The Tyranny of the Average
Why defining your Design Target helps leaders lead
There is a version of your organization that moves faster, argues less, and builds things people actually love. We have seen it. It exists inside companies that made one clear decision, deliberately and without flinching, about exactly who they are building for. Most organizations today say they are consumer led, customer centric, user first. Call it what you want. They run the research, talk to consumers, and build the personas. But those activities teach you how to listen, not who to commit to.
A Design Target answers that question.
We've worked with brands across almost every category, and a pattern emerges quickly. On one side, companies with a clear Design Target, one that brings stubborn conviction about who they're for, a north star the whole organization navigates by, the shorthand everyone speaks. On the other, brands sitting on broad demographic definitions they've never had to question, with real reasons to stay there: reach they've spent decades building, a loyal base they don't want to risk, a board that equates focus with lost revenue.
What exactly is a Design Target?
A Design Target is the specific community of people your organization chooses to build around. Not everyone. Not the average. A real group with distinct values, behaviors, and expectations that can shape where you go next.
Design Target communities aren't average consumers. They're cultural leaders with an unwavering belief system and trend-setting behavior, already solving future needs of the masses before the mainstream knows it has them. They’re living in your brand's future right now.
It’s not “women 25 to 54, HHI $75K+,” a segment definition that lives in a slide deck and gets referenced exactly once a year.
It’s not a persona, a marketing artifact made of fictional composites stitched together from survey data and given names like “Motivated Melissa.” Personas may summarize a segment, but they are static, abstract, and impossible to learn from in real time.
It’s not the average user, brought in to validate ideas rather than help imagine what’s next.
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A Design Target gives your entire organization permission to say no. That filter is enormously clarifying. It makes you faster, sharper, and far less prone to the kind of opportunistic distraction that scatters strategy and dilutes brands.
– Xavi Cortadellas, GM Gatorade
Brand Stories
A Design Target is easy to agree with in principle. The difficulty is choosing one when focus carries real consequences. These stories show how that tension gets resolved.
An ubiquitous brand everyone likes
A snack brand came to us, one of the biggest in the world, with a simple brief: grow cultural relevance without losing their core. But when we asked who their core was, six people gave six different answers.
A brand that ubiquitous had never had to choose. Because for decades they didn't have to: steady growth, dominant shelf space, a household name. But a fragmented sea of new brands was eating into their cultural moment, and they knew something had to change. The fear of alienating the people who had always shown up for them made every conversation about focus feel like a threat. But fragmentation punishes brands that try to stay neutral.
The instinct to chase the middle is understandable. It feels like the safe play. Wider net, more fish. But it's actually the riskiest thing you can do — because when you design for everyone, you design with no one. You end up with a product that is technically functional and emotionally neutral. And in a world where attention is currency and loyalty is hard-won, that’s fatal.
What we found was a clear red thread running through their existing consumers, revealing the people at the center of the brand’s opportunity, the magnetic middle that could pull the masses in.
A brand with competing audiences
A health and wellness client needed to identify the right consumer to grow with. They had two distinct groups and had been trying to serve both equally, which meant neither felt like the product was truly made for them.
One group was highly driven and health conscious, the kind of people who actively manage their habits, track their progress, and treat wellness as part of their identity. The other was motivated but inconsistent, people trying to become a better version of themselves without always following through. The tension in the room was real. The second group was bigger, yet less engaged, and walking away from them felt like leaving revenue on the table.
What we found was that the highly driven consumer was not just one audience segment, but the aspirational center of the brand. Even the less consistent group described discipline as the ideal, with one person admitting, “Consistency is the only thing that gets you anywhere.”
They were the clearest fit, the most engaged, and the group others were already measuring themselves against. Focusing there gave the client a stronger filter for decision making and a more compelling path to broader relevance and growth.
A masterbrand with different targets
A global technology company was building a unified experience across its portfolio, while serving two sub brands with meaningfully different users.
One was shaped by American pragmatism, toughness, and familiarity. The other reflected a more European sensibility, with stronger associations around modernity, precision, and progress.
It became clear that these audiences were too different to collapse into a single Design Target. They shared core needs, but not the same signals of trust. Trying to merge them would have flattened both.
The answer was a shared strategic foundation with room for distinct brand expression. That allowed the team to unify system logic while tailoring visual language, tone, and brand cues to each audience.
A brand with an evolving consumer
We worked with a major fitness brand that had surged during the pandemic by meeting a real cultural moment. Once that moment passed, the audience kept moving.
Exercise was taking on a different meaning, and that created real tension inside the business. Some leaders wanted to keep strengthening the core offer. Others wanted to explore adjacent solutions and a broader role in people’s lives. The Design Target was already clear. The work was staying close enough to that consumer to catch the shift as it happened.
What we found was that the consumer’s definition of fitness had widened. It was no longer just about intensity or performance, but about supporting different moods, needs, and moments across daily life. That clarity gave the brand a sharper view of where to stretch next, from communications to new experiences, without losing the core that made it matter in the first place.
What this means for leaders
Start by deciding, right now, who you are truly building for.
This is the work that changes the job of leading, because it gives the entire organization one source of truth. Not a rebrand. Not a revised mission statement. Not a new user study. The work of building deep, genuine understanding of your core community, then using that understanding as the spine of everything you build, say, and decide.
Your teams are moving fast. They're executing. They're shipping. They're keeping the machine running. No one has time to stop and do the thinking that anchors all of that execution to something real. But that's exactly why it has to be prioritized — because without it, fast execution is just efficient drift.
The brands that will win in the next decade won't be the ones with the biggest budgets or the most channels or the fastest content cycles. They'll be the ones who understood one type of person so deeply that they built something those people couldn't imagine living without. And then watched everyone else want it too.