How I Turned a Confusing Product into a Clear Brand
Illustration of Eloisa making sense of a product
A behind-the-scenes look at the thinking — not just the visuals
One of the most common briefs I get starts something like this: "Our product does a lot of things. We've been struggling to explain it simply. We need a brand that makes it make sense."
This is one of my favorite problems to work on. Not because it's easy — it's genuinely hard — but because the solution always reveals something true about the business that the founder already knew but hadn't quite said out loud yet.
I'm not going to share a specific client project here, but I am going to walk you through exactly how I think about this kind of problem. Because the process is more useful to you than the outcome.
Start with what the customer actually buys
Complex products — especially SaaS products — often suffer from feature-led positioning. The brand talks about what the product does instead of what the customer gets. Features are inputs. Outcomes are what get bought.
The first thing I do in these projects is ignore the feature list entirely and ask one question: if this product works perfectly, what is different about the customer's life or business six months from now?
That answer is the brand. Everything else is how you deliver it.
Find the one thing
Complex products often have multiple genuine value propositions. They do solve several problems. They do serve multiple customer types. This is usually presented to me as the core challenge: "We can't narrow it down because all of it is true."
But a brand can't say everything. A brand that tries to say everything says nothing.
The exercise I use is this: if this product could only solve one problem for one type of customer, which combination would you choose? Which use case makes your best customers say "I can't imagine doing this without you?"
That's your anchor. You can still serve the others — but your brand leads with the clearest, most resonant story you have.
Translate complexity into clarity
Once you have the strategic anchor, the visual and verbal work becomes a translation problem. How do you make something complex feel simple and approachable without making it feel dumbed down?
A few principles I keep coming back to: Lead with the outcome, support with the features. Use the language your customer uses to describe their problem, not the language your engineering team uses to describe the solution. Make the visual identity feel confident and clear — clutter in the design mirrors clutter in the thinking.
Simplicity in a brand isn't about removing things. It's about choosing the most important thing and making sure that thing is unmissable.
The moment it clicks
In every one of these projects there's a moment — usually in the strategy phase, before anything visual has happened — where the founder says something like "yes, that's it, that's what we've been trying to say."
That moment is what I'm working toward. The design work after that point is relatively straightforward because everyone knows what we're solving for.
The confusion was never about the product. It was about not yet having found the right frame for it. Strategy finds the frame. Design makes it visible.
