A few months ago, we presented the result of several weeks of work to one of our clients in the high-end aesthetics sector. Brand DNA, creative direction, visual territory: a substantial project with real positioning stakes. At the end of the presentation, he had a counter-proposal to share with us: his niece had redrawn the logo by hand on a blank sheet of paper, and he found her version... nicer. We held that conversation for 45 minutes, and unfortunately it's not an isolated case — far from it.
"I like it" or "I don't like it": the wrong compass
In the 8 years we've been guiding companies through their brand strategy, we've observed a pattern that repeats itself more and more. Branding projects almost never go off the rails because of a bad brief, rarely because the strategy is wrong or the creative direction is off.
They go off the rails the moment someone in the room says "I don't like it."
Two words that suddenly replace all the strategic thinking built upstream, shifting the conversation toward something far more subjective, far more emotional... and far more difficult to work with.
This isn't bad faith. It's a deeply human reflex: we all grew up believing that our gut reaction to something visual was a valid basis for judgment. In some contexts, that's even a quality. In branding, it's unfortunately a trap.
Imagine yourself at MoMA in New York
A white canvas. A red square in the center. The person to your left is moved to tears. They find the work sublime, hypnotic. You just see an empty canvas.
Who's wrong?
No one. Because art is precisely made to be felt, interpreted, and experienced differently depending on who's looking. Two diametrically opposed experiences in front of the same work — and both are perfectly valid.
Branding is not made to be judged as beautiful or ugly. It's made to work: to be recognised instantly on an Instagram feed, to stay consistent from the website to the business card, to stand out in a sector where every player says exactly the same thing with exactly the same words. These objectives have nothing to do with what you, your niece, or your family find beautiful on a Tuesday morning over breakfast.
Three real situations, drawn from our projects
We could have stayed theoretical. Here's what actually happened to us instead:
One client submitted our proposals to ChatGPT asking which one was "the most beautiful," and arrived at the meeting with the printed answer as his main validation argument — without a single question about consistency with his positioning or the perception of his target clients.
Another shared the logo proposals with his entire family before coming back to us: his mother preferred blue, his brother found the typography cold, his wife wanted something "rounder." We received the next day a summary of feedback from 12 people, none of whom knew the market, the target audience, or even really what the business did.
And our client in high-end aesthetics: an identity built for a premium positioning, visual codes calibrated for a very demanding clientele — and his niece had drawn something on a blank piece of paper. "It's cute, it feels more human and it's more aligned with what we had in mind."
In every single one of these cases, there was no bad intention — only a sincere confusion about what was actually supposed to be evaluated.
What we've learned to do: educate before we create
We could have developed a condescending discourse about this, but that would be a mistake. This emotional reaction is, in reality, perfectly understandable: when a family-owned SME entrusts us with their brand, they're not just handing us a logo — they're entrusting us with something far more loaded. Years of work, a story, a pride sometimes passed down across generations. To pretend that this doesn't generate strong emotions when it comes time to evolve it would be to ignore an essential human reality.
What we refuse, however, is to let those emotions drive the decisions.
So we educate. Not in a theoretical or condescending way, but by taking the time — right from the start of a project — to clearly explain the basis on which we're going to work together and how we're going to evaluate proposals. We set the criteria before presenting the results, we openly name the emotional dimension, we give it its place in the conversation, and we build alongside it a strategic evaluation framework.
What we observe every time is that clients understand perfectly well: these are executives, decision-makers, people used to making complex decisions based on objective criteria — and when you give them the right tools to evaluate a branding, they adopt them naturally. The result: less frustration on both sides, fewer unnecessary rounds of validation, and above all... better brands.
Beautiful or ugly: really the right question?
A branding is not judged the way you judge a work of art — it's judged on what it achieves. Does it faithfully represent who we are? Does it differentiate us in our market? Will our target audience recognise themselves in it? Will it still be relevant in ten years?
These are the questions that should guide your judgment, not your instinctive reaction on the day of the presentation. Beauty is subjective by definition. The effectiveness of a brand, on the other hand, can be measured. And a branding you find "not great" but that positions your company with precision and attracts the right clients is worth infinitely more than one you love... that nobody else knows how to read.
