Sapna Pieroux – how to reduce the credibility gap with your branding
How to reduce the credibility gap with your branding with Sapna Pieroux
What happens when someone sees you online for the first time? What do they think when they land on your website or see your LinkedIn banner..?
Yep. They’ll be in judging mode. And who can blame them? At that moment, it’s all they’ve got to go on.
In a split second, even before they’ve absorbed a single word of your carefully crafted copy, they’ve already decided whether you’re worth their time.
And that’s what I was talking to Sapna Pieroux about on this episode of The Show (Off)!
Sapna Pieroux is a multi-award-winning brand strategist and designer. She’s been shortlisted as Best Newcomer at the Speaker Awards 2026 and she’s the award winning author of Let’s Get Visible. She works with founders who are selling ultra-high ticket or to corporate to close the credibility gap and win more business.
If you don’t ‘look’ as good as you know you are, that’s what Sapna calls the credibility gap. And closing it is what she’s spent 30 years helping people do.
The logo and brand colours are the tip of your branding iceberg
Sapna’s career started with two decades in corporate, including producing work for L’Oreal, PlayStation, Rimmel and Toyota. She then moved into the entrepreneurial world, which is where she noticed that founders were doing branding the wrong way round…
She likens it to an iceberg. It’s understandable that business owners want to get the visual bit of branding right. It’s the bit that people can see after all! But this is just the tip of the aforementioned iceberg. And it’s sitting on a lot of foundational work, or at least that’s how branding should work.
Your branding won’t do anything for you unless you’ve started with the part below the water first i.e. the brand strategy. That’s what is going to make people stop scrolling and think these people understand my problems. It’s what turns a nice-looking business into one that people actually trust.
Do Say See: The Three Pillars of a Trusted Brand
One of my favourite frameworks from Sapna’s award winning book Let’s Get Visible is the Do Say See model. It’s a Venn diagram representing everything you do, everything you say, and everything people see.
For a brand to work, all three need to be in alignment. The moment they’re not, that credibility gap opens up.
If you’re telling people you offer a premium service but your website looks like it was built on a free trial in 2012, people will feel like something’s off. If your visuals are gorgeous but nobody can figure out what you actually sell, it’s less likely that they’ll buy.
Sapna describes what she calls “invisible brands”. These are good businesses that people scroll past to the competitor that looks the business. Even if that competitor isn’t actually better.
Building your brand into the future
I found this bit really interesting- Sapna doesn’t build brands for who you are today. She builds them for who you’re going to be.
“Sometimes [clients] look at the brand and go, oh my God, I’ve got to live up to this now!”
This might sound scary; creating a brand that might feel almost ‘too big’ for you right now. But the point is that branding is about perception. As far as your audience are concerned, their perception is the reality. To my mind this is a version of ‘not playing small’.
The alternative? You could go for a quick fix but it tends to cost more in the long run. Founders get a logo and some colours, feel good for twelve months, and then realise they’ve outgrown it. Back to square one. Back to the budget they thought they’d saved.
Another mistake Sapna sees frequently is when founders took to the market leaders in their industry, then brief their designer to make them look like ‘the market leader’.
The result is what she calls a me-too brand.
A better approach is to find what’s genuinely different about you and lean into it.
She gives the example of a female founder working in business automation, a space saturated with navy blue cogs. Instead they decided to link her branding to her Indian roots and love of pattern and colour. The result? A mandala-inspired design that subtly echoed the cog aesthetic of the industry while being entirely, unmistakably her.
Do you design a brand for you or your audience?
This made me think of someone I knew who’d got their branding done which appealed to their target audience. But she didn’t actually like it.
I thought it’d be interesting to ask Sapna her opinion on this, and let’s just say it wasn’t a head scratcher! She said that it should be possible for it to appeal to your audience and for you to love it too.
“You should feel proud of it. It should represent you and your work, and it should appeal to your target market as well. That is the balance to strike.” She said.
It’s a harder brief to execute, but it’s the right one. A brand you feel proud of is one you’ll actually show up in consistently.
Your personal brand is happening whether you cultivate it or not
Even for businesses where the founder isn’t front and centre, personal brand matters. People are nosy, as Sapna puts it. They want to know who’s behind the thing they’re buying.
“People buy from people…They want to get to know you first.”
Richard Branson gets more attention than Virgin. Michelle Obama is more compelling than any initiative she leads. The human in the brand is an asset; so you might as well make the most of it.
Being more herself and playing more
I get a sense that Sapna is showing up as ‘herself’ and she’s enjoying it, which is I asked her on The Show (Off) of course!
As it turns out, she has become more playful in recent years and is following the fun.
She launched The Notworkers, which is a karaoke networking event that has nothing to do with brand strategy and everything to do with the fact that she loves karaoke. And it makes people happy!
She also organised a local neighbourhood meetup after moving to a new area and realising she didn’t know anyone on her street.
She credits some of this loosening-up to getting older, some to the perspective shift that comes from serious illness (she was diagnosed with cancer four years ago), and some to having children, which gave her back a version of the carefree childhood she never quite had, growing up under a strict father who firmly believed that life was not all about having fun.
“Life is actually really fricking short. And you’ve got to have as much fun as possible while doing whatever it is you’re doing.”
I’m not going to argue with that!
Before you rebrand, read this!
One practical takeaway for anyone considering a rebrand; have a look and check what is still working about it. So often people dive into a complete rebrand (expensive) when a refresh might be cheaper, quicker and more appropriate.
Sapna has a free brand performance quiz that gives you a percentage score on how your current brand is performing across key areas. In other words, it’ll help you decide whether you can ‘evolve’ your brand or whether you do need all the bells and bangles.
Check your Brand Performance Score here.
Connect with Sapna
Find out more about Sapna’s work and connect with her:
- Connect with Sapna on LinkedIn
- Check out her website here
- Buy Let’s Get Visible here
- Near London? Why not go along to one of her Karaoke networking events! Find the next Notworkers event here.
And while you’re at it, why not connect with me on LinkedIn here.
And find out more about my offer positioning and messaging services here.
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Timestamps:
00:00 Show Intro
00:12 Meet Sapna Pieroux
00:55 Designing the Book
02:00 Who the Book Helps
03:34 Do Say See Framework
06:54 Beyond Logos
08:59 Iceberg Brand Strategy
09:55 Personal Brand Matters
11:57 Standout Founder Branding
15:19 Being Your True Self
18:07 Playfulness and Kids
19:23 Fighting Loneliness Locally
21:52 Karaoke Networking
22:36 Brand Score Quiz
23:43 Connect and Wrap Up