak” adds micro-misalignment. Eventually, the company talks to customers in fragmented voices.

Case Studies of Alignment (and Misalignment)

Airbnb: The Power of Narrative Continuity

In the mid-2010s, Airbnb ads heavily emphasized “belong anywhere”—a narrative aligning with social media storytelling, user-generated content, and even the product (staying in local, authentic homes). Importantly, this phrase showed up in ads, on landing pages, in app onboarding, and in customer community messaging. Visitors always heard thesame story. That alignment is what allowed them to scale trust in a model strangers initially distrusted.

Evernote: When Alignments Break

Evernote’s early ads promoted simplicity: “Remember Everything.” But as the app scaled, product features multiplied into document scanning, to-do lists, team workspaces, AI summarization. The content marketed complexity, while ads kept pushing “simplicity.” Users churned because expectations set by one system weren’t matched by others. The product wasn’t bad—it was the misalignment that broke trust.

SaaS B2B Example: HubSpot

HubSpot famously built a seamless funnel. Ads and blogs promoted “inbound marketing education.” Those weren’t random content pieces; they opened into free inbound scorecards, free HubSpot tools, and demos that reiterated inbound philosophy. The product did exactly what was promised: operationalize inbound marketing. This end-to-end alignment between philosophy, marketing, and product experience is why HubSpot dominated over competitors with arguably better tech.

The Psychology of Misalignment

From a cognitive science perspective, humans are particularly sensitive toexpectation violation. Psychologist Robert Rosenthal’s expectation effects research shows that unmet expectations erode trust disproportionately.

For example, if an ad sets an expectation of effortless onboarding, and the user encounters a 10-step sign-up, the disappointment is amplified beyond the real workload—it feels like a bait-and-switch. Even if the product is great, the misalignment has already damaged perception.

Daniel Kahneman’s “peak-end rule” also highlights that humans remember experiences based on contrasts between expectation and reality at specific moments. Misaligned handoffs create negative peaks—moments that override otherwise good experiences downstream.

The Cost of Misalignment

Misalignment costs businesses in ways that extend far beyond conversion rates:

• Waste of Media Spend: An $80,000/month ad campaign sending traffic into the wrong landing narrative burns budgets without feedback loops.

• Brand Erosion: Repeated small mismatches reinforce distrust (“they don’t deliver what they promise”).

• Data Deception: Metrics appear healthy (CTR, impressions), but customer segments quietly die in the funnel.

• Internal Blame Culture: Teams pointing fingers at each other—ads blame product, product blames sales. Nobody looks at the seams.

Harvard Business Review has noted that “misaligned organizations experience 20–30% less efficiency compared to aligned ones,” reducing not just profit but long-term resilience.

Frameworks for Diagnosing Alignment Problems

1. Journey Mapping Across Systems

Plot out the customer journey, but instead of focusing on KPIs for each system, annotate the handoffs:

• What expectation is set here?

• What expectation is confirmed or violated at the next step?

For instance:Ad promises free AI tool → Landing page offers free trial with credit card required → Expectation violated → Drop.

2. The Consistency Audit

Every 6 months, audit the top 10 customer-facing assets: advertisements, lead magnets, onboarding emails, in-product welcome messages, checkout flows. Look for language drift. Are we promising different things in different places?

3. Message Testing with Users

Tools like Wynter, UserTesting.com, or in-house interviews can test continuity perception. Ask: “From this ad to this landing page, what are you expecting? Did this meet it?”

4. The Alignment Council

Cross-functional working groups (ads, content, product, sales) review quarterly narrative alignment. Instead of reviewing only KPIs, they evaluate “consistency of promise.”

Emerging Research: Alignment as Trust Infrastructure

Research on customer trust shows alignment is increasingly critical in the AI and automation era. A 2023 Edelman Trust Report indicated that 71% of consumers distrust brands when ads and product experiences diverge. In AI-driven buying journeys (chatbots, recommendation engines), inconsistencies are magnified—because customers expect “machines” to be precise.

For example, Shopify merchants using AI-driven product recommendations see up to 25% abandonment spikes when recommendation categories don’t match advertised benefits, even if the products are individually popular.

Leadership Lessons and Organizational Practices

1. Teach everyone alignment literacy.Make it explicit that every system is not judged in isolation, but based on how it delivers on promises made upstream.

2. Shrink the feedback loop.Instead of monthly reports, create real-time monitoring to catch mismatched click ad → page narrative events.

3. Design for narrative ownership.A VP of Narrative or Head of Customer Continuity is becoming a new role in top tech companies. This role ensures storylines align across departments.

4. Embrace the “customer editor.”Borrowing from journalism, assign an internal role to ask: “Does this fit the rest of the story we are telling?”

Examples of Fixing Alignment

• Dropbox (2011): Early growth stagnated until Drew Houston had marketing, product, and content teams unify around one line: “Your stuff, anywhere.” Ads, referral programs, UI, and onboarding steps all repeated that phrase. Viral growth followed.

• Nike: Their “Just Do It” narrative has endured for decades. Every system—ads highlighting personal grit, product launches emphasizing empowerment, even community apps like Nike Run Club—repeat a unified message. The alignment matters more than the slogan itself.

Bringing It Back to the Solopreneur

Even if you’re a one-person business, alignment still matters. Maybe more so. When you grow quickly, priorities shift daily: one week you’re experimenting with new ads, the next week rebuilding your website, the week after launching a new offer. Without realizing it, your messaging subtly changes.

A solopreneur doesn’t suffer from interdepartmental silos, but they wrestle with context switching misalignment.Inconsistent positioning over weeks confuses your audience, and because you’re too close to it, you don’t notice. That’s why consistency audits—even for one-person teams—are crucial.

Closing Thought: Alignment as the Real Strategy

Peter Drucker famously said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” I’d argue alignment eats optimization for dinner.

Because you can optimize every piece—your ads, your product, your landing page, your funnel. But if these things don’t reinforce one another—if your inbetweeners misfire—customers won’t just ignore you. They’ll trust you less. And in a noisy marketplace, trust is the whole game.

The irony is that businesses assume performance problems come from weak systems; in truth, the friction of misalignment silently drains resources. The work of leadership is not merely to improve each system but to synchronize them.

Businesses that continually grow are those that keep realigning—and realigning again—as they scale.