Blind Spots and Soft Spots in Brand Building

What We Actually Do at Brand Shepherd

Before getting into the blind spots and soft spots, a quick frame of reference.

Brand Shepherd believes that a brand is made of three things: presence, people, and purpose. Or as we’ve developed it through our proprietary trademarked framework: Vibe, Tribe, and Why. That process captures, clarifies, and documents everything essential about a brand, and then packages it into what we call a Brand Experience Guide.

That guide doesn’t just sit on a shelf. It’s used across the entire organization, from the C-suite on down. More recently, we’ve been using it to train AI models so that first-draft content actually sounds on-brand instead of generic. And it informs everything from the website to sales collateral to trade show materials to product packaging.

It’s comprehensive. And it’s exactly in the process of building it that the blind spots and soft spots start to surface.

Blind Spots: What You Don’t Know You Don’t Know

A blind spot can exist on the brand side or the customer side. Sometimes it’s a gap in internal knowledge. Sometimes it’s a disconnect between what the brand thinks it’s communicating and what the audience is actually receiving.

One recent example: a client wanted to use the phrase “out of pocket” to refer to expenses. Totally reasonable for an audience of older millennials and up. But for Gen Z and younger millennials, that phrase means something completely different now. It’s a small thing. It’s also exactly the kind of thing that quietly erodes trust with the audience you’re trying to reach.

These things come up in leadership meetings constantly. Get the heads of multiple departments in the same room, and you will find places where operations is completely out of sync with sales, or where marketing is working off assumptions that haven’t been validated in years. It’s not conflict. It’s just the natural result of people running hard in their own lanes without a shared map.

The good news about blind spots is that once you can see them, they often become opportunities. Sometimes the fix is a pivot. Sometimes it’s a change in language or positioning. Sometimes, honestly, it’s a brand learning to laugh at itself. There’s more than one way to address a blind spot. But you can’t address what you can’t see.

Soft Spots: What Hasn’t Been Tested Yet

Soft spots are different. These aren’t gaps in knowledge so much as gaps in scrutiny.

A soft spot is a strategy or tactic that sounds good inside the building but hasn’t been pressure-tested by outside forces. It’s the idea that got a lot of nods in the room because everyone in the room already agreed with each other. It’s not wrong, necessarily. It’s just not ready.

One of the most common soft spots Brand Shepherd encounters looks like this: someone from a brand reaches out to ask why their marketing isn’t following a particular trend. Why aren’t we doing what everyone else is doing? And when we ask where that feedback came from, the answer is almost always the same. It came from a vendor. A competitor. Someone in the industry. Someone already inside the fold.

Not a customer. Not a prospect. Not someone the brand is actually trying to reach.

That’s preaching to the choir. And if a brand is spending its energy and budget trying to impress its vendors and competitors instead of attracting new customers, that’s a soft spot. A significant one.

The respectful but direct response: if you want to turn your voice inward and talk only to the people already around you, Brand Shepherd probably isn’t the right fit. This isn’t said to be harsh. It’s said because honest feedback, delivered with some levity, is usually what earns the most respect and leads to the most productive conversations.

The Fix Is the Same for Both

The solution to a blind spot and the solution to a soft spot are identical: outside perspective.

This is why the best brands, even the biggest brands with large internal teams, still bring in outside partners for this kind of work. It’s not because their internal teams aren’t capable. It’s because internal teams are too close to it. That proximity is unavoidable and it’s not a flaw. It’s just reality.

Tools like PickFu and Ugly Baby are examples of this principle in a more accessible form. PickFu gathers feedback from qualified strangers, people with no stake in your brand, no reason to be polite, and no prior exposure to your internal assumptions. Ugly Baby does the same specifically for websites. Brand Shepherd’s own website recently went through an overhaul that was driven directly by that kind of unfiltered outside review. The suspicion that there were blind spots and soft spots turned out to be correct. But they couldn’t be fixed from the inside.

It’s worth noting that AI alone doesn’t solve this. An AI model has no accountability. The subscription fee gets paid regardless of whether your brand improves. There’s no skin in the game. Outside human partners who specialize in branding bring something AI can’t replicate: genuine investment in the outcome.

If This Sounds Familiar, It Probably Should

Most brands have at least one blind spot and at least one soft spot at any given time. That’s not a failure. It’s just what happens when people are deep in the work of running a business.

The question is whether those spots get identified and addressed before they become bigger problems, or whether they get papered over with internal consensus and good intentions.

If you sense that your brand might have one or both, Brand Shepherd is currently offering a free brand audit at brandshepherd.com. That offer changes in April 2026, so if it’s useful to you, now is the time to take advantage of it.

Brand Shepherd guides brands to clarity and helps them thrive. New episodes of Field Notes drop weekly.