Designing for your audience, not yourself: The hardest lesson in brand work

The people closest to a brand are often the least equipped to see it clearly. After 30 years of helping brands perform better, here is what we have learned.

There is a moment that happens in almost every project we have ever worked on as a branding agency. It tends to occur somewhere in the middle of a workshop, when the client looks at what we have created and says something like: ‘I love it, but…’

That pause after the ‘but’ is one of the most instructive moments in brand work. What follows is rarely about the work itself. It’s about the gap between what the brand means to the person ‘on the inside’ and what it needs to mean to those they are trying to reach.

Those two things are often closer than you might expect. But the distance between them, however small, is where brands either connect with their audience or quietly miss them.

We have been in that room hundreds of times, across branding projects in every sector we work in. And if we are honest, genuinely honest, we have been on both sides of it.

Why those who love a brand most, often see it least clearly

When you have built something of value, the brand is not just a communications tool. It is an extension of collective identity. The values threaded through it are your values. The story it tells is your story. So asking someone in that position to look at their brand the way a stranger would is asking them to set aside everything they know and feel about the business and see it cold, for the first time, with no prior relationship and no emotional investment.

Very few people can do that on their own. Not because they lack intelligence or self-awareness, but because proximity is the one thing that genuine familiarity cannot overcome. The things that feel obvious to people inside a business are seldom obvious to people outside it. The shorthand that makes perfect sense to a leadership team, the references that resonate internally, the tone that feels natural when you live inside the brand every day, none of these translate automatically to an audience encountering the brand for the first time.

There is a second, subtler problem. The people who review brand work in most organisations are not the target audience. They are the board, the leadership team, the founders, people who already understand the business, are emotionally invested in it, and bring all of that context to every creative decision. A brand that is optimised for their approval is a brand that has been designed for the wrong room.

A lesson learned on national television

A few years ago, our founder Neil Stanhope, found himself making this argument not in a client meeting, but on Channel 5.

He had been brought in by Alex Polizzi, the celebrated hotelier and host of The Hotel Inspector, to help a pair of hoteliers in Southport named John and Mel. They had built something genuinely interesting: a Peaky Blinders-themed craft ale bar called, fittingly, Peaky Blinders, with a boutique hotel above it called the Regency Rooms. The bar was doing well. The hotel was not. And John, full of energy and ambition, had already moved on mentally to his next ideas: a tapas bar, an organic chicken shop, a roof terrace, before the hotel above his existing success had found its footing.

The brand challenge was not complicated, but it was deeply human. John and Mel knew exactly what they had built. They understood the Peaky Blinders concept completely, the character of the location and the atmosphere they wanted to create. What they had not done, what is almost impossible to do from the inside, was looking at the Regency Rooms the way a guest would. Someone who had loved the bar downstairs and was curious about the hotel above it. Someone who needed the two to feel like parts of the same world rather than two separate ideas sharing a postcode.

That was the brief in its simplest form. And the lesson it illustrated, in front of several million viewers, which has a way of sharpening the mind, is the same lesson we return to in every project we work on. The audience does not share your context. They do not know what you intended. They only experience what you have created. And the gap between your intention and their experience is exactly the gap that brand work exists to close.

For John and Mel, getting that right meant creating a coherent identity that carried the energy and character of the bar upstairs into the hotel experience, so that a guest moving between the two felt they were deepening their relationship with a single, distinctive world rather than switching between two unrelated businesses. The Regency Rooms has since gone from strength to strength, with a Peaky Blinders cocktail bar now added and a significant new opening in Liverpool in the works. The brand clarity came first. The growth followed.

The discipline required

Designing for your audience rather than yourself is not a one-time decision. It is a discipline that has to be practised deliberately, in every project, at every stage of the work. Three things make it possible.

The first is genuine curiosity about the audience, not an assumption about them, not a demographic profile, but a real desire to understand how they encounter the brand, what they need from it, and what would make them choose it over everything else available to them. This sounds obvious. It is, in practice, surprisingly rare. Most brands commission audience research looking for confirmation of what they already believe, rather than letting it shape their brand strategy. The ones that commission it with genuine openness to being wrong tend to produce better work.

The second is the willingness to be surprised. The most useful insight in any brand project is almost always the thing that challenges what the business thought it knew about itself. The perception gap, the distance between how a brand sees itself and how its audience actually experiences it, is rarely catastrophic. But it is almost always illuminating. And acting on it, rather than defending against it, is what separates the brands that improve from the ones that stay stuck.

The third is the hardest to accept: a trusted external perspective is not a luxury. It is the specific ingredient that makes this kind of work possible. The value an outside eye brings is not cleverness or creative talent, though those matter. It is the distance. The ability to see a brand the way a stranger would is something that cannot be fully replicated from inside the business, no matter how much self-awareness is brought to bear. That is not a criticism of the people inside. It is simply a description of how proximity works.

The lesson we keep relearning

We said at the beginning that we have been on both sides of that ‘I love it, but’ moment. The side where we are listening is familiar territory. The side where we are saying it is something we try to be honest about.

Underscore is not exempt from this. We have a brand too. We have thirty years of history threaded through it, a team that cares about it deeply, and a founder who has spent three decades building it. All of which means we are as susceptible as any of our clients to the pull of designing for ourselves rather than our audience.

It is one of the reasons we are looking hard at our own brand right now, asking the same questions we ask every client, commissioning the same honest external scrutiny, and sitting with the same productive discomfort that comes from seeing something you love through someone else’s eyes.

The lesson never gets easier. But in thirty years, we have not found a better way to build a brand that works.

If you’re reviewing your brand’s digital presence and want a strategic perspective on where to focus, we’d be glad to talk.

Explore our Brand Strategy & Identity work at underscore.co.uk or get in touch at [email protected]