Ep. 64 Should Your Brand Be Built For You or Your Ideal Client?

Mar 16

When you first created your brand, who were you really building it for? Your current self? Your future self? Your ideal client? Or maybe, if you're being honest, you weren't entirely sure?

There's a lot of competing advice about this online, and you'll find branding experts who are firmly on both sides of the debate. Here's the thing though: they're both right, and they're both missing something at the same time. This post is going to settle the score and give you the clarity you've been missing around how much of your brand should be about you versus how much should be about your ideal client.

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The Two Camps and Why Neither One Is Fully Right

When it comes to who your brand should be built for, there are two main schools of thought.

Camp A: It's all about you. Personal brand advocates will tell you that you are your own differentiating factor. Your personality, your story, your energy is what sets you apart, and nobody can replicate that. So you should lean all the way into building a brand that puts yourself at the forefront.

Camp B: It's all about your ideal client. On the other side, plenty of branding experts will argue that since a brand exists to attract and convert ideal clients, every color, word, and message should be chosen based on what's going to resonate with them, not based on your personal preferences.

Both of these positions have real merit, and I personally know highly talented branding designers who fall on each side. But in my experience, going too far in either direction creates problems. The true answer lives somewhere in the middle.

What Happens When Your Brand Is 100% About You

A quick note before we go further: if you are an influencer or a celebrity, then yes, a fully personal brand makes sense because that's exactly why people follow you. But for the done-for-you service providers who make up most of my audience, a brand that is entirely about you tends to create a specific and frustrating problem.

When your brand is built completely around your personality, your aesthetic preferences, your vibe, it can start to feel a little too self-centered to your audience. It might attract people who genuinely like you as a person, but who aren't necessarily ideal clients ready to invest in your services. You end up with a brand that feels beautiful and authentic to you, but doesn't clearly communicate what you do, who you help, or what transformation you offer.

The result? You invest in a rebrand, love how it looks, and then wonder where all the clients are.

What Happens When Your Brand Is 100% About Your Ideal Client

The opposite extreme creates a different set of problems. When your brand is built entirely around your ideal client, it can start to feel foreign or inauthentic when you're actually trying to use it. Marketing becomes exhausting because you don't really love your brand and it doesn't feel like you. There's a subtle weirdness that comes with attaching your name to something that doesn't reflect who you are.

You might attract clients who check all the right boxes on paper, but the relationship lacks that personality match that makes the work genuinely enjoyable. Those clients still pay the bills. But they don't really light you up.

There's also something worth naming here: building a brand that's entirely about your ideal client and nothing about you can actually be a form of hiding. Staying so generic and so safe that you never have to put your real self out there. And that works against you, because people hire people. If your brand never gives anyone the chance to feel like they know you, how are they supposed to get comfortable enough to hire you?

The Venn Diagram Sweet Spot

Here's the framework I use to think about this. Picture a Venn diagram. The left circle represents a fully personal brand built around your personality, preferences, and vibe. The right circle represents a fully client-centric brand built around everything your ideal client needs to see, feel, and hear in order to trust you. The overlap in the middle is where your brand actually belongs.

That overlap is where your unique personality meets their unique needs. Where your personal story becomes the reason they choose you over a competitor. Where you're able to show up as yourself and also communicate exactly what your clients need in order to pull the trigger and hire you.

That is the goal of great brand strategy: identifying what lives in that overlap and bringing it to life across your visuals, your messaging, your website, your social media, and everywhere else your brand shows up.

The Questions to Ask on Each Side

To find your overlap, you need to honestly answer questions from both sides of the diagram.

On the personal brand side, ask yourself: what aesthetic, colors, and fonts feel authentic to your personality? What are your non-negotiables when it comes to brand values, voice, and messaging? What do you want to talk about and be known for? These are the things that make your brand sustainable and enjoyable to show up for. They're what you'll actually want to promote.

On the client-centric side, ask yourself: what does your ideal client need to feel in order to trust you? What language do they use when describing their problem? What do they need to see in your brand to feel like you're the right fit? This is the part that makes your brand actually work and actually convert.

The overlap is where you weave those two sets of answers together.

How to Find the Overlap in Your Existing Brand

If you're reading this and realizing your current brand skews heavily toward one side or the other, here's where to start.

Audit what you have. Does your brand feel authentic to you? Does it speak clearly to your ideal client? Or does it lean too far in one direction?

Get clear on your non-negotiables. What do you genuinely love about your existing brand that you'd never want to change, whether that's a visual element, a tone of voice, or a core message? And what feels a little misaligned or like it's speaking to an outdated version of your ideal client?

Do market research. This one cannot be overstated. Talk to your ideal clients. Read the feedback they give you. Listen to how they describe their problems and their experience working with you. Ask them directly about their perception of your brand.

Then look for the natural overlap. What parts of your brand do you love that your ideal clients are also responding to? What parts do you feel like you've outgrown, and are your clients quietly calling those same things out as a mismatch? That's your starting point for what needs to evolve.

The Right Balance Looks Different for Every Business

Getting this balance right doesn't mean landing on a perfect 50-50 split every time. Some businesses will naturally be 60% about them and 40% about their ideal client. Some might flip that. Some may land at 70-30 in either direction, and that's completely fine.

What matters is that you're not fully camped out on either extreme. Going all in on a personal brand can feel brave and empowering, but it can also become a way of avoiding the deeper work of truly understanding your audience. And going all in on a client-centric brand can feel smart and strategic, but it can also be a way of keeping yourself so hidden that your potential clients never get the chance to feel like they know you.

Building a brand in that overlap requires both vulnerability and strategy. Both of those things are hard on their own, and they're even harder together. That's part of why a lot of brands never quite take off the way they could. But when you get it right, it makes everything easier: the marketing, the client attraction, the day-to-day of showing up and running your business.

Your Brand Is the Bridge

The answer to "should your brand be built for you or your ideal client?" is not one or the other. It's both.

Your brand should act as the bridge that connects you to your ideal client. You build that bridge by honestly answering two sets of questions: who am I, what do I want to be known for, and what feels real to me? And also: who is my audience, how do they want to be seen, and what are they looking for from someone who provides the service I provide? The overlap between those two sets of answers is where your brand lives.

If your brand has been feeling off, whether that means you love it but it's not attracting clients, or you're getting clients but the brand still doesn't feel like you, the problem is most likely that you've built too far into one extreme. The fix isn't starting over. It's finding your way back to the middle.