Decision 1: Who Are We Willing to Build This Brand For?

Part 1 of the Brand Transition Series

This article is part of my Brand Transition series, exploring the questions manufacturers should answer before building a consumer brand. If you've spent years making products for other companies, you already know how to manufacture. Building a brand requires a different set of decisions. Throughout this series, we'll look at eight questions that help turn manufacturing expertise into a brand customers recognize, trust, and actively choose.

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When onboarding with a new client, the first question I ask isn't, "Who is your customer?"

It's a little more uncomfortable than that.

Who are you willing to build this brand for?

At first, it sounds like the same question.

It isn't.

Most manufacturers have spent years serving a wide range of customers. Different retailers. 

Different price points. Different product specifications. Different markets. Their strength has been the ability to adapt to each customer's needs.

That's a huge advantage in manufacturing.

But it can become a real challenge when you're building a consumer brand.

When I ask who the brand is for, I often hear answers like, "Anyone who appreciates quality," or "People looking for a great value." While those statements aren't wrong, they aren't decisions. 

They're broad enough that almost anyone could fit.

Customers don't experience brands that way.

As consumers, the brands we choose feel like they understand us. They reflect our taste, solve our problems, fit our budget, and speak our language. They're in emotional alignment with us. That's what creates connection.

Building a brand means making deliberate choices. Not about who can buy your product, but about who you want the brand to serve exceptionally well.

What answering this question actually involves

This is where brand strategy moves beyond brainstorming.

Defining your audience isn't about filling out a customer persona template. It's about  understanding the people behind the purchase and making intentional decisions that will shape almost everything that follows.

That work often includes:

• Looking at your current customers and identifying meaningful patterns.

• Understanding which customers are the most profitable, loyal, and likely to recommend you.

• Studying competing brands to see who they're already serving well—and where opportunities exist.

• Defining your customer's motivations, frustrations, priorities, and buying habits.

• Deciding who the brand isn't trying to reach.

• Evaluating whether your products, pricing, packaging, photography, messaging, and sales channels actually reflect that customer.

Notice how few of those activities involve demographics.

Age and income rarely tell the whole story. Understanding why someone buys, what they value, and how they want to feel is often far more useful than knowing they're between 35 and 44 years old.

It's about  understanding the people behind the purchase and making intentional decisions that will shape almost everything that follows.

From the Buyer's Side of the Table

One of the things I learned from sitting across the table from retail buyers is that they rarely asked, "Who is this product for?"

Instead, they asked whether the product was right for one very specific person—their customer.

I remember one DIY category buyer from a national chain who described hers as "a mom with two kids and ice cream melting in the cart." (I'm pretty sure it was just the ice cream melting, not the kids.)

What she meant was that our product needed to solve a problem for her in that exact moment. She was in the DIY aisle looking for something that would engage her creative side, feel on trend, and be easy to understand in just a few seconds.

That buyer looked at every product through that lens.

Who walks down this aisle and notices it? Does it belong in my category? What problem is it solving? Why would she choose this over the ten similar products already on the shelf?

When we could answer those questions clearly, the conversation became much easier.

When the answer was, "Well... it's really for anyone creative," it became much harder for the buyer to understand if the product belonged.

Retail buyers don't just buy products. They're curating an assortment for a specific customer.

The clearer your understanding of that customer, the easier it is for everyone else to understand your brand, too.

Why this work is harder than it sounds

None of these exercises are especially complicated on their own.

The challenge is perspective.

Founders know their products inside and out. Manufacturers understand every material, process, and specification. That expertise is incredibly valuable, but it also makes it difficult to step back and see the brand through a customer's eyes.

I've watched leadership teams spend weeks debating who their customer is because every decision feels like closing the door on another opportunity.

In reality, the opposite is usually true.

The clearer your audience becomes, the easier it is to develop products they'll love, write messaging that resonates, create packaging that feels right, and build a shopping experience that makes sense.

Clarity doesn't limit growth. It gives it direction.

What I'm looking for

When I work through this exercise with clients, the conversation goes far beyond demographics.

I'm asking questions like:

• Who naturally gets excited about this product?

• Who comes back and buys again?

• Who tells their friends about it?

• Who's willing to pay full price instead of waiting for a promotion?

• What problem are they really trying to solve?

• What emotional need is this product meeting?

• Which customers create the most complexity without adding meaningful long-term value?

Those conversations often uncover opportunities that weren't obvious at the beginning.

Where I usually come in

This is one of the first exercises I facilitate with clients because it influences almost every decision that follows.

Together, we look at customer behavior, competitors, the existing product assortment, retailer expectations, and the strengths the business already has. My role isn't to tell clients who their customer should be. It's to ask the right questions, challenge assumptions, and help the team make confident decisions based on evidence rather than instinct.

By the end, we're no longer describing everyone who could buy the product.

We're defining exactly who the brand is being built for.

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Every strong brand is built through a series of deliberate decisions.

This series explores eight of the most important ones.

Once you've decided who you're building the brand for, the next decision becomes much clearer:

Decision 2: Which products actually make sense together in your customer's mind?