Brand Strategy
When Customer Input Is Valuable to Your Rebrand (and When It Isn’t)

Customers are at the heart of any business. It makes sense that when companies enter a rebrand, they want to bring customers into the process.
But as we’ve shared previously, a rebrand generally occurs when there’s a big shift in your company. Whether it’s a shift in the audience you’re targeting, a redefinition of the competitive landscape, modernizing to meet evolving needs, or something else — these big shifts are almost always internal ones, not ones that your customers will have insight into. Although it can be helpful to get customer input to understand what your company is doing well (and what you could improve on), it’s only one ingredient of the research that goes into our rebrand recipe.
At Focus Lab, we agree that your audience is important, but we don’t recommend overindexing on customer opinion within your rebrand process. To build a brand your audience loves, you need to get input from them, right? Yes and no. Here’s how we approach customer input — and why we don’t overindex on it.
How do we use customer input?
We use customer input as a form of research. In some projects, we conduct direct customer interviews. But we don’t recommend them in every case. Even when we do include them, we’re intentional about how many people we speak with, and why (more on that later).
Other times, our partners will provide existing customer inputs to us, in the form of customer quotes and downloads. We also look at review sites like G2 and client case studies to check out what folks are saying about your products and brand.
Customers are important, but they can’t define your brand for you.
Interviewing customers and reading up on their opinions can be helpful for identifying pain points in your existing brand or product and understanding what made your brand stand out among the sea of competitors.
But when you rely too heavily on them to define your brand, you risk building a mirror that reflects back what they expect, rather than a magnet that attracts them. In short, customers don’t know what they don’t know, and relying on external opinions for brand validation is missing a key part of the equation.
When we have partners push for more customer input in a rebrand, it can sometimes be to seek that validation. But great brands are not shaped by what the market thinks they should be. They’re grounded in what they are, what they believe, and how they want to show up in the world. That clarity doesn’t come from customer quotes. It comes from introspection: knowing your values, your purpose, and what makes you different.
Customers can provide valuable information and insights, but they’re a small piece of our strategy research. Relying on customers to affirm the future of your brand may sound like a good move in theory, but they’re not privy to the information that insiders know. They’re relying on you to paint a vision of the future that they can follow.
"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” — Henry Ford
Our focus is quality of customer input, not quantity.
Although we don’t do market research, we do conduct stakeholder interviews and customer research. But since customers are only one part of the research puzzle, this information is not about volume — it’s about quality and relevance. When we speak directly with customers, we recommend no more than six interviews. After that, patterns start to muddy, outlier opinions creep in, and feedback gets repetitive or contradictory. Similarly, we aim to only take in the most relevant customer information during our research phase.
If your team would like us to engage with customers during the process, we find it helpful to include customer input (direct interviews and otherwise) from the clients or customers who:
- Shout your names from the rooftops. These are the ones that when you get a referral that mentions them, you think, “Oh yeah, I want to work with another person just like that client.” They’re the clients and customers you wish you could clone.
- This means that our interviews are often with a small group of customers, and that’s great. Once we get beyond six or so interviews, insights begin to run together.
- Are actively engaged with your brand. A great client from a few years ago isn’t helpful; they aren’t up to date with what’s changed with your company. A customer who is a big fan but doesn’t actively use your product or services isn’t great either, since they can’t speak to the day-to-day brand experience.
- Fit your ideal customer profile moving forward. If your brand wants to attract more enterprises in the future, interviewing customers at SMBs likely won’t elicit the most valuable insights.
These are the folks who give us insight into your current differentiation — what you do better than any other competitor, and why they love working with you. And those insights become a supporting thread in your strategy.
When it comes to our brand strategy research, the most useful insights usually come from inside your company, not outside it.
The goal of a rebrand is to carve a clear path toward what’s next. Information about what’s special about your company and why folks love working with you is important, but it’s even more valuable to pair that with your future vision and direction. And that’s something that comes from within.
It’s our conversations with your team and the information you provide to us that really make the difference. These are the conversations where we hear about your goals and ambitions, what’s working and not working in your brand currently, and what your brand truly stands for. These are the things no customer could ever fully articulate. As we said in our market research blog, “When we seek approval from outside the organization, we relinquish ownership of our brand and hand over our power to voices that don’t understand our vision.”
We’re not discounting customer input. We simply believe it should support your brand strategy — not lead it. As with every part of your rebrand, we encourage you to be intentional about the information that goes into it. Just like when building a recipe, an extra dash of spices or subbing in a different ingredient can change things, and we want to ensure there’s no confusion or unexpected bumps on our road forward.