Brand ICP.

A while back, I was working with a national B2B platform company. They had built the infrastructure underneath a roster of well-known consumer brands, and they were now thinking about spinning off their own consumer-facing brand. New product line, new customer, new everything.

We were sitting in a planning meeting on go-to-market. And the CRO, the chief revenue officer, said something that revenue leaders say all the time. He was focused on the types of revenue categories the new brand should pursue. He said, "we're just trying to figure out the types of customers we want to work with."

I told him, "okay. Then start with who you don't."

He nodded. He said, "wow, yeah, that makes things easier."

He was right. It is easier. It is much easier to write down who you do not want as a customer, and then trim from there, than it is to invent the perfect customer from a blank page. Most revenue leaders can list five customer types they would walk away from before they can list one customer type they would build a brand around. The negative list is where the real conviction lives. The positive list is where most teams hide their lack of one.

Start with who you don't.

That moment, in that room, "start with who you don't," is the entire thesis of this episode.

Because most ICP work in the world starts with the question "who is this for." That question, asked first, almost always produces a vague answer. "Modern professionals." "Ambitious founders." "Health-conscious consumers." The answer feels like it means something until you read it back and realize it means almost nothing.

The question that actually produces a sharp ICP is the inverse one. Who is this not for? And the founders who can answer that question with specifics, with people they would turn away, with revenue they would refuse, with categories they would walk past, are the founders who build brands that compound.

Today we are talking about Ideal Customer Profile. The most underrated decision in all of brand strategy. And we are going to do it backwards. We are going to start with who it isn't.

I am John Luke. Welcome to Position to Win, where you can find consistent branding and positioning advice for founders and CMOs.

What ICP actually means

ICP stands for Ideal Customer Profile. And every one of those three words is doing work.

Ideal. Not typical. Not average. Not "everyone who might buy from us." Ideal means the customer who gets the most value from what you do, who pays you with the least friction, who stays the longest, who refers other customers, and who, critically, makes the rest of your business better by being in it.

Customer. Not buyer. Not user. Not target market. Your ICP is the person, or more often the specific type of household or company, that you are actually trying to close, serve, and retain.

Profile. A set of attributes, written down, that you can use to make decisions. A profile is not a person. It is a pattern.

Most founders think they have an ICP. Most founders actually have a target market, which is a much bigger, much fuzzier thing. Target market is a category, "enterprise SaaS" or "direct-to-consumer skincare" or "cannabis." ICP is a specific, narrow slice of that category that you are deliberately going to win.

Knack

I am going to use two case studies in this episode, and I want to introduce one of them now because it shows up throughout. Knack is a New York recreational cannabis brand. My studio led the brand identity and strategy work. It is the first recreationally grown cannabis brand in New York State, grown in the Adirondacks, sold in New York dispensaries.

Knack's target market is "New York recreational cannabis consumers." That is about two million people. Knack's ICP is much narrower than that. The narrowing is what gave the brand its voice.

What ICP is not

ICP is not TAM. Total Addressable Market is the universe of people who could theoretically buy your product. TAM is an investor-deck number. ICP is a go-to-market number.

ICP is not a buyer persona. A persona is a fictional individual, "Marketing Manager Mary, thirty-five, lives in Austin." Personas are useful as writing prompts. They are not ICP. ICP describes the deal. Personas describe the people.

ICP is not aspirational. A lot of founders describe their ICP as the customer they wish they had, a Fortune 500 logo, a famous brand. If you are not closing deals with that customer, that is not your ICP. That is fan fiction.

If you are not closing deals with that customer, that is not your ICP. That is fan fiction.

The Five Filters

Most ICP work in the world stops at three things. Demographics. Psychographics. Behavior. Who they are, what they value, what they do. That is the standard version most agencies will deliver to you. Three is enough to get a brand off the ground.

The framework I work from adds two more. I call it the Five Filters. It is mine, developed over years of running ICP engagements across cannabis, healthcare, real estate, CPG, and B2B. The first three filters are the standard ones every agency teaches. The last two add depth: they help the brand reach further, hit harder, and resist drift over time.

Five questions, in order. Each one screens the audience tighter than the one before it. And this matters: each one is paired with its inverse. Who is this not for at this filter. The "not" half is the half that does the work.

The "not" half is the half that does the work.

Filter one. Category. What category are you in? Not what you do. The category your customer puts you in when they're shopping. For Knack, the category is recreational cannabis. For Liquid Death, which we will get to, the category is bottled water. For your firm, the category is whatever the customer Googles when they realize they have your problem.

Filter two. Geography or context. Where do they live, work, or buy? In what circumstance does the purchase happen? Knack chose New York. Liquid Death chose music venues, tattoo parlors, and skate shops before they ever chose grocery aisles. Geography is not always literal. Sometimes it is a context: a moment, a setting, a channel.

Filter three. Lifestage or revenue band. For consumer, this is age, household composition, life chapter. For B2B, it is revenue band and team size. The CRO of a fifty-person startup and the CRO of a twenty-thousand-person enterprise are different species of buyer.

Filter four. Trigger. What makes them go looking? "I'm bored with what I have." "My friend handed me one." "Our last vendor failed." The trigger tells you the emotional doorway your brand has to walk through. Most ICP documents skip this filter entirely. It is the one most teams miss.

Filter five. Psychographic. Who do they think they are? Not who they are. Who they think they are. Knack's customer thinks they are a New Yorker with taste. Liquid Death's customer thinks they are someone who cares about plastic waste and refuses to be sold to. Patagonia's customer thinks they are an environmentalist who happens to be outdoors. Self-image is the deepest filter of ICP, and the hardest to get right, because it requires you to listen for things people do not say out loud.

Five filters. Each one screens the audience tighter. By the time you are through the fifth filter, the universe of "everyone who could buy from us" has shrunk to a pattern specific enough to run a brand against.

A quick caveat. The Five Filters is sharpest for consumer brands and consumer-adjacent B2B. It strains in pure enterprise B2B, in two-sided marketplaces where you have two ICPs to run, and in heavily regulated categories where procurement dominates. In those contexts the framework still helps. The lower filters just do less work. Adapt accordingly.

Where the inputs come from

Frameworks are useless without inputs. Three sources, in priority order.

Source one. Interview your ten best customers, the ones you would clone if you could. Ask four questions. What were you doing the day you decided to look for us? What did you almost buy instead? What would have to change for you to leave? And when you describe us to a friend, what words do you use? That last question is gold. It gives you the language your future customers are already using. This is April Dunford's point in Obviously Awesome: your best-fit customers will tell you your positioning if you ask them in the right order.

Source two. Read your sales call transcripts, support tickets, and reviews. The unfiltered language your customers use when they are not trying to flatter you is the most accurate ICP data you will ever get. Most companies have hundreds of hours of this material in a CRM and have never read it.

Source three. Watch what they buy alongside you. Adjacent purchases tell you what category your customer thinks you are in. Sometimes it is not the category you thought.

Do those three things, interview the best ten, read the unfiltered language, watch the adjacent purchases, and you will have the inputs to fill in the Five Filters. It is one to two weeks of real work. It is the most leveraged work you will do all year.

The exercise

Block one hour on your calendar. Take the Five Filters and fill it in for your business. Out loud, on paper, with a pen, not in a Notion doc. The friction of writing by hand is part of the exercise.

Then, the harder half: write the inverse. For each of the five filters, write down what you are not. Not this category. Not this geography. Not this lifestage. Not this trigger. Not this psychographic.

Now read both sides out loud. If the "not" side is empty, vague, or longer than the "is" side, you have not done the work. The "not" side should feel uncomfortable, because it represents revenue you are choosing to walk away from. If it does not feel uncomfortable, you have not committed to anything yet.

Then take this document into your next leadership meeting. Read it. See who agrees. Watch who flinches. The flinches are where your ICP is still contested inside your own company. That contested space is what is bleeding your marketing budget.

The cost of no ICP

Without an ICP, customer acquisition cost rises, conversion drops, and retention thins out. The brand sounds like every other brand because it is trying to speak to too many audiences. Eventually, somebody in a board meeting asks "what is our actual differentiation?" and the room goes quiet.

With an ICP, the math reverses. CAC falls. Conversion rises. Retention compounds. Pricing power emerges. You become the obvious choice for a specific customer, instead of an okay choice for a general one.

This is not a marketing exercise. It is a financial decision with marketing consequences.

Knack: two passes

Let me walk you through how the ICP work actually played out on Knack.

Here is the non-obvious thing. We did the ICP work in two passes. Not one. Two.

The first pass was directional ICP. Before we named the company, before we designed anything, we knew the brand was going to be a New York recreational cannabis company, grown locally, sold legally, built around volume and accessibility, bigger packs, fair prices, real product, positioned against the stoner stereotype on one side and the luxury cannabis brands on the other. That was enough directional ICP to start naming.

We generated several hundred candidate names. The winner was Knack. Four letters. Percussive. Ownable. The name has a built-in cultural register, "I have a knack for this," "you've got a knack for that," that assumes the reader is an adult with taste, not a stoner looking for the strongest thing on the shelf. The name has an ICP built into it.

The name has an ICP built into it.

Once we had the name, the ICP got sharper. The name pulled the ICP into focus. Because "Knack" implies competence and taste, it cannot be marketed to someone looking for a bargain or a numb-out. The name did not just express the ICP. It narrowed it.

So we did a second ICP pass. The audience went from "New York recreational cannabis consumer" to something much more specific. A New Yorker with identity-level pride. An adult who buys cannabis the way they buy a six-pack, a regular, confident choice, not a special occasion. Someone who cares that it is grown in the Adirondacks for the same reasons other people care where their coffee is from. Someone who wants real product at a fair price from a brand that is from here.

That second pass is what made the voice work. Without it, the copy on the packaging would have been generic. With it, we could write lines like "another reason for Jersey to be jealous" and "once you go Knack, you don't go back."

The lesson most ICP frameworks miss: ICP is iterative with the brand. Sometimes the name, the voice, or the identity sharpens the ICP after the fact. Founders who do this well stay open to the ICP evolving as the brand takes shape. Founders who do this badly write the ICP document, lock it in a drawer, and never revisit it.

Liquid Death

Start with the name. Liquid Death is canned water. Every other brand in the bottled water category has a name that signals purity, hydration, freshness, or wellness. Aquafina. Smartwater. Pure Life. Essentia. Liquid Death named itself the literal opposite of every brand on the shelf.

That is not a marketing accident. That is the ICP decision, said out loud, in two words on the can.

The brand sells canned water in a tallboy that looks like a beer can. Sold in tattoo parlors and music venues before it was sold in grocery stores. Two taglines: "Murder Your Thirst" and "Death to Plastic." Founded by Mike Cessario, a former Netflix creative director, in 2017. Launched to consumers in 2019. Valued at one point four billion dollars by 2024.

The brand is built on two ICP decisions wearing aluminum.

The first is environmental. Liquid Death's customer refuses to keep buying plastic water bottles. "Death to Plastic" is not a slogan: it is the customer's stated value, delivered back to them on the can.

The second is cultural. Cessario's insight came from the Vans Warped Tour in 2009. He watched concertgoers drink water out of Monster Energy cans. Not because Monster tasted better. Because holding a Monster can did not make you feel like a kid. Holding a plastic water bottle did.

So Liquid Death's psychographic ICP is layered. People who care about plastic waste and people who feel uncool drinking water in social settings. Both at once. The aluminum can solves both.

Look at how every filter of the Five Filters shows up in their decisions.

Category. Bottled water. But Cessario refused to position against other water brands. He positioned against energy drinks and beer. The category cue is the occasion, not the product.

Geography or context. They did not start in grocery. They started in tattoo parlors, bars, and music venues. The context was the cue. Once the brand was associated with those contexts, grocery became easy. Whole Foods picked them up and they became the fastest-selling water brand on those shelves.

Lifestage. Young men, primarily. Twenty-one to thirty-five. Self-described or aspirational counterculture. The ones who eat clean but want to look like they don't.

Trigger. The trigger is social. "I'm at a show, a party, a barbecue, and I want to hold something that doesn't make me look like I'm trying too hard to be healthy."

Psychographic. The deepest filter, and the layered one. The Liquid Death customer thinks they care about plastic waste. They also think they have a dark sense of humor and are smarter than the marketing being pitched at them. The brand confirms both self-images at once. Every piece of copy is in on the joke; every piece of packaging is a tiny environmental statement. The customer feels they are part of the joke, not the target of it, and they feel righteous about the can in their hand.

Now compare to Knack. Knack's ICP is geographic and cultural: New York pride, identity-level. Knack belongs to the city. Liquid Death's ICP is psychographic and environmental: it belongs to the customer who wants to drink water without contributing to plastic waste and without looking like a kid in a metal venue.

Same category structure: branded consumer goods sold against generic competitors. Completely different ICP shapes. Knack uses local pride and Adirondack provenance. Liquid Death uses skulls and death-metal lettering. Neither could have used the other's playbook. The ICP determined the playbook.

Both walked away from somebody. Specifically. On purpose. In writing.

The companies that compound are the ones with the discipline to define who they are not for, and to stay out of those rooms even when the deals are right there for the taking.

Positioning, the original idea

One more name belongs here, because it is the one Dunford and the rest are building on top of.

Al Ries and Jack Trout wrote Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind in 1981. The book is about one idea: positioning is not what you do to a product, it is what you do to the mind of the prospect. That single shift is the foundation of every modern ICP framework, including the Five Filters.

ICP is not optional. Choose who you are for, write down who you are not for. Everything downstream, your name, voice, identity, packaging, pricing, sales script, is a tactical answer to one strategic question. For whom?

Four ways ICP work fails

The most common ICP failure: too broad. The company defines ICP as their target market, "enterprise SaaS" or "recreational cannabis," and never narrows.

The second most common: the moving target. ICP shifts every quarter to chase whatever looks like it might close. ICP is a multi-year commitment, not a quarterly theme.

The third: ICP calcification. The company gets good at selling to a specific segment and stays there long after the market has moved.

The fourth: conflating founder affinity with ICP. Founders sell best to customers who look like them. The question is not "who do I have the easiest conversations with." The question is "who generates the most value from our product, pays reliably, and grows with us."

The takeaway

Here is your takeaway.

Run the Five Filters on your business. Do the trigger work. Do the psychographic work. And do the inverse on every filter. Who is this not for. The "not" half is where the conviction lives.

If you cannot describe your ICP in one paragraph, with specific attributes, specific triggers, and a specific "Not Our ICP" list, that is the most valuable work you can do this quarter. Not a rebrand. Not a new website. The ICP document. Because without it, every other piece of brand and marketing work you commission is building on sand.

If you already have an ICP document, the question is not "do we have one." The question is "does our ICP show up in the artifacts." On the packaging. In the voice. On the don't-say-this page. If it does not, the document is decoration.

If it does not, the document is decoration.

Knack knew who it was for. It also knew who it was not for. Liquid Death knew the exact same thing, different shape, same discipline. When you can answer both halves of that question with specific, published evidence, you have done the work.

Next episode, we go one level down the stack. From audience to architecture. Why the structure of your brand portfolio, the org chart of your brand, is the decision that shapes every naming, identity, and positioning choice you make for the next decade.

Thanks for listening. Talk soon.