CONSUMER&COMMERCE

For founders of desire-led brands

You might be building your business around the wrong customer.

Many consumer brands are built around a customer they imagined.

We help founders find the right customers. Then we help them tie the brand and every team to a promise they can keep, so the effort they are already putting in starts to pay off.

Find out in a 25-minute call

No obligation.

Read on

We call them imaginary customers.

The customer a company builds for but never quite wins. It comes in 3 forms.

  1. Who you pick

    The wrong customer

    Made up, too rare to build on, or real but not a fit for your brand or the business you want to build. A muse can inspire a brand. It can't be the only customer you sell to.

  2. How you read them

    The misunderstood customer

    The right customer, read wrong, so what you build never lands with them.

  3. How you execute

    The Frankenstein customer

    Understood at the top, then stitched together from channel, region and team targets until nobody is talking to the real person. So they drift away.

Whatever the form, the result is the same. The right customers barely show up in your sales.

Inside the company, it plays out in 2 ways.

Aligned around the wrong customer. Everyone points the same way, just not at the right person.

Divided among many. Everyone names the same customer, but each paints a different picture.

The second is worse. It's better to be aligned around the wrong customer than divided among many.

Everyone is working hard just to get the basics right.

  • Everyone is busy. Nothing moves.

    Full roadmaps, full calendars, flat results. Getting to good, not even great, takes everything the team has.

  • The same decisions keep coming back.

    Nothing gets settled. Nobody knows what is adding and what is subtracting. So everything stays, and there is never a moment to rest.

  • There is no single source of truth.

    Every team works from its own numbers, its own plan and its own picture of the customer.

  • Everything you put in returns less.

    Holding last year's number takes more money, more people and more energy every year.

Sound familiar?Book an Imaginary Customer Call

Customer centricity is only half the story.

The customer is king, up to a point. Focus only on the customer and it fails, like any relationship where one side does all the work.

A brand people buy because they want it, not because they need it, starts with a match: a clear brand and the right customers, each sharp enough to find the other. If the brand isn't clear, the right customer never shows up, and you leave it to chance.

Where they meet is the promise, the one thing only you can offer them. Then the organization is built to keep it.

That promise is what sets you apart. Price points and aesthetics can be copied. Technology is too good and cycles are too fast. What can't be copied is a promise carried through your product, your symbols and the way your organization works. Without it, every season starts with "what have we done for them lately?"

When they don't line up, the cracks show in 3 places, often all at once.

Imaginary customers
The business builds for the wrong customer, misreads the right one, or stitches one together from team targets until nobody recognizes them.
Empty vessels
The brand stands for nothing in particular. It stops at a product, a logo or a list of values, so nobody can say what it means or who it is for. Heritage on its own is not meaning.
The emperor's new clothes
The organization believes it keeps the promise, but its targets, budgets and incentives work against it, and no one says so.
Our approach
Promise Brand with depth and meaning Customers the right ones, understood Organization built to keep the promise THE PROMISE TRIFECTA The promise sets you apart. The organization is built to keep it.

Start small. Every step earns the next.

Each step has a fixed scope agreed before we start, sized to your stage, from a founder preparing to launch to an established brand with a full leadership team.

  1. Imaginary Customer Call

    25 minutes to see whether this might apply to you. A first read, not a verdict.

  2. Trifecta Audit

    For start-ups and scale-ups, a discovery with the founder. For larger companies, a discovery with the founder or CEO, plus interviews with the leadership team.

  3. Trifecta Blueprint

    Your brand manifesto, your customer manifesto, and the constitution that defines your promise and ties everything together, including the organization. Your guiding light, built to last.

  4. Trifecta Strategy

    The long-term plan: where you're going, what to focus on, and the KPIs that tell you you're getting there.

  5. Trifecta Build

    The promise, taken to the whole company: a roadshow, the customer journeys, the roadmap and the guidelines every team works from.

  6. Trifecta Check-up

    Once a year: is it still holding, and what comes next?

How we work with you. As a project, fractional or interim.

What each step includes

Pragmatic work, with what you already have.

Consumer goods

An established founder-led brand

From chasing a channel to building the brand he always wanted.

A family business the founder had run for more than a decade, with an online shop that worked early on and then stood still for years.

His plan was to grow online 5 times over. But the business was organized around a channel instead of its customers: a Frankenstein customer. Getting the trifecta in order showed which customers to put front and center, a closely aligned group the brand already had but had never prioritized. It also brought out what he really wanted the brand to become, and he is now building toward it.

Our work · In progress

Life sciences

A start-up built to scale

One clear story for pilot customers and investors.

A founder with several promising product ideas, pulling in different directions and competing for the same time.

It was all clear in his head, but not yet clear to the people he was pitching. We organized it, mapping the ideas onto one value chain to show which one starts the ball rolling. The result: a clear brand, clear customers and a step-by-step roadmap, before any launch spend.

Our work

Read all the cases

Could this be happening at your company?

It takes just 25 minutes to get a first read.

There's no obligation. Afterward, you'll get a short note with an outside view of where your brand, customers and organization stand.

Book an Imaginary Customer Call

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