Your Signal isn’t your brand.
Your brand contributes to it. It isn’t your messaging, positioning, visual identity, offer, pricing, personality or customer experience either. Those contribute to it too.
Your Signal is what all of it communicates together.
And whether you’re building a company, selling a product, offering a service, consulting, creating a personal brand or putting your own name behind your work, you’re already sending one.
The question is: Do you know what it is?
Your brand is what you build.
Your Signal is what they receive.
When you build something, you know the backstory. You know why you chose those words. You know what the offer does. You know why the price makes sense. You know what makes you different. You know what the image is supposed to represent and why that sentence matters.
You know what you meant.
The person encountering you doesn’t have any of that information. They have what you gave them, and from that they begin putting together their own understanding of who you are, what you do, whether it’s for them, what makes you different, and what they should expect if they keep going.
That’s why I don’t define Signal by what you intended to communicate.
Signal lives in the space between intention and reception.
Sometimes those two things line up beautifully. Sometimes they don’t. Neither answer requires me to declare that your business has a problem. But knowing the answer gives you information you didn’t have before.
The pieces don’t get received separately.
We separate branding, messaging, positioning, marketing, and customer experience because we need language for the work. Someone writes the copy. Someone creates the visual identity. Someone builds the website. Someone develops the offer. Someone runs the ads.
The person on the other side doesn’t care which department made what.
They just experience you.
A beautifully designed brand can communicate one thing while the words communicate another. Your positioning can say you’re unlike anyone else in the category while everything I’m looking at feels remarkably familiar. Your marketing can create an expectation your actual offer was never designed to fulfill. Your pricing can tell me something your copy never says.
None of those pieces exist independently once another human being receives them.
Signal is what they add up to.
I’m not only reading the pieces. I’m reading the sum.
And then AI changed the environment.
I use AI. I think it’s an incredible tool. But I also think we’re watching something happen that businesses need to understand.
It has never been easier to make things. We can create copy, graphics, campaigns, landing pages, offers, and months of content faster than we ever could before. Ideas that once required an entire team to execute can be turned into something usable before lunch.
But there’s a tradeoff showing up everywhere I look. The things that make people and businesses genuinely different are increasingly being translated into the same language. Nuance gets cleaned up. Strange gets made sensible. Complicated thinking gets condensed into a neat little value proposition. Personality gets polished. Before long, five genuinely different businesses are explaining themselves with slightly different versions of the same words.
You can be genuinely different and still Signal sameness.
You may know exactly what makes you special. But can we see it? You may know why your offer matters. Can we understand why it matters without you standing next to us explaining it? You may have spent decades developing something your competitors cannot replicate. Did that survive the translation into what you’re putting in front of people?
Being different and communicating the difference are not the same thing.
A strong Signal isn’t about being louder.
I’m not interested in helping everyone become more provocative, more disruptive, more “authentic” or whatever word we’re all going to wear out next. 😂
I’m interested in whether what you’re sending accurately carries what is already there.
If you’re brilliant at something, can I tell? If your approach is different, can I understand the difference? If there’s a reason your work costs more, have you given me enough information to understand why? If you’re creating a particular expectation, can you actually fulfill it?
A strong Signal doesn’t require you to become something more interesting.
It lets me receive what is already true.
And Signal doesn’t stop at the sale. What happens after I click contributes to it. What happens after I buy contributes to it. Whether the experience matches what you taught me to expect contributes to it.
You’re not sending a Signal from one page.
You’re sending it through the whole thing.
What can knowing your Signal give you?
Signal gives you an outside view of something that’s incredibly difficult to see from inside your own business: what someone may actually be receiving from what you’ve put into the world.
It can show you what is immediately clear, what makes you distinctive, what creates trust, where expectations are being set, what may be creating hesitation or confusion, and where the different pieces of your business are reinforcing each other or saying different things.
Sometimes there will be audience language or behavior that helps confirm what I’m seeing. Sometimes there won’t be. I follow the evidence that’s actually available rather than forcing every business through the same framework or pretending I know what people are thinking when I don’t.
The outcome isn’t a score or a list of things you’re doing wrong.
It’s visibility.
You understand what you’re currently putting into the world more clearly, so whatever you decide to build, change, keep or amplify next is an informed decision.
Signal isn’t a problem I’m looking to find.
This matters to me because I have no interest in creating another system that exists to tell businesses everything they’re doing wrong.
Your Signal may be communicating exactly what you intended. If it is, that’s valuable to know. Now you know what you’re pressing into.
I may receive something you never intended. That’s valuable too. Now you know before you decide what happens next.
And sometimes I may see something valuable in what you’re already sending that you didn’t realize you were saying at all.
That’s why I don’t think of Signal as good or bad.
Signal is information. Once you can see it, you can decide what to do with it.
I read Signal.
For most of my career, I didn’t have that language for what I was doing. I just knew I could look at a business, a person, an offer or an idea and start seeing connections other people weren’t necessarily seeing.
My clients usually knew A. They knew where they were. And they knew Z, where they wanted to go. A lot of my work became figuring out B through Y: what needed to be built, changed, communicated, connected or created to get from one to the other.
I’ve helped my clients generate tens of millions of dollars doing that work. I’ve worked with industry giants, celebrities, entrepreneurs and businesses at very different stages. I’ve built the strategy and I’ve built the things. I’ve spent enough time inside all of those separate disciplines to understand how they affect one another.
But I’ve realized something important about the order.
Before I start solving for B through Y, I want to understand A.
Not simply what you tell me A is.
What is A actually communicating?
That’s where Signal starts.
So, what are you signaling?
There’s one obvious problem with trying to answer that question yourself.
You already know what you meant when you said it. You can’t unknow it long enough to experience your business the way someone encountering it for the first time does.
I can.
That’s why I created the Blind Signal Read.
Before you tell me what you intended, I experience what you’ve already put into the world and tell you what I received.
Maybe it’s exactly what you meant. Maybe it isn’t.
Either way, now you know your Signal.
Explore the Blind Signal Read →
It’s rare to find brand chops and proven performance. Kristen delivers both.
Jonathan “JCron” Cronstedt
CO-CEO, Kajabi
