Users

Who they are, why & how they use your brand

Behind every abstract target audience is a real person with specific habits, pressures, and reasons for choosing you or not, and the closer you get to that person, the sharper the brand becomes.

Understanding users is not a one-time research exercise that produces a set of personas to file away. It is an ongoing practice of staying curious about the people who actually engage with your brand: who they are, what they are trying to do, what frustrates them, and what would make them choose you again. The distance between a brand and its real users tends to grow over time without deliberate effort to close it.

The most revealing user insights rarely come from surveys alone. They come from watching people use a product, listening to the language they use to describe a problem, or reading what they write to each other when no one from the brand is in the room. That kind of research tends to surface motivations and workarounds that no one inside the company thought to ask about.

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.

Talk to users regularly, not just at launch

Brands like Spotify and Airbnb build continuous user research into their operating rhythm, not just as a pre-launch phase. Regular qualitative interviews alongside usage data create a much richer picture than either can offer alone.

Find the gap between stated and actual behavior

What users say they do and what they actually do often diverge. Brands that invest in observational research or usage analytics tend to find this gap, which reveals which features or messages are doing real work versus which ones users say they value but quietly ignore.

Involve users in shaping the brand

Some brands involve users directly in product and brand development through beta programs, co-creation workshops, or ongoing advisory relationships. Lego Ideas, for example, lets fans submit and vote on new sets, which produces both product ideas and a stronger sense of ownership among the most engaged users.

Questions to explore

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

Who actually uses your brand today, and how does that compare to who you thought you were building it for?
What job is your brand really doing for users, in the moments they reach for it?
What do your users struggle with that your brand does not yet address well?
How do different types of users experience the brand differently, and does one group's experience undermine another's?
When did you last spend time with a user who was not already your biggest fan?

Things to notice

Relying on personas built from assumptions rather than actual user research, which makes them feel real but represent no one in particular.
Talking only to the most vocal or enthusiastic users and missing the more representative majority who are harder to reach.
Treating user research as a validation tool for decisions already made rather than a genuine input to what gets decided.