ThemeProcess & Planning
CardCard 20 of 64
Questions5 to explore

Discovery

How people find out about you

Before a brand can mean anything to someone, that person has to find out it exists.

Discovery covers all the ways people first encounter a brand: search results, social feeds, word of mouth, editorial coverage, community recommendation, physical spaces, events. The mix differs enormously by category and audience, and the mistake is assuming you know how your best customers found you without actually asking.

Discovery is also partly a brand positioning question. Where a brand shows up in the discovery landscape signals something about who it is for. Appearing in certain publications, communities, or search results positions you alongside other things people trust. Being found through referrals from existing customers is a different signal than being found through paid acquisition.

How strong brands handle it

The same building block, handled well. These are approaches and illustrations from how brands tend to work, not rules, and never a ranking of companies.

Word of mouth as design goal

Dropbox and Airbnb built their early growth around discovery through referral, which was not accidental. The referral mechanism was engineered into the product and the brand experience, making sharability part of the brand's core proposition.

Search presence as brand expression

Brands like HubSpot have made search discovery central to their brand strategy, producing educational content that ranks for what their target audience is trying to understand, not just what the brand wants to sell.

Community-led discovery

Linear and Figma found early adopters through the communities where their target users were already talking about tools. Being discovered where trusted peers talk is a different kind of introduction than an ad.

Questions to explore

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

How do our best customers actually find out about us, and does our brand investment reflect that?
Which discovery channels bring people who stay versus people who churn?
What does a first encounter with our brand look like in each of our main discovery channels?
Where in the category conversation are we not showing up but should be?
How much of our discovery is engineered versus happening without our involvement?

Things to notice

Attribution for discovery is notoriously imprecise. Someone may see an ad, then a Tweet, then a friend's mention before they convert. Optimizing only for the last touchpoint misunderstands how discovery actually works.
Categories where all brands use the same discovery channels (all on the same three social platforms, all at the same conferences) tend to be places where standing out is hardest. Think about where your audience is that your competitors are not.
Discovery sets expectations. How and where you are found shapes what people expect when they arrive. Paid acquisition through high-pressure ad copy attracts a different mindset than editorial discovery.