Ask who else should be making this for them
A deep dive into the technique that surfaces the values, aesthetics, and capabilities consumers feel are missing — and six ways to use the imagined maker as a precise brief for who the brand needs to become
Why this angle exists
Every consumer has a mental model of who should be making the things they use. Not always conscious. Not always articulable. But real — a sense, accumulated through experience, that certain kinds of organisations produce certain kinds of things, and that the organisation currently making something they use is not quite the right kind. The gap between who is making it and who should be making it is the category's most precise positioning brief.
This technique works because it asks the consumer to do something much more generative than describing what they want. It asks them to imagine a different maker — a brand, a type of company, a person — and in doing so, they describe the values, capabilities, aesthetic sensibility, and relationship with the consumer that the imagined maker would bring. Those attributes are not a wish list for a product. They are a brand brief. They tell you not what to make but who to be in order to make it right.
The imagined maker is almost always from outside the category. This is what makes the answers so valuable. When a consumer says a category should be made by a brand from a completely different sector, they are revealing the gap between what the category currently offers and what a genuinely different kind of organisation could bring. The consumer is not asking for the same product from a different company. They are asking for a different relationship, built on different values, delivered through a different sensibility. That is a strategic repositioning brief, not a product improvement request.
The answers are also unusually honest because they are hypothetical. The consumer is not evaluating an existing brand — they are imagining an ideal one. This removes the social complexity of criticising real companies and replaces it with the imaginative freedom of constructing the right one. What the consumer builds in that imaginary space is almost always more specific, more revealing, and more strategically useful than anything they would say in response to a direct question about existing brands.
When you know you need this angle
The category feels like it's run by the wrong people
"It just doesn't feel like anyone who actually uses this had a say in making it." When consumers express a sense that the category is designed by and for someone other than them, the imagined maker question surfaces exactly who they think should be in charge — and what that would change.
You're looking for a positioning breakthrough, not an improvement
Positioning questions about existing competitors produce positioning answers within the existing frame. The imagined maker question breaks the frame entirely — the consumer designs the brand that doesn't exist yet, which is the only brand worth building if the category is already crowded.
The category has strong functional competence but weak emotional resonance
When products work well but feel like they were made without affection for the user, the imagined maker question reveals what kind of emotional relationship the consumer believes the right maker would bring. That emotional brief is almost always what the category is missing.
You're developing a new entrant or challenger brand strategy
The imagined maker is the consumer's specification for a challenger. Every attribute they assign to the imagined maker is an attribute the challenger should credibly claim. The question essentially writes the challenger's positioning platform — from the consumer's mouth, not the strategy team's whiteboard.
Six techniques
AThe dream maker
The most direct form — ask the consumer which brand or type of company from anywhere they wish would enter this category and what they would bring. No constraints on feasibility, no category logic required. The dream maker question gives the consumer full latitude to imagine the ideal entrant and, in doing so, to specify everything the current players are not. The more unexpected the dream maker, the more revealing the answer — because the distance between the imagined maker and the actual makers is the measure of the category's failure to be what it should.
WEAK
STRONGER
"If a company from a completely different world — not the usual players in this category — were to come in and make this product or service, who would you want it to be? And what would they bring that doesn't exist here?"
LIKELY RESPONSE
"I'd want Apple to make my health insurance. I know that sounds ridiculous. But I think about what Apple does with hardware — how simple everything feels, how nothing requires you to read a manual, how the whole system is designed around the person using it rather than the person selling it. My health insurance is the opposite of all of that. Every interaction feels like it was designed to confuse me. If Apple ran it, I think I'd actually understand what I was covered for. I think the whole thing would feel like it was on my side."
INSIGHT UNLOCKED
The consumer has named Apple not because she wants a tech company to run her insurance, but because Apple represents a set of design principles — simplicity, user-centricity, zero-manual operation — that her insurer has never applied. The brief is not 'be more like Apple.' It is: apply to insurance the design philosophy that Apple applies to hardware. Every interaction should require no instruction. Every policy document should be written for the person reading it, not the person defending against a claim. The whole system should feel like it is oriented toward the consumer's understanding rather than the insurer's protection. None of this requires being a technology company. It requires making the same design choice Apple made: that the person using the product is the person it should be designed for. That choice is available to any insurer. None has made it.
When to use: The dream maker question works in virtually every category but is most productive when the category's relationship with design, communication, or user experience is visibly poor. Healthcare, insurance, financial services, utilities, government services — categories where the product is necessary but the experience is punishing — consistently produce the most specific and most urgent dream maker answers.
BThe values maker
Ask which brand or organisation the consumer most trusts to share their values — in any domain — and whether they would want that organisation making something in this category. The values maker question gets directly at the ethical and identity dimension of what the category is missing. In categories where consumers feel that existing brands are oriented toward extraction rather than care, the imagined values maker is the brand whose entry would immediately resolve the trust deficit the category has accumulated.
WEAK
"Which brands do you feel share your values?"
STRONGER
"Is there an organisation — in any area of life — that you feel genuinely shares your values and operates accordingly? If they came into this category, what would change?"
LIKELY RESPONSE
"Patagonia. I know they make outdoor clothes, but the reason I trust them is that they seem to genuinely mean what they say — they've given profits away, they've sued the government, they've actively told people to buy less of their stuff. If Patagonia made baby food I would buy it without reading the label. I'd trust the ingredient list, I'd trust the sourcing, I'd trust that they weren't cutting corners somewhere I couldn't see. No baby food brand gives me that feeling. I read every label and I'm still not sure I'm making the right choice."
INSIGHT UNLOCKED
The consumer would buy Patagonia baby food without reading the label — which is the most extreme trust statement available in a category she currently navigates with vigilant scepticism. The specific basis for that trust is not Patagonia's product expertise but its demonstrated willingness to act against its own commercial interest on behalf of its values. The baby food category has earned none of this trust, despite operating in one of the highest-stakes consumer categories that exists. Every brand asks the consumer to trust their claims. Patagonia has earned trust through action that cost it money. The brief is not a values statement or a sustainability credential. It is a structural act — something the brand does, at real cost to itself, that demonstrates the values are operational rather than decorative. Until a baby food brand makes that kind of gesture, this consumer will keep reading every label and remaining uncertain.
When to use: The values maker question is most productive in categories where the consumer's dominant emotional state is vigilant scepticism — they want to trust but have no grounds to. Baby food, supplements, financial products, healthcare, food with complex supply chains. In these categories, the gap between the values the consumer needs and the values the category demonstrates is the most significant positioning opportunity available.
CThe craft maker
Ask which maker — brand, craftsperson, independent producer — the consumer associates with the highest standard of care in their work, and whether they wish that standard of care existed in this category. Craft maker answers reveal the gap between industrial production logic — optimised for scale, cost, and consistency — and the quality of attention the consumer believes the product deserves. They are particularly powerful in categories where mass production has gradually lowered the standard of care without the consumer being able to point to a specific moment it happened.
WEAK
"How important is quality to you in this category?"
STRONGER
"Who do you think makes things with the most genuine care — anywhere, any category, doesn't matter how small? If that person or that approach came to this category, what would be different?"
LIKELY RESPONSE
"There's an independent baker near me who makes bread that tastes like bread is supposed to taste. She uses three ingredients. She starts at 4am. She sells out by 10. You can taste that someone cared about every loaf. Now compare that to the bread in the supermarket — I know it's a completely different operation, I know you can't scale what she does. But the supermarket bread tastes like no one cared about it at any point in its production. It tastes like it was optimised for shelf life, not for eating. I'd want someone with her mentality — not her exact process — to make the bread I buy every week."
INSIGHT UNLOCKED
The consumer has made a precise distinction between process and mentality — she knows the independent baker cannot be industrially replicated, but she believes the attitude that produces the bread can be. The supermarket bread fails not because it uses different ingredients or a different process, but because it carries no evidence of care — it tastes, she says, as though no one cared about it at any point in its production. This is a brand brief as much as a product brief: the supermarket bread brand that could credibly communicate genuine care — through its sourcing, its process visibility, its willingness to accept the commercial constraints that care imposes — would occupy exactly the territory she is describing. Not artisan. Not premium. Just clearly made by people who give a damn. That brand does not currently exist at supermarket scale. The consumer has been waiting for it every time she buys bread.
When to use: The craft maker question is most productive in food, drink, and personal care categories where the consumer can taste, feel, or otherwise perceive the difference between care and its absence, but cannot always access the caring version at the scale or price point they need. The brief is almost never 'make a premium version.' It is 'make a mass version that doesn't feel like care was the first thing cut.'
DThe category outsider
Ask the consumer to imagine a complete outsider entering the category — someone with no existing knowledge of how the category operates, no category conventions to honour, and no incumbents to be polite to — and what that outsider would immediately change. The category outsider question is a disruption brief in disguise. It asks the consumer to identify which category conventions are genuinely valuable and which are arbitrary habits that have survived only because everyone has agreed to maintain them. The answer is almost always a list of sacred cows the category has never questioned.
WEAK
"What do you think could be improved in this category?"
STRONGER
"Imagine someone brilliant who knew nothing about this category — no preconceptions, no idea how things are 'supposed' to work — walked in and started making things. What would they immediately change that everyone inside the category has stopped questioning?"
LIKELY RESPONSE
"The pricing model for gyms. A complete outsider would look at the annual contract, the direct debit you can't cancel, the January sale that gets you in and the summer guilt that keeps you paying, and they'd think it was a scam. Which it sort of is. A genuinely fresh pair of eyes would say: charge people for when they actually go, and make the experience good enough that they want to go. The whole model is built around trapping people rather than serving them. Someone from outside the industry would see that immediately. Everyone inside it has made peace with it."
INSIGHT UNLOCKED
The consumer has identified the gym industry's core business model as a sacred cow — one built on retention through inertia rather than value through quality, which everyone inside the industry has normalised and no one has had sufficient competitive pressure to abandon. The outsider brief she has written is pay-per-use with a service quality sufficient to generate voluntary return — which is the exact model that would work if the product were genuinely good enough to earn it. The reason the industry hasn't moved there is not that the model is unworkable. It is that the existing model is profitable precisely because it exploits the gap between consumer intention and consumer behaviour. A genuinely confident entrant — one willing to bet that its experience would generate voluntary return — would not just disrupt the category. It would expose the existing model as the extraction mechanism the consumer has always suspected it was.
When to use: The category outsider question is most productive in industries with entrenched business models that serve the producer more than the consumer — subscription traps, opacity pricing, artificial complexity, information asymmetry. In these categories, the outsider's fresh eyes almost always land on the same thing: the convention that benefits the industry most is the one the consumer resents most, and no one has been willing to give it up because the financial model depends on it.
EThe aesthetic maker
Ask whose aesthetic sensibility — whose visual language, whose design philosophy, whose sense of what things should look and feel like — the consumer wishes would come to this category. Aesthetic maker answers reveal the gap between the visual and experiential register the category operates in and the one the consumer feels at home in. They are particularly valuable in categories where the visual language has calcified into conventions that no longer represent how the category's consumers actually see themselves — and where a design-led entrant could win on feeling before they win on function.
WEAK
"How do you feel about the design of products in this category?"
STRONGER
"Whose visual sense — whose design, whose aesthetic, whose way of making things look and feel — do you wish would come to this category? What would it change about how it feels to engage with it?"
LIKELY RESPONSE
"Muji. I'd want Muji to design the experience of going to the pharmacy. Everything in that space is either aggressive — neon, shouty, sale stickers, medical diagrams — or depressing. It feels like a place you go when something's wrong, not a place that supports your health generally. Muji would strip all of that out. Clean, quiet, nothing unnecessary. You'd feel calm just being there. You'd be able to think. Health is supposed to be about wellbeing and the pharmacy looks like the opposite of wellbeing. Someone like Muji would understand that the space itself is part of the product."
INSIGHT UNLOCKED
The consumer has articulated a precise aesthetic brief for a pharmacy category that has never considered its visual environment as part of its health proposition: strip back the aggression, remove the unnecessary, design for calm thinking rather than anxious browsing. 'The space itself is part of the product' is a retail design principle that the pharmacy category has never applied — despite operating in a category where the consumer's emotional state on entering is almost always already elevated by concern or discomfort. Muji's design language — reduction, calm, considered emptiness — is not aspirational for this consumer in a luxury sense. It is aspirational in a functional sense: she cannot think clearly or make good choices in an aggressive visual environment. A pharmacy that understood this and designed for it would not just feel different — it would actually perform its function better, because the consumer would be calmer, more considered, and more capable of making good decisions. The aesthetic brief and the functional brief are the same brief.
When to use: The aesthetic maker question is most productive in categories where the visual environment actively works against the consumer's ability to engage with the product on their own terms — pharmacy, financial services, healthcare waiting rooms, legal services, insurance communications. In these categories, the aesthetic is not decoration. It is an operational variable that directly affects the quality of the consumer's decision-making and their relationship with the category.
FThe community maker
Ask which organisation — brand, movement, community, institution — the consumer feels has the best relationship with the people it serves, and whether they wish that quality of relationship existed in this category. Community maker answers reveal the relational gap in a category: not what the product does, not how it looks, but how it treats the people who use it. In categories where the dominant mode of relationship is transactional, the imagined community maker is the brand that would make consumers feel like participants rather than customers — and the brief it produces is about belonging rather than buying.
WEAK
"How do you feel about your relationship with brands in this category?"
STRONGER
"Which organisation — brand, community, institution, anything — do you think has the best relationship with the people it serves? Not the best product — the best relationship. If that organisation ran something in this category, what would it feel like to be a customer?"
LIKELY RESPONSE
"The National Trust. I'm a member and I feel like they actually value my membership beyond the money. They tell me things I didn't ask to know, they make me feel connected to something bigger than a transaction, they seem to genuinely care whether I'm enjoying the places I visit. If a financial services company had that kind of relationship with me — where I felt like a member rather than an account — I'd never leave. I've been with my bank for fifteen years and I feel nothing for them. Not hostility. Just complete indifference. There's no relationship there at all."
INSIGHT UNLOCKED
The consumer has been a National Trust member long enough to understand what membership — as opposed to subscription — feels like: proactive communication, connection to something larger than a transaction, evidence that the organisation values her beyond her direct debit. Her bank, after fifteen years, has produced nothing but indifference. Not hostility — indifference, which is in some ways worse, because hostility at least implies the relationship has emotional weight. The brief the National Trust model produces for a financial services brand is not a loyalty programme or a community forum. It is a fundamental shift in the relational mode: from account management to stewardship. From 'we hold your money' to 'we are accountable to your financial life.' The distinction is not cosmetic. It requires a different communication philosophy, a different metric of success, and a different conception of what the brand owes the people who trust it with something as significant as their financial security. No high-street bank has made this shift. The consumer has been waiting fifteen years for one of them to try.
When to use: The community maker question is most productive in categories with long relationship duration but low relationship quality — banking, insurance, utilities, telecoms, healthcare. In these categories, the consumer is often technically loyal but emotionally absent. The community maker brief almost always reveals the same thing: the brand has been managing an account for years while the consumer has been waiting to be treated like a person. The organisations that do this well — membership organisations, trusted institutions, beloved local businesses — are almost never in the category. Their relational model is available to be imported. Nobody has imported it.
Follow-up probes once the imagined maker is named
▸"What specifically would they bring that no current player has — what's the single most important thing they'd do differently?"
Forces prioritisation of the imagined maker's attributes. The consumer may name several things the maker would bring — the single most important one is the brief's essential core, the thing that everything else depends on. Always find the one thing.
▸"What do you think stops the current players from being more like that?"
Surfaces the consumer's read on why the gap exists. Whether they attribute it to commercial incentives, organisational culture, regulatory constraints, or simple lack of imagination tells you something important about the nature of the barrier — and what kind of change would be required to overcome it.
▸"If that organisation actually entered this category tomorrow, would you switch immediately — or would you want to see how they did it first?"
Tests the commercial reality behind the imagined enthusiasm. A consumer who would switch immediately without seeing the product first is expressing a level of transferred trust that tells you how strong the imagined maker's brand equity is in this consumer's mind — and how much work positioning alone could do for an entrant who credibly claimed that association.
▸"Is there anything the current category does that you'd want the imagined maker to keep — something that shouldn't change?"
Identifies what the category gets right that the disruption brief should preserve. The imagined maker question can produce a wholesale rejection of the category that is more radical than the consumer actually intends. Finding what they'd want kept is as important as finding what they'd want changed.
▸"Do you think other people in this category feel the same way — or is this quite personal to you?"
Tests the scale of the imagined maker brief. A consumer who believes their dissatisfaction with the current category is widely shared has implicitly assessed the market size. Their assessment is worth probing — not to accept uncritically, but to understand whether the gap they've identified feels idiosyncratic or structural.
▸"If you were advising the imagined maker as they entered this category — what would you tell them to watch out for, what could go wrong?"
Inverts the brief into a risk assessment. The consumer who can articulate what the imagined maker would need to avoid — the category traps, the consumer sensitivities, the credibility risks — has moved from dreaming about the ideal entrant to thinking like the strategist who would build it. That transition is where the richest and most operationally useful insight lives.
Signals that the imagined maker brief is strategically significant
The named maker is from a completely different sector with no obvious category logic. Apple making insurance. Patagonia making baby food. Muji designing pharmacies. The further the imagined maker from the category, the more the consumer is reaching for values, sensibility, or relationship quality that the category has never thought to claim. The distance is the measure of the gap — and the opportunity.
The consumer can articulate what the maker would bring with unusual specificity. Not "they'd just be better" but "they'd strip out everything that isn't necessary and make the one thing that is work perfectly." Specific attribute transfer means the consumer has a clear mental model of the maker's operational philosophy and is applying it directly to the category's failures. That specificity is the brief.
Multiple consumers in the same category name the same imagined maker independently. When separate consumers, unprompted, reach for the same brand from outside the category, the signal is structural rather than personal. The category is failing in a specific, consistent way that a specific type of organisation is perceived to solve. That convergence is one of the strongest innovation signals available in qualitative research.
The named maker is already in the category or has announced entry. Valuable as confirmation that the consumer's instinct is commercially validated — but less useful as a forward brief. Probe for what the named maker would need to do differently from their announced approach to fully meet the consumer's expectation. The gap between the actual entry and the imagined one is often where the most interesting brief lives.
The named maker is an individual or a very small independent rather than a brand. A craftsperson, a local producer, a specific chef — the consumer is describing a quality of attention rather than a scalable organisation. The brief is real but requires translation: what does 'the mentality of this person' mean at the scale of a consumer brand? That translation is the hard and valuable work.
The consumer names an existing player in the category as the ideal maker. Useful for understanding relative preference within the category but not the purpose of this question. Gently redirect: "and if it wasn't someone already in this space — if you could bring in someone from completely outside — who would that be?" The outside answer is almost always more generative than the inside one.
What to avoid
Don't treat the named maker as a literal brief. When a consumer says they want Apple to make their insurance, they are not asking for a technology company to enter financial services. They are using Apple as shorthand for a set of design and relationship principles that their insurer has never applied. The job is to understand the principles, not to build a partnership deck. Always ask what the named maker would bring — not who they are — before treating the answer as a brief.
Don't let the imagined maker answer stay hypothetical. The most common failure mode with this technique is to collect vivid answers about imagined makers and never push them into operational specifics. What would they actually do differently? What specific interaction would change? What would the first thing look like? The imagined maker is a starting point, not a destination. The destination is the concrete change in product, service, communication, or business model that the imagined maker's entry would produce. Stay in the question until you have something buildable.
And don't dismiss the answer because the named maker seems implausible. The consumer who says Patagonia should make baby food is not being naive — they are identifying a trust architecture that the baby food category has never built and that Patagonia has. The plausibility of the specific entry is irrelevant. The attributes they would bring are entirely real, entirely transferable, and entirely available to any brand in the category that is willing to earn them. The implausibility of the literal answer is often the signal that the brief is genuinely disruptive — which is exactly what it should be.
Comments
Post a Comment