Field Note 4: "The biggest risk to your brand is what you can't see"

From The Johari Window by Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham:

"Some things are known to you and others. Some are known to others, but not to you."

The Johari Window is usually taught as a self-awareness model. But I've found it far more valuable when you apply it to brands.

We use 'brand personas', brand keys', 'brand purpose' and the list goes on, but the premise of the model is simple - quite often, brands don't fail from what they know. They fail from what everyone else can see that they can't.

Most people hear "blind spot" and assume it means negative feedback. So they brace for criticism, argue back, or write it off as edge cases or in some instances, they do nothing.

That's not the lesson.

The principle isn't "brands should listen more." It's to stop ignoring what's not working.

There's a difference between asking people what they think, and then watching what they actually do. Between decks and lived experience. Between what you say in the brief and what actually lands in market.

In Johari Window terms, strong brands expand the 'open' area. They reduce the gap between how they see themselves and how they're experienced.

This may sound cynical, but I now assume that every brand has a blind spot it is blissfully unaware of. And so, before advising to increase spend or make more ads, I look for where perception and intention don't line up.

That means sitting in sales calls, focus groups, reading comments that make people uncomfortable, and trying to understand why some ads underperform despite our hypothesis being solid. Once you stop defending the brand/ego, the results improve quickly.

Recently, Jeanswest (an Australian denim retailer) made headlines for rolling out AI-generated models across their site and marketing. On paper, it made sense. Faster production, lower costs, more scale. The kind of thing a lot of retail brands are quietly experimenting with.

The problem wasn't their . It was the blind spot.

Jeanswest has always traded on familiarity. Real bodies. Real people. A brand built around approachability, not aspiration. That was their "open area" in Johari Window terms - what they knew about themselves and what customers experienced consistently.

Then overnight, customers were staring at polished, synthetic-looking models that felt completely disconnected from how the brand had shown up for decades.

The backlash was immediate. Social comments turned nasty. The narrative flipped from "smart efficiency" to "this feels fake" almost instantly. What should have been an operational decision became a brand credibility issue.

Here's what happened through the Johari lens:

What Jeanswest knew about themselves: We're modernising. We're being efficient. We're solving a production problem.

What customers knew about Jeanswest: This is the brand that shows real people in real denim. That's the whole point.

The gap between those two realities is the blind spot. AI just made it impossible to ignore.

Internally, the move probably felt logical, efficient, even smart. Externally, it violated an unspoken contract the brand had with its customers. What the brand thought was an operational upgrade, the market experienced as a betrayal of identity.

The blind spot wasn't that customers don't like AI. It was that Jeanswest didn't fully see how strongly its audience associated the brand with authenticity and relatability. They were operating from their internal logic while completely missing what customers actually valued about them.

Strong brands constantly test the gap between self-perception and market reality. Weak brands assume internal clarity equals external alignment, until something like this exposes the truth.

The lesson isn't "don't use AI." It's that technology exposes misalignment faster than anything else. If you don't understand how your brand is actually perceived, scale just makes the gap bigger.

Thanks for reading, and see you next week!

Murph