Designing brands that connect, inspire.
Writen By
Maya Fernandez
Published
October 25, 2025
Introduction
Connection is the most over-claimed word in brand work and one of the easiest to check. Either people repeat what you said in their own words, or they do not.
Connection is a measurable thing
Read a hundred support tickets, a hundred reviews and a hundred sales calls, and you will find the sentence your customers use about you. It is almost never the sentence on the homepage. The distance between the two is the honest measure of how well the brand connects.
Three habits that close the distance
- Write from the customer's problem, not from the company's capability. The capability is the second paragraph.
- Use the customer's nouns. Every industry has a word the trade uses and the buyer does not.
- Say the number. Specificity reads as honesty in a way that no amount of tone of voice can imitate.
Inspiration is a by-product
Brands that set out to inspire tend to produce copy about journeys. Brands that set out to be useful, and are, get described as inspiring by the people they were useful to — which is the only version of it worth having.
Conclusion
If you want to know whether a brand connects, stop reading the brand guidelines and start reading the reviews. The answer is already written down, by the only people qualified to write it.
