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Profiling phase 1: Manifestation meets Neuroscience, which can help you attract the right customers and tell more powerful stories.
As a founder, you may or may not believe in the principles of manifestation, but there’s more to it than just the woo; neuroscience also explains how helpful our brains find vision boards because what we focus on expands.
If what we focus on expands, imagine you are six or twelve months from now, attracting the kinds of customers you want for your brand. Why not do this? What if a customer vision board pinned in your office helps you make better decisions, from customer service to finance? What if this is a secret weapon in your ambitions and plans to grow and scale? It just might be.
Neuroscientist Dr Tara Swart, author of The Source, explains:
"Looking at images on a vision board primes the brain to grasp opportunities that may go unnoticed. That’s because the brain has a process called ‘value-tagging’, which imprints important things onto your subconscious and filters out unnecessary information.”
What will a vision board do for you?
These boards are crucial in creating an emotional attachment and attracting the people you most want to engage with your brand. We think it's an essential first step in writing stories that attract the right people.
A vision board starts to add texture and depth to your "personas" - two things that are essential to creativity and storytelling but are often missing in a business context.
In the ecosystem of your customer insight work, a customer vision board sits above the
demographic and psychographic data that we use to build a picture of who your customers are. It helps us build empathy to write emails that people want to read. It helps us understand where there are gaps or hidden motivations.
Having a Customer Vision Board also helps build a tone of voice—it puts your customer front and centre in your imagination and daily life. Most brands don’t focus on this, so if you want to create a space where you can connect with the things that matter most to your customers and your brand.
The visual cortex
The visual part of our brains (the visual cortex) gets active and strengthens connections to our goals and desired outcomes, changing our neural pathways. According to Mark Travers in Forbes:
"Visual stimuli can prime certain thoughts, emotions and behaviours. When individuals regularly view their vision boards, they may experience priming effects that activate related goals, values and motivations. This can lead to increased attention to goal-relevant opportunities and actions."
Here are a few examples of boards we've worked with for our clients.
Adding Texture and Depth
Vision boards alone are a powerful tool. Especially for creative founders who are often more visual, they're more appealing than a turgid "ideal persona" document or chart. They start to bring your people to life.
But there is a crucial next step, and that's to start writing your characters' stories using your boards.
Let's add some texture and depth.
Margot is 33 and lives in Walthamstow with her husband, Will, and their new baby Rosa. Margot is a freelance graphic designer, and Will works for a sustainability consultancy in London.
When we know that Margot, the frustrated graphic designer who works at home (often with the baby), secretly wants a sustainable new kitchen and living space to work, cook and chat with her Will in their new home.
She feels alone and isolated working at home and very uncreative since they had a baby. So having a space that feels like a cafe where she can be creative during the day but enjoy spending time with Will in the evenings, cooking together, when he comes back from work will transform her life's quality.
The connection points here for a modern kitchen brand that is a good fit for her—Husk, Plykea, maybe - are going to revolve around working and living at home and achieving balance, home well-being, and the importance of space, light, and bringing nature inside on our happiness (it’s real; read A Happier Home we co-created with our brilliant client Cimmermann).
For Cimmermann, we've added texture and depth by creating a series of people-focused interviews. Because what home design enthusiast doesn't want to peek into other people's houses?!
We tell the Cimmermann story with an authentic and non-spammy link through the stories of the people their customers are most interested in. We've featured a wide range of people in their journal, from the Chairman of Ercol to a design-focused restaurant on the Island of Mull and the home of one of their most regular customers.
This is something The Modern House does to perfection. They started out putting audience-focused content and have built a cult following. They have invested in magazine-style features like this Photo Diary of 'Hackney Letting it's Hair Down' by Freya Najade, set around the immediate area of one of their most recent listings.
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