When your story isn’t landing, it’s probably not the story. It’s who you’re telling it to
Most brands don’t suffer from a weak narrative. They suffer from narrative misalignment. They spend months refining their voice, their message, their campaigns—then deliver all of it to the wrong room. Internally, the story makes sense. It resonates in pitch decks. It wins applause in the boardroom. But in the market, it’s met with silence. Or worse, indifference.
Why? Because clarity in storytelling doesn’t begin with what you say. It begins with knowing who it’s for.
And that’s where most strategy unravels.
The ICP Problem Nobody Talks About
“Define your Ideal Customer Profile” is one of the most repeated startup mantras. It’s also one of the most misunderstood.
Done well, an ICP is a filter for decision-making. Done poorly, it becomes a marketing artifact. A vague composite of aspiration and assumption, and a placeholder for depth. The real risk of a lazy ICP isn’t targeting the wrong people. It’s shaping your product, your message, and your team around a customer who doesn’t exist or succeed with you.
According to HubSpot, companies with a clear ICP generate 50% more leads than those without. Their customers—like Make Influence—report that defining their ICP didn’t just help identify ideal leads. It enabled them to increase pricing sixfold and reduce acquisition costs by half. But the real metric isn’t lead volume. It’s narrative accuracy and internal cohesion. It’s long-term fit. The goal isn’t reach, it’s resonance.
McKinsey reinforces this broader shift. Nearly 80% of business buyers today are comfortable making purchases of $50,000 or more through digital or self-serve channels. It’s a clear sign that the psychology of purchasing has changed. Buying power is becoming more decentralized, more fluid, and less tethered to legacy hierarchies. This shift isn’t just about sales efficiency. It signals a structural evolution in authority and attention. If your ICP still assumes outdated patterns of influence, urgency, or decision-making, it won’t just be misaligned. It will be irrelevant.
What an ICP Actually Is and What It Should Force You to Confront
An Ideal Customer Profile isn’t a buyer persona. It’s not a wish list. It’s not a job title wrapped in demographic shorthand.
It’s a diagnostic tool. It defines the type of company that sees the most success with your product and delivers the most value in return. That’s the critical loop. Value for, and value from.
The ICP should do three things:
- Reveal what you’re not built for.
- Expose who your story truly resonates with.
- Force alignment across product, GTM, and growth.
If your ICP doesn’t feel like a line in the sand, it’s not doing its job.
Here’s how an ICP differs from a buyer persona:
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ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)
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Buyer Persona
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The Cost of Getting It Wrong Isn’t Just Churn. It’s Drift.
The most dangerous audience isn’t the one who says no, it’s the one who says yes for the wrong reasons. Poor-fit customers don’t just churn. They demand custom features, distort your roadmap, inflate customer cost acquisition, and exhaust your team. They leave you chasing revenue instead of building momentum.
Worse: they trick you into thinking your message is working, when it’s actually eroding brand integrity from the inside.
“Business leaders are starting to recognize how costly keeping a poor-fit customer can be… from overcustomization to outsize servicing costs.”
— Neha Ahuja, Gartner
Common ICP Pitfalls
Even seasoned teams trip up when crafting ICPs. Some of the most common pitfalls?
- Too many avatars. Focus isn’t fragmentation. If everyone’s a fit, no one is.
- Job title obsession. “CMO at a fintech company” tells you nothing about how they buy, how they think, or why they’d care.
- Wishful thinking disguised as targeting. Documenting who you want to serve isn’t the same as identifying who actually wins with you.
- Static strategy. Your ICP should evolve with your product. If it hasn’t changed in two years, either your product hasn’t grown or you haven’t been paying attention.
- Siloed ownership. If your ICP only lives in marketing, you’ve missed the point. It’s a strategic tool, not a creative one.
Four Ways to Build an ICP That Holds Up to Real Pressure
1. Start With Fit, Not Revenue
Who’s growing with you, not just buying from you?
Look at engagement, not just ARR. Who advocates, refers, and renews without excess friction? And if you’re early-stage? Don’t dream. Diagnose. Start with a smart hypothesis grounded in real-world pain. Study public patterns. Read between the lines in reviews and Reddit threads. Anchor your ICP in actual struggle, not vanity vision.
Example: Adobe’s Creative Cloud pivot didn’t just target “designers” broadly. It zeroed in on freelance creators and small agencies who needed flexible, collaborative workflows. That clarity allowed Adobe to expand into community-building and creative education—delivering ecosystem value, not just software.
2. Look for Shared Psychology, Not Just Shared Industry
It’s easy to spot patterns like company size or vertical. But the real gold is deeper:
- How do these companies define success?
- How do their teams buy, implement, and evangelize tools?
- What’s their appetite for risk? Their patience for onboarding?
Fenty Beauty saw what the industry ignored. Exclusion wasn’t just a gap—it was a story waiting to be told. Rather than target the average consumer, they designed for the overlooked. The result? $72 million in their first month.
Duolingo didn’t just build for language learners, they honed in on people who were bored by traditional ed-tech. By speaking directly to the unserious learner through memes, absurd push notifications, and viral TikToks, they found product-market resonance in personality, not pedagogy.
Fit isn’t just about who needs your product. It’s about who feels seen by your message.
3. Interview for Signals, Not Praise
Your best customers won’t just tell you what they love. They’ll show you how your product fits into their belief system. Pay attention to:
- The words they use to describe their pain.
- The surprise moments in their onboarding journey.
- Where they almost dropped off, but didn’t.
And churned customers? Don’t ignore them. They teach you where you lied—intentionally or not. Airbnb’s early strategy focused on budget travelers. But over time, they saw more traction with experience seekers—those looking for a sense of connection, not just a cheap stay. That insight shifted their narrative from rentals to belonging, transforming the brand into a lifestyle movement.
4. Build It Cross-Functionally or Don’t Build It At All
If sales uses one version of your ICP, product another, and marketing invents personas by the quarter, you’re not aligned, you’re guessing in different directions. A real ICP isn’t a slide. It’s a shared lens. It should inform roadmap decisions, outbound targeting, onboarding flows, and even pricing models. Otherwise, you’re not just telling your story to the wrong audience, you’re building the wrong product to begin with.
Magnetic Stories Start With Ruthless Clarity
The clearest message in the world will fail if it’s aimed at the wrong person.
ICP isn’t just about lead quality. It’s about narrative control. About knowing who you’re here for, and building a company, product, and story that reflects that.
At Axium Narrative, we help brands define their ICP with rigor, not templates. Then we build story systems that convert clarity into connection.
If your story isn’t landing, we’ll help you ask the harder question:
Are you telling it to the right person?
