We had just wrapped our biggest campaign of the year. The product was solid, the execution smooth, and the visuals—at least in our eyes—looked sleek and professional. I remember the energy in the room when we clicked “launch.” It felt like a win. Twenty-four hours later, the comments started pouring in. Not the applause we’d hoped for, but confusion, skepticism, and outright disappointment. Customers, mostly women from our home markets in Malaysia and Singapore, were asking why the person featured in our ads looked nothing like them. “Whose mom is this supposed to be?” one woman commented. “Looks like a brand for expats. Not for me,” said another. We’d chosen a European model because we thought she embodied the kind of aspirational look we wanted. We hadn’t realized that in doing so, we’d alienated the very people we were trying to serve.
It wasn’t the first time a brand had made this mistake. But it was the first time we did—and that made it personal. What made it even more painful was the fact that we had genuinely believed we were building something for our community. We had local testimonials, we’d held in-person events with real users, we even had customer DMs telling us how much they appreciated the product. Yet when it came time to scale, we defaulted to the same old tropes. Glossy. Global. Generic. We thought we were elevating the brand. Instead, we revealed how disconnected we’d become.
What I’ve learned since then—and what I now share with every founder I mentor—is this: representation isn’t about inclusion optics or identity politics. It’s about trust. When your customer doesn’t see themselves in your brand story, they start questioning whether you really understand them. And when they feel excluded from the narrative, even accidentally, they don’t just disengage—they walk away entirely.
At the time of that campaign, our team was in a rush. We had a short deadline, limited resources, and a media buyer who was pushing us to hit broader appeal. None of those are excuses, but they’re clues. In the absence of deliberate representation, default aesthetics take over. In our case, the default was Western-looking, slim-bodied, light-skinned. It looked neutral. But it wasn’t. It was specific—and it excluded.
What stung the most wasn’t the drop in conversions or the wasted ad spend. It was the silence from users who used to talk to us. They stopped tagging us. Stopped responding. Stopped recommending us to their friends. For a community-driven brand, that loss was devastating. Our early growth hadn’t come from billboards or influencers. It came from word of mouth, built on intimacy and trust. That trust wasn’t broken in one ad. It cracked the moment we made them feel invisible.
I think a lot of early-stage founders make the same mistake we did: assuming that diversity in visuals equals representation. You can have every ethnicity in your carousel and still miss the emotional tone of your audience. Representation isn’t just who appears in your content. It’s who gets to shape it. It’s who has veto power in the decision room. It’s whose worldview you prioritize when choosing words, colors, faces, music, partnerships. It’s whose lived reality you consider when writing a line of copy.
I’ve worked with enough founders now across KSA, Malaysia, and Singapore to know that this problem shows up in different ways depending on the market. In Malaysia, it often plays out through class cues—English fluency, schooling, skin tone, and urban styling. In Saudi, it’s about tone and dignity—how women are framed, how humor is used, and how tradition is referenced. In Singapore, it’s more subtle—accents, cadence, even background props can betray whether something is meant for locals or for someone else entirely. The common thread? When representation is shallow, it rings false. And the customer knows it instantly.
There’s a line I use with new teams I mentor: representation isn’t about diversity stock photos—it’s about cultural permission. That means showing up in a way that your audience finds not only familiar but respectful. It means knowing what a real mom in Johor Bahru sounds like when she’s buying your product. It means knowing how a young Saudi woman shares a review without losing face. It means paying attention to the difference between looking inclusive and actually being included.
True representation requires you to slow down the default. And that’s hard when you’re scaling. When you’re chasing metrics and feeding ad engines, pausing to double-check whether your cast reflects your customer feels like a luxury. But it’s not. It’s the foundation of brand trust—and once that’s gone, no amount of clever targeting will win it back.
One of the most powerful moments I’ve seen recently came from a founder in Penang. She launched a new skincare line targeting working-class women in small towns. Instead of hiring influencers, she worked with local teachers and nurses—real women with real skin, real stories, and real constraints. She didn’t rebrand their voice. She amplified it. Her sales didn’t go viral, but her community engagement was unmatched. She got messages from women saying, “I finally feel like this brand sees me.” That kind of loyalty can’t be bought. It has to be earned.
And earning it means more than just casting a wide net. It means being specific. Honoring accents. Mirroring emotions. Understanding the rhythm of someone’s day. Knowing when not to speak and when to show up. This level of representation doesn’t scale easily, but it compounds deeply. It turns one-time buyers into repeat customers. It turns followers into evangelists. It makes your brand harder to forget—because it made someone feel remembered.
I’ve also seen the opposite: founders who try to borrow templates from Western success stories without adapting them to local context. They use “inclusive” marketing language that sounds like LinkedIn but feels alien to the person walking into a Watsons or scrolling TikTok in Bahasa. They default to the same pastel aesthetics and Shopify clones, assuming those visuals are universal. But they’re not. They’re often coded to a very narrow slice of the market—and when that code doesn’t match your user, you lose them.
The real risk isn’t just low engagement. It’s misalignment. When your internal team, brand voice, and customer base don’t match, execution starts to feel chaotic. Campaigns feel off. Feedback loops get noisy. You can’t tell if it’s the product, the marketing, or the strategy. And most dangerously, you start blaming the customer for not “getting it”—when the truth is, you never made them central in the first place.
The fix isn’t just hiring one diversity consultant or running an annual Raya campaign. It’s about rewiring how you think about belonging as a brand. It’s about embedding representation into every decision—who’s in the room, who has approval rights, what stories get told, what feedback gets weighted. It’s about seeing representation not as a checkbox but as a strategic lens. When done right, it sharpens your positioning, strengthens your brand equity, and creates defensibility that’s hard to copy.
There’s also a psychological cost to getting this wrong. Founders lose confidence. Teams second-guess themselves. Brand identity wobbles. I’ve mentored founders who’ve delayed product launches because they didn’t know how to “get the tone right.” Others who’ve burned through agencies trying to “look more regional” without realizing the issue wasn’t style—it was perspective. They weren’t trying to be someone they were not. They were just disconnected from who they were.
So what does it take to get representation right? It takes humility. You have to be willing to be told you’re off. It takes curiosity—to go deeper than demographics and understand lived experience. It takes structure—embedding review systems that catch blind spots before they go public. And it takes consistency. Not just during campaigns, but in the boring in-between moments: customer replies, community engagement, brand partnerships.
The best representation doesn’t always look flashy. Sometimes it’s a thank-you card written in your customer’s first language. Sometimes it’s featuring a user with a visible disability and not making it a big deal. Sometimes it’s declining a big-name influencer because their aesthetic doesn’t align with the heart of your brand. These choices aren’t about performance. They’re about principle. And the market feels the difference.
If I had to do it again, I would start with fewer assumptions and more listening. I would test voice, not just visuals. I would co-create with my users instead of casting them later. I would ask myself at every creative review: “Does this reflect who we serve—or who we think we need to impress?” Because those two are rarely the same.
The truth is, representation is not a branding issue. It’s a trust issue. It’s about whether your customer feels seen, respected, and prioritized. It’s about whether they believe you built something for them—or just used them for reach. And in a crowded, skeptical, always-on market, that belief is everything.
So to every founder scaling your brand: slow down. Look again at your ads, your packaging, your social posts, your customer service scripts. Ask yourself who they center. Who they echo. Who they exclude. Then build better. With intention. With courage. With clarity. Because if you get this right, your brand won’t just be remembered. It’ll be believed.
And that’s the kind of brand that lasts.
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