Three Greys and a Calico
What the cats outside my garage taught me about audience alignment.
By Quinn Harrington, Founder & Chief Brand Concierge, Harrington Design Company
There are four cats in my yard, and I've been getting them wrong for months.
Three of them are new. They hang out by my garage, on the other side of the screen, and I've been feeding them treats and the occasional can of wet food. The fourth has been here for years. My girls and I call her Grand Kitty.
I figured feeding cats would be simple. You put out food, the cats eat it, and everyone's happy. That isn't what happened.
The calico hisses at me when I come out with the food. She wants it. She's been waiting for it. And she still hisses at the hand holding the bowl. Meanwhile, the two young greys bolt the second I step outside, even though I'm offering them something for free. Grand Kitty watches all of it from a sunny spot by the fence like she's seen this movie before.
My first reaction wasn't very enlightened. I said it out loud to nobody. If they can't share, the calico has to go.
I've said that about clients too. Most founders have. It took me a minute to see that the cats were running the same play my clients do.
The Calico
The calico isn't hostile because she dislikes me. She's hostile because she doesn't trust the food will be there tomorrow. So she guards it. She plants herself between the bowl and everyone else, and she hisses at anything that moves toward it, including the person who brought it.
I've had clients exactly like her. They hired us and they want the work, but they fight us at the moment of delivery. Usually it's because somebody before us promised a lot and didn't show up. Their hostility isn't about you. It's about scarcity.
You don't win that client with a better pitch. You win her by showing up at the same time, in the same place, with the same bowl, until she stops bracing.
Ash Grey and Pebble
Ash Grey is the diva, respectfully. She's high-energy and always on the move, but she's careful about where she eats. Pebble is the little one, still finding her way. They both run when I offer food, and for a while I took it personally.
Then I noticed where they were looking. They weren't afraid of me. They were afraid of the calico.
That's the part of audience alignment nobody puts in the deck. One loud customer can quietly push a whole segment away from your business. The quiet ones don't complain and they don't leave reviews. They just stop coming around, and you never find out why. If you only listen to the customer who hisses, you'll build everything around her and wonder why the others keep leaving.
There's something else going on too. Free made them nervous. When something costs nothing, a careful customer wonders what the catch is. I learned that at sixteen, charging for swim lessons in other people's backyards, and it's still true.
Ash Grey reminds me of a client I've known for years. Brett House, who co-founded Signal & Noise, has been on the other side of a lot of HDco's work. He was there when we helped launch Nielsen's digital marketing platform. He was there for Neustar's launch of Fabrick, the work that caught TransUnion's attention. He's changed roles more than once, and HDco has come along for a lot of those moves.
Brett is high-energy and never sits still, but he doesn't eat from just any bowl. He watches how a room works before he commits to it. That isn't him being difficult. It's good instinct. Clients like Brett don't need convincing. They need the setup to be right, and once it is, they don't just come back. They bring you with them to the next yard.
Grand Kitty
Grand Kitty is my Platinum Catlient. She was here long before the treats. She knows the warmest spot in the yard and the coolest one, and she found both on her own. She's a little aloof and occasionally skittish, but she's never needy.
She didn't come for the product. She came for the environment, and she stayed because it suited her. The treats are a bonus.
Your best clients usually look like this. They chose you for how it feels to work with you, not for the line item on the invoice. They don't make noise, so they're the easiest ones to take for granted. They're also the clearest signal you have about who your business is actually built for.
The Fix Isn't Firing the Calico
Once I calmed down, I figured out the problem wasn't any one cat. It was the setup. I had one feeding spot for four very different animals, and that pretty much guaranteed the loudest one would win.
Sending the calico away wouldn't fix it. Another bold cat would take her place within a week. The dynamic lives in the setup, not in the cat.
So I'm changing the setup. Each cat gets her own spot, far enough apart that they can't see each other eat. The calico gets fed first so she's busy. They'll all eat at the same time every day, so nobody has to guard anything. Grand Kitty gets her own spot by the fence, which is where she was sitting anyway.
I don't know yet if it'll work. Ask me in a few weeks.
Who You're Actually Feeding
Most businesses have a yard like mine. Usually the loudest customer is shaping every decision, while the loyal one sits in the sun and nobody notices her.
When we built the BrandLove Diagnostic, one of the five dimensions we score is Audience Alignment.
The question behind it is a simple one. Do you actually know who you're selling to, or who you wish you were selling to? Most marketing leaders answer that with confidence. Then they look at where their time and budget really go, and it's almost always toward the calico.
If you've been feeding everyone from one bowl, it might be time to look at your yard. The diagnostic takes about three minutes. It won't tell you to fire anybody. It'll show you who you're really built for.
Quinn Harrington is the founder and Chief Brand Concierge at Harrington Design Company, a brand strategy and video production agency based in Jacksonville, Florida. For 30 years she's helped companies, from Fortune 500 to founder-led, figure out what they actually stand for and who they're actually talking to. She now feeds four cats from four bowls.
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