Why Personal Taste Shouldn’t Guide Brand Strategy
“I like the color green.” This seemingly innocuous statement is the type of comment we often hear in branding: a founder’s personal preference, shared without reflecting on how it ties into the values or vision of their brand. While potentially harmless on the surface, this “I like…” logic can easily undermine the branding process because it isn’t rooted in meaningful strategy.
The takeaway isn’t that a founder’s (or any client’s) opinion is irrelevant—far from it! Yet having the ability to distance oneself from personal preferences and think instead about what the brand needs (or what your target audience might resonate with) is an essential factor for branding success. This is where brand positioning can play a critical role, as it brings clients into our creative direction process, establishing an integrated, coherent vision for both business and brand.
Here’s an example of the questions brand positioning might tackle:
What audiences are you serving, and where do their needs overlap / diverge?
Who are your closest competitors in the industry, and how does your value proposition differ from theirs?
What are the values that guide your company and resonate with your team?
If your brand was a person, how might we describe their worldview and personality?
Images by Jenna Gatlin
These nuanced questions set our clients up for specificity: a truly magic ingredient in any creative process. Specificity is what gives your brand a point of view, a sense of focus and helps you find “your people.” Especially in the age of AI, the risk isn’t in standing out or standing for something; it’s that brands will increasingly start to look the same, remixing and regurgitating trends that have already been proven in the market. Specificity is the antidote to this omnipresent “blanding,” empowering teams to confidently step away from trends and outside influences to find a tone, an aesthetic and vision that is uniquely theirs.
If you’ve never gone through this kind of robust, holistic branding process, you might be thinking, “This feels a little unnecessary for logo design.” Yet that misunderstanding (that a brand is just a logo, rather than a holistic creative framework) sets many companies up to fail. While it may seem cheaper and faster to simply “throw a brand together” without this level of reflection, it is often more costly—financially and reputationally—over time. Rushing the strategy of branding inevitably creates dissonance for your target audiences, as well as your internal team and prospective hires, limiting your growth and overall potential as a business.
“Great branding, when executed thoughtfully, should feel like an organic extension of everything your company offers and stands for. If it is solely rooted in one person’s preferences, it’s highly unlikely it will hit that mark. ”
So rather than deferring to our clients’ personal taste, we seek to hold a mirror up to their company—to have their brand feel like an organic extension of what they have built and what it feels like to interact with their business. That’s what it takes for a brand to attract the right audiences, to continue to grow organically and to stand the test of time.