Essay4 min
The Legibility Problem
Most brands that think they have a visibility problem have a clarity problem, and more content won't fix it.
There is a kind of invisible that happens in full view.
You post. You run the ads. Nothing sticks. People are looking at you. They just can't tell what they're looking at, and more reach only puts that confusion in front of more people.
Most brands are afraid to be specific, because specific feels small. If I say this is for creative professionals in Lagos who take their work seriously, what happens to everyone else? What happens to the sale I might have made if I'd kept the door wide open?
So the door stays wide open. Everyone can walk in, and nobody feels like they belong.
Nike started by building a room for runners: people who trained before the city woke up and didn't need a crowd to keep going. That room had its own standard. People who had never run a race in their lives started wearing what the runners wore. They were buying the room. Belonging to something defined pulls harder than an invitation to something general.
The gold is the specific room, the one other people eventually ask to be let into.
ZiggaTech is my version of this, still being written. I built it for creatives and professionals who care about the tools they work with more than the price tag on them. The audience is deliberate, so the ones who find it feel found.
When someone finds your brand and thinks, this is for me, you've made a convert. Converts don't need convincing the next time. They bring people, and they defend you in rooms you'll never be in. Reputation cannot be bought at any price. It is only paid for in instalments.
You only get converts when you're willing to say who you exist for, clearly and without apology.
So the mirror question is whether someone who finds you today knows, within thirty seconds, if they're in the right place. And if they are, whether they feel it.
“A brand that tries to speak to everyone ends up in conversation with no one. And that's a lonelier place than niche ever was.”
Author’s note
Almost every brand that believes it has a visibility problem has been sold the same prescription: post more. Ore's argument is that the diagnosis is usually wrong, and the prescription therefore makes the condition worse.
The test he applies is blunt. If a visitor cannot say what the business does and who it is for after thirty seconds on the page, the business needs to become legible before it needs more content. More posts on top of an unclear proposition multiply the confusion at scale.
The audience for legibility has changed as well. A business has to be legible to a machine before it can be recommended by one, and an assistant summarising a brand has even less patience than a visitor. What it rewards is structure.
Legibility is the precondition for everything downstream. A brand that cannot be understood cannot be trusted, and a brand that cannot be trusted cannot be bought from, whatever the volume of content pointing at it.
For a founder, the order matters. Clarity has to come before trust, and trust before distribution. Reversing it is the most expensive common mistake he sees.