Stop Branding on Gut Feel: Simple Ways to Find Out What's Right

To brand on evidence instead of gut feel, treat your instinct as a hypothesis, then check it quickly: interview recent customers and lost prospects, mine sales calls for buyer language, look at what buyers search, and test the message on the pages where they decide. It doesn't take a big budget, just real buyer input.

A marketing leader I talked with recently put it in one line I liked: too many companies do what they think is right rather than finding out what's right.

That's especially true of branding and messaging, because everyone has an opinion and the opinions feel like knowledge.

Why gut feel wins by default

Brand decisions tend to happen in meetings. Somebody senior has a strong view. Someone else has a different one. The loudest or most senior voice usually wins, and the result reflects what the company believes about itself.

The trouble is that what a company believes about itself is often not what buyers value. Teams fall in love with the clever name, the big vision, the feature they worked hardest on. Buyers care about whether you solve their problem.

Gut feel is a starting point

I'm not against instinct. Experienced people have good instincts. But an instinct is a hypothesis, not a decision. The question is how quickly you can check it.

Cheap ways to find out what's right

Talk to buyers

Interview eight to twelve people: recent customers, recent losses and a few long-time customers. Ask:

• What was happening when you started looking?
• What made you choose us, or not?
• How would you describe us to a colleague?

Write down their exact words. Stop when you hear the same answers again and again.

Listen to sales calls

Recorded calls are full of buyer language. What do prospects say about their problem? What do they compare you to? What makes them lean in?

Look at search data

The searches that bring people to your site, and your competitors' sites, show how buyers describe what they want. That's research you already have.

Check win and loss notes

Patterns in why deals are won or lost tell you what actually matters in a decision.

Test before you commit

Once you have a direction, test it where buyers decide:

• Put the new message on a high-intent page and watch qualified leads.
• Use it in sales emails and compare replies.
• Ask reps to try it on calls and report how buyers react.

Small tests in the real world beat any amount of debate in a conference room.

Make research a habit

Research isn't something you do once before a rebrand. A handful of buyer conversations every quarter keeps your messaging honest and catches drift early. It's one of the cheapest ways to make every other marketing dollar work harder.

Signs you're branding on gut feel

• The last messaging change came out of a leadership offsite, not customer conversations.
• Nobody can quote a customer's exact words about why they bought.
• Your tagline was chosen because the CEO liked it.
• Sales quietly uses different language than the website because "it works better on calls."

That last one is a gift. Your reps have already done some of the research for you.

What to do this week

Book three 20-minute calls with customers who signed in the last six months. Ask the three questions above and record the answers, with permission. Afterward, put their exact phrases next to your homepage headline. If the words don't overlap, you've found the gap between what you think is right and what's right. That's your starting point, and it cost you an hour.

A worked example

Say leadership believes the brand should lead with "innovation." Then customer interviews keep returning the same phrase: "they were the only ones who got back to us the same day." That's not innovation. That's responsiveness, and it's something buyers care about enough to mention unprompted. Testing a headline built on that phrase against the current one on your demo page will tell you more in a month than another round of internal debate.

Common mistakes

• Interviewing only happy customers. Lost deals tell you just as much.
• Asking leading questions. "Did you choose us because we're innovative?" gets you the answer you wanted, not the truth.

Start with what buyers search

One of the fastest ways to see how buyers really describe their needs is to look at the searches they make right before they choose. The 15-minute traffic check shows which of those you're missing.

See the traffic you're missing. BoFu, Baby builds bottom-of-funnel content engines for B2B companies: 15 money pages and 15 supporting posts in 90 days, built to rank on Google and get you named by ChatGPT. See what you're missing.