Almost every branding agency has heard this line at least once: “I personally don’t like that color, let’s change it.” It usually shows up in the final meeting, after weeks of research, testing, and argument building. And every time, it puts the same question on the table: who is this branding actually for?
“I like it” is a valid opinion. You’re entitled to it, like anyone looking at a logo or a label. But a personal opinion is not a branding strategy, and mixing up the two costs money, time, and sometimes the whole project. A brand doesn’t exist to reflect the owner’s taste. It exists to communicate with its market, in the language that market actually understands.
This article breaks down why founder-driven branding becomes a business risk, what you lose when you let personal aesthetics decide brand direction, and what a process looks like when strategy comes before preference.
Strategy should have the final say in a branding project. A functional brand is built for its market and audience, not merely for the aesthetic comfort of the person paying the bill.
What “I like it” actually is as a decision method?
HiPPO, the phenomenon behind the founder’s call
Business consulting already has a name for this pattern: the HiPPO effect, short for “highest paid person’s opinion.” Bernard Marr describes in Forbes how, without clear data, teams tend to defer almost automatically to the opinion of whoever holds the most authority in the room, even when that opinion has no objective basis behind it. In branding, that person is usually the founder.
It’s not about bad intentions. The founder genuinely believes they know what’s best for their brand, because they built it from nothing. The problem is that knowing your own business inside out doesn’t automatically translate into knowing how the market perceives that business visually. These are two different things, and they get confused often.
Why the owner’s opinion carries more weight than it should?
Nobody on the team wants to directly challenge the boss, especially when the discussion is about taste, a territory that feels personal and hard to argue against with numbers. The result is that aesthetic decisions end up replacing strategy, without anyone raising a flag in time. The designer backs down. The brand manager backs down. And the brand launches looking exactly how the founder wants, not necessarily how the audience needs it to look.
The difference between liking something and it working for the brand
Who the design is actually for?
A logo, a color palette, or a packaging design aren’t created for the business owner. They’re created for the customer choosing between shelves, for the user scanning a website in seconds, for the partner deciding in a few moments whether you’re worth working with. Your brand isn’t about you, it’s about the audience it talks to every day.
That doesn’t mean the founder’s taste is completely irrelevant. A founder who has built genuine intuition for their market over time can bring real value to the table. The difference is that intuition needs to be tested, not imposed. A personal preference becomes useful once it’s checked against a real audience, not when it turns into the final word with no appeal.
What “functional” means for a logo or a visual identity?
A design works when it does the job it was built for: it differentiates the brand on the shelf, communicates the right positioning, gets recognized quickly, and stays coherent across every touchpoint. Your logo isn’t your brand, it’s just one of the signals through which the brand gets recognized. A logo can look “nice” in someone’s opinion and, at the same time, fail completely for the business, because it ignores the context it will be seen in or the associations it triggers in a consumer’s mind.
What you lose when branding becomes about your taste?
The long-term cost of subjective decisions
Brand consistency isn’t a cosmetic preference, it’s a growth engine. Industry reports, including one from Marq, formerly Lucidpress, show that companies with consistent brand presentation across every channel report revenue growth between 10 and 20 percent, with some companies reaching even higher. Every decision made purely because “that’s what I like” and that drifts from the strategic direction chips away at exactly that consistency. Over time, the brand turns into a collage of successive personal preferences, not a coherent system.
The sign that strategy has turned into a vanity project
There’s a simple tell: if the main question in a branding meeting is “how does it look” rather than “what does it communicate, and to whom,” strategy has already been replaced by taste. “Looking good” is not branding, because a design can look flawless and still say nothing relevant about the brand’s positioning. When conversations stop at “I like it” or “I don’t like it,” without continuing to “why does this work or not work for our customer,” the project has already slipped into a vanity project paid for out of the company budget.
The owner’s opinion can become a business risk. When authority replaces data and research, design decisions can move the brand away from its audience.
What a properly run branding process looks like?
Research and data before aesthetics
A healthy branding process starts with market research, positioning, and target audience profiling, not with a conversation about favorite colors. Every aesthetic decision should follow from those findings, not the other way around. A proper branding process starts with understanding the business and the market, not aesthetics, and every visual element should be explainable through a strategic reason, not simply because it “looks good.”
Why the agency should convince you, not the other way around?
At BroHouse, the collaboration with SanoVita started from exactly this principle. Beniamin Dan, marketing manager and a seven-year client, described the philosophy behind the project clearly: no matter how hard the client pushes with requirements, the design team has to convince the client, not the other way around, for the project to actually work. That collaboration led to the VegieLife packaging design for the plant-based pâté line, which won bronze at the Pentawards. The packaging didn’t win because someone at the company “liked it.” It won because it was built on a clear differentiation strategy for the shelf.
Packaging design solution has won a bronze award at the PENTAWARDS 2020, the most globally prestigious award for packaging design since 2007. With over 2,000 entries from 60 countries, we were recognized as the winners in the Food Trends category.
That’s the simple test for any branding decision: if the final argument is still “because that’s what I want,” the process isn’t working correctly. If the argument is “this is what works for our audience, and the data backs it up,” then the strategy has done its job.
How do you test your own branding decisions?
Next time you approve or reject a design direction, ask yourself one question before saying “I like it” or “I don’t like it“: who is this brand actually for, and what does that person need to understand about it in three seconds? If the answer is grounded in your real audience rather than your own visual preference, the decision is likely on the right track. If the answer is only about your personal comfort with how it looks, it’s worth a pause before blocking the project.
Who should have the final say in a branding project?
Formally, the final say belongs to whoever signs the invoice. But a mature branding process moves that final word away from taste and onto argument. The last word should belong to whichever direction can be backed by data about the audience, the positioning, and the market context, regardless of who on the team proposed it.
Conclusion
The founder’s taste doesn’t disappear from the equation, and it shouldn’t be ignored completely either. But “I like it” remains an opinion, not a strategy, and the difference between the two can decide whether your brand sells or just looks good in your own office. A functional brand gets built starting from its audience, not from the personal taste of whoever signs the invoices.
If you want your next branding project to start from strategy instead of preference, the BroHouse team can pick up the conversation from here. Get in touch, and let’s find out together whether the direction in your head actually works for your market.