Anyone who has commissioned a website redesign or new brand identity has heard the same words come up in a kickoff call: modern, trustworthy, premium, disruptive. According to a recent breakdown from Smashing Magazine, those words are exactly where branding projects tend to go wrong, long before anyone opens a design tool.
The article, written by a branding agency founder who works with SaaS, fintech, and other technology clients, describes what she calls the “pre-concept” phase: the research and clarification work that should happen after a kickoff meeting but before a designer produces a first visual direction. The core problem she identifies is that broad brand adjectives feel agreed upon in a room, but rarely mean the same thing to every stakeholder.
The Same Word, Three Different Brands
The article uses a health tech company as an example. The client wanted to appear modern, trustworthy, and disruptive. On the surface, “disruptive” suggested something bold and unconventional. But because the company’s actual clients were large, conservative government medical institutions, a visually loud or rebellious brand would have undermined the trust it needed to build. The word was correct, but too broad to act on until the team dug into what it actually meant for that specific audience.
The same risk applies to a word like “premium.” One stakeholder might picture something refined and editorial, another might picture something expensive and exclusive, and a third might picture something clean and minimal. Everyone nods in the meeting, then three very different visual directions emerge later.
Questions That Clarify Perception
The article argues that discovery workshops should go beyond standard business and competitor questions and get into perception directly, since a brand exists in the audience’s mind rather than in the company’s intentions. Suggested questions include:
- What should people believe about the company after seeing the brand for the first time?
- What would make the brand feel credible in this specific category?
- If the brand were a person in the room, how would they speak?
- What do customers currently misunderstand about the company or category?
- Where does the brand need to fit expectations, and where should it break from them?
Why This Matters for Site Owners
For anyone managing a WordPress site or planning a rebrand alongside a redesign, the takeaway is practical: pin down what your brand adjectives actually mean, and to whom, before a designer or developer starts building. Skipping that step doesn’t just risk an ugly logo. It risks a mismatch between the site’s tone and the audience it’s trying to earn trust with, which can undercut conversions no matter how well the site itself is built or hosted.