Brand ICP

Ask a founder who their customer is and you'll get a category. Enterprise SaaS. Recreational cannabis. Health-conscious consumers. None of those is an ICP. They're hiding places.

This episode is about the most underrated decision in brand strategy, and the one most companies fake. Ideal Customer Profile. We do it backwards. We start with who it isn't.

It is easier to write down who you'd walk away from than to invent the perfect customer from a blank page. Most revenue leaders can list five customer types they'd refuse before they can name one they'd build a brand around. The negative list is where the conviction lives. The positive list is where teams hide the fact that they don't have one yet.

I'll give you the framework I've used across cannabis, healthcare, real estate, CPG, and B2B. I call it the Five Filters. Category. Context. Lifestage or revenue band. Trigger. Psychographic. Five questions, each one screening the audience tighter than the last. Each one paired with its inverse, because the "not" half is the half that does the work.

The two filters most teams skip are the two that decide everything. The trigger, what actually makes someone go looking. And the psychographic, the self-image your customer is buying into.

Two case studies carry the episode.

Knack, the New York cannabis brand my studio built. Grown in the Adirondacks, sold in New York dispensaries. Its customer is a New Yorker with identity-level pride who buys cannabis the way they buy a six-pack. A regular, confident choice. The name narrowed the audience after we landed on it, and that second pass is what made the voice work.

Liquid Death, canned water with two words on the can that signal the opposite of everything else on the shelf. Its customer cares about plastic waste and refuses to look like a kid holding a water bottle at a show. Same category structure as Knack. Completely different ICP shape. Neither brand could have run the other's playbook.

You'll also get the discovery method. Interview your ten best customers. Read the unfiltered language in your reviews, your support tickets, your sales calls. Watch what they buy alongside you. Then a one-hour exercise you can run on Monday. Fill in the Five Filters by hand. Write the inverse for each one. Read both lists out loud and watch who in the room flinches. The flinch is where your ICP is still contested inside your own company, and that contested space is what's bleeding your marketing budget.

Borrowed wisdom from April Dunford's Obviously Awesome and the book the whole field stands on, Ries and Trout's Positioning.

The takeaway is simple. If you can't describe your ICP in one paragraph, with a real "not for" list, that's the most valuable hour of work you'll do this quarter. Not a rebrand. Not a new website. The ICP.

Choose who you're for. Write down who you're not for. Everything downstream, your name, voice, identity, packaging, pricing, the sales script, is a tactical answer to one strategic question.

For whom?

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

A while back, I was working with a national B2B platform company. They had an infrastructure underneath of well-known consumer brands. And they were now thinking about spinning off and creating their own consumer-facing brand. That meant new product line, new customers, new everything. We were sitting in a planning meeting on the go-to-market early stage, and the CRO, the chief revenue officer, said something that they always say. I mean, he said, We're just trying to figure out the types of customers we want to work with. And I told him, Okay, then start with who you don't. And he nodded, Oh wow, yeah, that makes things easier. And he was right, it is easier. Most revenue leaders can list the five customer types they would walk away from before they can list one customer type they would build their brand around. So the negative list is where the real conviction lives. And the positive list is where most teams struggle. In that moment in that room, start with who you don't is the entire thesis for this episode. Because most ICP work in the world starts with a question, who is it for? And that question asked almost always produces a vague answer. It's for modern professionals, ambitious founders, health conscience consumers. The answers feel like it's meant for something until you say it out loud and you realize it doesn't produce a lot of depthness. The question that actually produces a sharp ICP is the opposite one. Who is it not for? The founders who can say that and answer that with specific with people who they would turn away from, with revenue they would say no to, with categories that they would walk past, are the founders who brands become icons. Today we're gonna talk about ideal customer profile. This is the most underrated decision in all of brand strategy, and we are gonna do it backwards. We are gonna start with who it isn't. So I'm John Luke, and welcome to Position to Win, where you can find consistent branding and positioning advice for founders and CMOs. So, ICP, let's start there, stands for Ideal Customer Profile. This is three words, each of them are doing specific work. Okay, ideal, it's not typical, it's not average, it's not everyone who might be. This is the customer who gets the most value from you and what you do, who pays with the least friction, who stays the longest, who gives you referrals, and makes the rest of your business better by being in it. It's not your user, it's not your target market, this is the specific person or type of company that you are actually trying to close, serve, and retain. And then profile. Profile is essentially the set of attributes, it's written down, and you use that to make your decision. This is not a person, it's a pattern. Okay, most founders think that they have an ICP, and most founders actually have a target market, which is much bigger, much fuzzier type of thing. Target market is a category. Enterprise SAS, direct to consumer skincare, cannabis. ICP is a specific narrow slice of that category that you are deliberately going to win. Two case studies that we're gonna run through this episode. The first one is NAC. This is a New York recreational cannabis brand, my studio named and Build the Identity for. First recreational grown cannabis in New York State. NAC's target market was New York recreational cannabis consumers. It's obvious. But that's about two million people. NAC's ICP is much, much smaller than that. And the narrowing is what gave the brand a voice. It's really what made it more iconic. ICP is not TAM. TAM is total addressable market, right? This is in the universe of people who could theoretically buy your product. TAM is an investor deck number. ICP is a go-to-market number. ICP is not a persona. A persona is a fictional individual. A marketer manager is Mary, who's 35, who lives in Austin. Personas are useful for marketing. They're useful for writing copy, training, sales esteem, but they are not ICP. ICP tells you who to go after. Personas tells you how to talk to them. And it's important that you get UICP first before you get your personas. Most ICP work in the world stops at three things: demographic, psychographic, behavior. Who they are, what they value, and what they do. That's what most agencies will hand you. A one-pager worksheet with three bullet points. Maybe it'll have a persona with a stock photo at the top, because agencies tend to blown persona types and ICPs together. Three is enough to get off the ground. But after running this type of work across cannabis, healthcare, real estate, CPGs, and B2B companies, I kept finding that three left a gap. And so I built a framework around that gap, and I call it the five filters, right? So this is when you build a really, really strong ICP. So the five filters, each one paired with its inverse. Not just who it's for, but who it's not for. And the not is half of where the conviction lives. So filter one, we have identity. Identity is who they are. These are the observable facts. You got age, household, life chapter for consumers, are they married, etc. etc. Also, revenue. This could be team size for companies, title, for B2B. It really kind of depends on who you're targeting. But these are just observable facts. This is the first thing that most teams fill out because it's really just concrete. But identity also does the least amount of work on its own. Knowing someone is a 35-year-old CMO leaves a lot of gap. And so that's why we have these additional other filters. Filter to category. What shelf the customer puts you on, not what you call yourself, what category they reach for you when they realize that they have a problem that you're solving for. So knack is recreational cannabis. Liquid death is water. Customer does not reach for it in the water shelf, they reach for it on an occasional shelf, next to the beer and the energy drinks. The category tells you who your real competition lives. So if your revenue is not being spent with you, who would they spend it with? That's who your competition with. It's not always often who you think it is. Then there's filter three, context. Context is where and when the purchase actually happens. This is the circumstance, the moment in which they are actually looking. So liquid desk context is not the grocery aisle. This was in music venues, tattoo parlors, barbecues. Context is not always a place. Sometimes it's a state of mind. Then there's filter four. This is the trigger. When they start moving, the emotional doorway. This is how they are feeling. I'm bored with what I have. My friend handed me one. Our last vendor failed, and we have 90 days. The trigger is the one that most ICP documents skip, which is why most marketing misses the moment. You might know who exactly is the person and where they are, and still miss them completely if you do not know what sets them in motion. What is the moment? So then there's filter five. This is the self-image. Who they believe they are, not who they are, who they believe they are. And this is where most teams never get to. It is the one that actually determines whether the brand sticks. Next customer believes that they are a New Yorker with taste. Liquid Death customers believe they are someone who cares enough about plastic waste and refuse to be sold to. Patagonia customers believe they are environmentalists who happen to be outdoors. The self-image is where brand equity actually lives. When a brand reflects a customer's self-image back at them, something shifts. These are the five filters, each one paired with its inverse. By the time you have worked through all of them, honestly, the universe of everyone who could buy from us has narrowed to something specific enough to build the brand against. And if your company already has customers, you have a research asset most teams have wasted. Three things worth doing before you redefine your ICP. First, interview your best customers, the ones you could clone if you could. Alright, ask four questions. What were you doing the day you decided to look for us? What did you almost buy instead? What could you have changed for you to leave? And when you describe us to a friend, what words do you use? Their last question is gold, and it gives you language your customers are already using. So ask your best customers in the right order, and they will tell you your positioning. Second, read your sales call, transcript, support tickets, and reviews, and the unified language your customers use when they are trying to flatter you. This will be the most accurate ICP data you will ever get. Most companies have hundreds of hours of this material sitting right there in their CRM and they've never read it. Third, watch what they buy alongside of you. The adjacent purchase tells you what category your customers actually think you are in. Sometimes it is not the category you thought. So here's a great exercise. Start with no. Write down who it is not for. Identity, category, context, trigger, self-image. For each one, the not before the yes. For some of you, this exercise is going to be simple. If your company already solved one specific problem for one specific type of person, you probably know your ICP intuitively. Writing it down is making the implicit explicit. For others, this is most companies. The hard part is deciding who you stop serving. Especially if you've been saying yes to a lot of people, which you're going to change. Okay, that list is uncomfortable, the no list, because it represents the real revenue you are gonna choose to walk away from. If this exercise does not feel uncomfortable, you have not done the work. Okay, so start with no, then go back to yes, then return back to no one more time and make sure that this holds. Then bring both sides into your next leadership meeting and read them out loud. Watch who agrees, watch who flinches. The flinches are the most valuable things in the room. Okay, they show you exactly where your ICP is still being negotiated with inside your own company. And that negotiation is what is bleeding your marketing budget. It's also hurting your branding. Your biggest competitor isn't another brand, it's noise. So think about what your customer is actually moving through every day. Right? They have the inbox, the commute, every brand is trying to reach them, is more noise in the stream, including you, until you are not. The moment you stop trying to speak to everyone and start speaking to someone specific, something shifts. You stop being noise. So when you become more part of the noise, then customer acquisition costs rise, conversion drops, and retention thins out. And the brand sounds like every other brand because it is trying to speak to many different types of audiences in the same time. And eventually, someone in the board meeting says, Well, what makes us actually different? And the room gets quiet. With an ICP, the math reverts, customer acquisition falls, conversions rises, retention compounds, and the pricing power emerges, and you become the obvious choice for a specific customer instead of an okay choice for a general one. This is not a marketing exercise, right? Most people think it is. It is a final business decision that also has marketing consequences, but it reflects everything. Let me walk you through an ICP work that we actually played out with NAC. We did ICP work in two passes, not one, two. Okay? The first pass was the directional ICP. Before we named the company, before we designed anything, we knew the brand was going to be New York Recreational Cannabis Company. Grown locally, legally, built around the volume and accessibility, bigger packs, fair prices, real products, positioned against the stoner stereotype on one side and the luxury cannabis brands on the other. That was enough directional ICP to start naming. We generated several hundred candidate names. Then the winner was Knack. Five letters, ownable. The name has built a cultural register. I have a Knack for this, you got a Knack for that. That assumes that the reader is an adult with taste. Once we had the name, the ICP got sharper. And the name pulled the ICP into focus because NAC implies competence and taste. The name did not express the ICP, it narrowed it. So we did a second ICB pass. The audience went from New York recreational cannabis consumer to something much more specific. A New Yorker with identity level pride who has taste. An adult who buys cannabis in the way that they buy a six-pack, a regular confident choice, not a special occasion. Someone who cares that it is grown at a Rondacks for the same reason that they care where their coffee comes from. Someone who wants real product at fair prices from a brand that is from here. The second pass is where the voice does the actual work. Without it, the copy of the packaging would have been just generic. And with it, we could write lines like another reason for Jersey to be jealous. Or once you go knack, you don't go back. The lesson most ICP frameworks miss: ICP is iterative with the brand. Sometimes the name, the voice, or the identity sharpens the ICP after the fact. And founders who do this well stay open to the ICP evolving as the brand takes shape. Founders who do this badly write ICP documents, lock in the drawer, and never look at it again. So now to Liquid Death. Because Knack and Liquid Death make completely different ICP decisions, and seeing both side by side gives you a really nice comparison. So let's start with the name. Liquid Death is canned water. Every other brand in the bottled water category has a name that signals purity, hydration, freshness, wellness, source, aquafina, smart water, pure life, essentia. Liquid Death named itself the literal opposite of every brand on the shelf. And that's not a marketing accident. That's an ICP decision said out loud in two words on the can. The brand sells water in a beer can. This is sold in tattoo parlors, music venues, before it was ever sold in grocery stores. So two tagline: murder your thirst, and death to plastic. The brand is built on two ICP decisions wearing aluminum. So the first is environmental. Liquid desk customers refuse to keep buying plastic water bottles. Death to plastic is not a slogan. It is a customer-stated value delivered back to them on the can. And the second is cultural. One day the founder went to a festival and he watched the people drinking water out of a monster energy can. Not because monster tasted better, but because holding a monster can did not make you feel like a kid. Holding a plastic water bottle did. So look at how every filter shows up in their decision. Filter one, identity. Young men, primarily 21 to 35. They're self-described as aspirational, countercultural. The ones who eat and drink clean, but they don't want to look like they do. So filter two, category, water. This is the brand that refuse to position themselves against other water brands. They position themselves against energy drinks and beer. The category is the occasion, not the product type. And then there's filter three context. They did not start in grocery store, they started in tattoo parlors, bars, and music venues. And so the purchase happens at a show, at a barbecue, at a late night, not weekly grocery run. This is for a special occasion. Trigger 4, it's similar, but this is trigger four is really based on the emotional trigger. Right? What are you feeling? It's like, okay, I'm going to the show, I'm going to a party, I'm going to a barbecue, I want to have I want to have this, I want to feel cool, I want to do this, and this is what I'm trying to represent myself. I want to hold something that doesn't make me feel like a kid, right? Trying to have fun. I'm not trying too hard to be healthy. And then we have filter 5, which is self-image. The deepest filter of them all. And this is what do they think they are. So the liquid death customer believes they care about plastic waste. They also believe they have a dark sense of humor. And they're smarter than the marketing that's being pitched to them at the time. The brand confirms both self-image at once, and every piece of copy is in on the joke. Every piece of packaging is a tiny environmental statement, and the customer feels they are part of the joke, not the target of it. And they feel righteous about the can being in their hands and them supporting the environment in the same time. Now compare that to Knack. Knack uses a local pride of the Adironic Providence. Liquid Death uses skulls and death metal lettering as part of their ICP play. And neither could have used each other's playbook. The ICP determines the playbook. It's the first constraints of brand strategy that oftentimes people miss. Both of these companies walk away from somebody entirely, specifically on purpose and in writing. The companies that compound and the companies that become iconic are the ones with the discipline to define who they are not for. And to stay out of the rooms and to stay out of the conversations when the deals are right there in front of them with the taking, right? This is money you're walking away from. Here is a question I get asked almost every time I teach this framework. If I narrow my ICP this tightly, am I not limiting my growth? Now this is a reasonable thing to ask. And the best answer I know is a parable. Every day, we're all swimming in the same water. Problems at work, problems at home, the inbox, the relationship that needs tending, right? When are you gonna get home? The babies waiting for you, the dealing that is not closing. We are underwater, moving through the same ocean, carrying weight, and somewhere in the ocean there are two fishermen. And the first cast his nest wide as wide as he can across the whole surface. The logic is simple. More wide net means more cash. He reaches everywhere and hopes for everything and ends up with a little bit of everyone. Many customers, none of them super sticky, revenue that comes from it, but nothing that really compounds. And then there's a second fisherman. This one who studied the water. He knows there is a bay. He knows where something is small, where the bluefin tuna run deeper than anywhere else in the region. And he has been there before. He's not there every single day or all the time, always late hours. He knows exactly the time that he needs to go. And so he's not there for every fish in the ocean either. He's indispensable to one. And at the end of the year, the first fisherman caught more fish. But the second fisherman has built something. The Michelin Star restaurants, they call him first. He's the best buyer in the market and they know his name. His fish commands a price and a net capture that cannot be touched. He's not a vendor. He is the only option for Bluefish Tuna. And that is not an ICP decision. It does not limit you to a bay. It makes you irreplaceable inside one. And most brands shout at the noise, hoping someone else hears. The brands that compound are the ones that whisper to the exact right person. Make them feel like you're the only option in the room. That's what ICP does, and that's why it's so important. Now look at the companies that became the category defining. Yahoo tried the opposite. Email, news, search, finance, sports, shopping, maps, answers. All under one brand, all at once. And none of them were obvious choice for anything or for anyone. Google picked one thing and won it. Yahoo picked everything and lost it all. Okay. The second choice in every category is basically the first choice at night. At its peak, Yahoo was worth $100 billion. And now it's basically worth nothing. Amazon started with books. Jeff Bezos did not build an online bookstore. He wanted to build something for everything, but he chose books deliberately. The highest numbers of distinct tiles of any product category, the most predictable shipping dimensions, the lowest return rates, right? He studied the category. But books were not the visions. Books were the sharpest possible wedge into the e-commerce platform. Amazon dominated books and build the logistical infrastructure and build the customer relationship first. And then he expanded, right? Everything came after books. Books were the ICP. But the brands that go wide before they go deep always stay mediocre. So you want to go narrow and deep, not wide and shallow. The brands that go narrow and deep first they build equity and then they expand from a position of strength. Okay, that's what good branding does. It gives you more strength. ICP is not a limitation on growth, it's a mechanism for growth. Focus gives the brand power, and power then buys you the right to expand. Not the other way around. Okay, so what happens to ICP as you scale? Well, it widens, but sequentially, not simultaneously. You do not try to serve 12 customer types at once. You serve one brilliantly, and you become the obvious choice for that one. And then an adjacent one opens up. And the brands that try to widen too many simultaneously do not get multiple audience. They actually get none, right? They get the attention of neither. The first customer stops feeling chosen when they grow too quickly, and then the second never feels anything at all. This is not like a slow fade, right? This happened, this can happen the moment the brand stops being clear for someone. The brand that expands wells do it differently. They find the next customer type that shares most of the filters of the first. Okay, this could be the same trigger, the same self-image, a similar context. The pain point rhymes, okay? The values overlap. So it doesn't feel like they are having completely different pain points, right? You're not starting all over again. The brand does not need to contradict itself in order to reach a new customer. So PayPal moved from eBay power sellers to small business owners. It was a different identity, but the same triggers, right? They need to get paid reliable and fast and maybe deal with international transactions. The brand stays legible because the core filter holds. The companies that skip this sequence, they try to be everything for everyone from day one, are the ones in the board meeting asking, What is our actual differentiator? Three years later. ICP is not forever, but it is for the beginning. And you cannot skip the beginning. So one more credit before we close. That's Al Rice and Drake Trout. They wrote the book Positioning, The Battle of Your Mind in the 1980s. So great book. I pulled a lot of great insight and information from this book. Positioning is not what you do in the product, it is what you do for the mind of the prospect. If you have not read it, I definitely recommend it. Everything else is commentary. So here is the only assignment. Run the five filters, fill in all five, and then write the inverse. Who it is not for for each. Read them both out loud. If the not side does not make you slightly uncomfortable, you've likely not done anything yet. If the ICP exists only in the document, it's not the ICP, it is just a file. The question is not whether you have one, the question is whether it shows up in the brand touch points. NAC knew its ICP. Liquid knew. And the only question is whether you do. Next episode, we go one level down the stack from audience to architecture and why the structure of your brand portfolio, the organization chart of your brand, is the decision that shapes every naming, every identity, and positioning choice you make for the next decade. So thanks for listening. Let's talk soon.