The meaning your customer makes matters more than the meaning you intended

I think about this a lot: you don’t actually get to decide what your brand means.

Which is deeply inconvenient considering how much time and money businesses spend doing exactly that.

You can sit in a room for six months deciding you’re premium, empowering, innovative, accessible or whatever other word has survived the final round of the positioning workshop. You can put it into a beautiful brand book. You can get everyone in the business aligned behind it.

And then you give it to people.

And they decide it means something completely different.

You think premium. They think expensive. You think scientifically credible. They think this is for someone with a medical problem and that isn’t me. You think sustainable. They think probably won’t work as well. You think challenger brand. They think I’ve never heard of you so I’m not sure I trust you.

Neither side is necessarily being unreasonable. The customer is simply taking all the signals you have given them and making meaning from them.

Price. Packaging. Name. Advertising. Where you are sold. Who else uses you. Reviews. Previous experience. What they already believe about the category. Something their mum told them. Something they saw on TikTok three weeks ago. It all gets joined together into a mental map.

And that mental map is what they act on.

This is particularly fascinating in categories loaded with emotion. You can create a menopause product you intend to be empowering, but if everything about the category signals decline, ageing and things going wrong with women’s bodies, the customer can make a very different meaning.

Same product. Completely different interpretation.

I think we spend an enormous amount of time asking, “What do we want our brand to mean?”

I want to spend at least as much asking, “What meaning are people already making?”

Because that is the reality you’re actually starting from.