I spent Tuesday with forty-one interview transcripts and a yellow highlighter, which is what December looks like when research is part of your job. Three markets, one client, a premium household product I am not going to name. The assignment was simple. Come back with the language customers actually use.
I came back with the language customers actually use. None of it belonged to the client.
The brand platform has four pillars, a manifesto, and an art directed PDF that cost roughly what a used Subaru costs. What customers said was that the lid is good. That it does not leak. That their sister has one and their sister is picky about this stuff.
Six words, give or take. That is the entire brand as it exists in a human head.
The words a company spends four months writing are almost never the words a customer spends four seconds remembering, and only one of those two vocabularies does any work in the world.
Here is the part that gets lost in the readout, usually somewhere around slide nine. This is not a failure of the copywriting. The copy is often quite good. It is a failure of expectation, because we keep treating the platform as something customers are supposed to adopt rather than something the company uses to decide what to build.
Read enough transcripts and the six words start to follow rules. One, they are concrete. Nobody says thoughtfully engineered. They say it does not tip over when the dog hits the table. Two, they are comparative, because people describe things against the last thing they owned. Salt & Straw is not artisanal to anyone in line, it is the one where the flavors are weird and it works. Three, they are borrowed, almost always from a person the customer already trusts, which means half your brand language was written by somebody's sister in a kitchen you will never see.
None of that is a reason to stop writing the platform. It is a reason to stop measuring the platform by whether it comes back out of a stranger's mouth. Measure it by whether the product team made a better call because of it.
And then go find the six words. Write them on the wall. If the true six words are it does not leak, then every dollar you were about to spend on elevated craft storytelling should probably go into the seal.
Six words, give or take. That is the entire brand as it exists in a human head.
I finished the readout deck at a table at Stumptown with the rain doing its December thing against the window, and I thought about how the strongest line in the whole project came from a woman in Sacramento who was mostly annoyed I had called during dinner.