What About the People Who Think They Already Know You?
I’ve been traveling with the family over the past couple of weeks, so The Foxman Edit took a little intermission. But the trip gave me so much to think about that I figured I’d make it up to you with a deeper dive than usual.
We just got back from Orlando. Disney and Universal. Cielo got the trip as a Chanukah present and had been counting down ever since. Honestly, so had I.
I’ve always been a Disney person. Not in an annual-passholder way, but in the way where Disney just is the theme park for me. It’s the one I grew up on, the one I never questioned. If you’d asked me before this trip to rank the two, I wouldn’t have even understood the question. Disney was Disney. Universal was the other one.
So when we booked Epic Universe, Universal’s massive new park, I was curious. But I also figured it would be a glorified amusement park. Carnival grounds with better IP. Something to fill a day.
And look, we had a wonderful time at Disney. Strolling the food stalls at Epcot, experiencing the new updated rides, being together as a family in a place that’s meant so much to me for so long. I’m not here to knock Disney. But I am here to tell you that Epic Universe exceeded the standard.
It blew us away. The worlds weren’t just themed. They were complete. Each portal transported you into an environment where every surface, every sightline, every corner had been considered. There was no visual waste. No filler. The merch was beautifully designed, curated, and actually desirable. Not the usual bin of keychains and oversized t-shirts. The food was genuinely excellent. Small, curated menus that felt intentional. Not the sprawling dining-package-generic buffets we’ve all been trained to expect from theme parks.
But what stood out most were the people. Every employee we encountered was pleasant, present, and authentically helpful. And then there was the moment that sealed it. We walked into Cosme Acajor Baguettes Magique, the wand shop in the Wizarding World’s Parisian quarter, and my son found himself face-to-face with Cosme Acajor herself, the shop’s fictional wandmaker, played by a performer so committed and so warm that Cielo was completely enchanted. She spoke to him like he was a real young wizard choosing his first wand. He believed every second of it. So did I.
Disney hit the nostalgia button for me. My mind kept harking back to old memories more than making new ones. The magic was familiar. And familiar is wonderful. But familiar isn’t the same as fresh.
Cielo didn’t necessarily notice the difference. Each park was magical in its own way, each had rides he loved. But the adults noticed. And when the adults start noticing, that’s a signal worth paying attention to.
The Three Audiences You’re Really Competing For
Here’s the framework that crystallized for me on this trip, and I think it applies far beyond theme parks.
Every brand, legacy or challenger, is really speaking to three groups of people.
The Convinced. These are the people who already believe in you. Disney’s diehards. The annual passholders. The families who go every year because it’s tradition. They’re not comparing. They’ve already decided. For challengers, these are your early adopters. The people who found you first and don’t need convincing.
The Unaware. These are the people who don’t think of you at all. You’re simply not on their radar. You need to introduce yourself to them entirely. Important, but relatively straightforward.
The Moveable Middle. This is the group that matters most, and the one most brands under-invest in. These are the people who think they know what you are. They have a conventional wisdom about you, formed by reputation, bias, a visit from five years ago, something a friend said, or simply the assumption that the established player is the better choice. They’re not hostile. They’re not unaware. They’re just operating on outdated information or inherited preference.
I was the moveable middle on this trip. I walked into Epic Universe with a bias I didn’t even recognize as a bias. I assumed Disney was the premium experience because Disney had always been the premium experience. Nobody at Universal needed to convince me they existed. They needed to convince me I was wrong about what they could deliver.
And they did it the only way it actually works. They gave me the experience and let the comparison speak for itself.
If You’re the Legacy Brand
The convinced will keep coming regardless. The unaware aren’t your immediate threat. But the moveable middle? They’re the ones quietly starting to hear from your competitors. And they’re more persuadable than you think, because their loyalty is based on assumption, not recent experience.
Shop yourself like a skeptic. When was the last time someone on your leadership team experienced your product the way a first-timer would? Not as a VIP. Not with insider knowledge. As someone who showed up cold and had to be won over.
Audit your assumptions with recent evidence. Make a list of everything your organization believes about itself. “We’re the premium choice.” “Our service is best-in-class.” Now ask: what proof do we have from the last twelve months? Not from 2018. Not from that one glowing review. If you can’t point to recent evidence, the assumption is coasting on memory.
Find what you’ve stopped noticing. Legacy brands develop blind spots. Things that have been “fine” for so long that nobody sees them anymore. The tired facilities. The mediocre food everyone’s learned to tolerate. Your challenger is noticing every single one of these things. They’re building their pitch around the gaps you’ve stopped seeing.
Earn it again. The most dangerous sentence in any legacy organization is “people come here because we’re [us].” The moment your brand becomes the reason instead of the experience, you’re vulnerable. Your nostalgia is a head start, not a finish line.
I learned this firsthand at InStyle. We were the number one selling fashion magazine in the world. Commercially dominant, massive audience, culturally relevant. But in certain corners of the fashion establishment, we were dismissed. Too accessible. Too celebrity-driven. Not “serious” enough. The fashion snobs were our moveable middle. They had a fixed idea of what InStyle was, and that idea gave them permission to overlook us. The temptation was to chase their approval. Get cooler. More exclusive. More niche. But that would have meant abandoning what made us number one in the first place. Instead, we had to keep proving, issue after issue, that accessibility and quality weren’t mutually exclusive. That you could be the biggest and the best. You don’t win the moveable middle by becoming something you’re not. You win them by being undeniable at what you are.
If You’re the Challenger
The convinced aren’t coming to you yet. Don’t waste energy trying to convert diehards. The unaware just need an introduction. But the moveable middle is your real opportunity. They’re already thinking about the category. They just think the other guy is better. Here’s how to change their mind.
Know that your customer arrives pre-sold on someone else. The people you most want to reach have probably already decided, consciously or not, that the legacy brand is the safe, premium, “real” choice. You’re not starting from neutral. You’re starting from behind. Every touchpoint has to work harder.
Exceed them where they’ve gotten lazy. Find the areas where the incumbent is coasting on reputation instead of delivering, then make those your strengths. Epic Universe turned “theme park food,” an industry-wide punchline, into a genuine differentiator. They took the legacy brand’s weakest link and made it their calling card. We’re still texting each other about the Butterbeer crepes. Multiple people in our group have gone looking for clone recipes online. That’s not “good for a theme park.” That’s just good.
Build for the doubter, not the converted. Your fans will find you. The harder and more valuable audience is the person who walks in thinking, “This probably won’t be as good.” Design every detail for that person. Prove them wrong so thoroughly they can’t rationalize it away.
Make the comparison easy. If someone experiences you and your competitor in the same trip, the same week, the same day, what will they notice? Epic Universe won because the contrast was immediate. We’d been at Disney the day before. The delta wasn’t subtle.
You won’t win on nostalgia, so don’t try. They own that. You can’t manufacture thirty years of childhood memories. So win on care, on craft, on the feeling that someone actually thought about what it would be like to be right here, in this moment. Nostalgia is borrowed emotion. Delight is earned in real time.
I think about this every day in my work at Boston Seaport. For years, decades really, this was parking lots. That’s the conventional wisdom a lot of Bostonians still carry. They have their beloved neighborhoods, their seasoned traditions, their established go-to spots across the city. Boston Seaport is the new kid in a very old town. Some people have visited and updated their thinking. Some haven’t been in years and are still working off an outdated mental snapshot. And some have never come at all because they already decided it’s not for them.
That’s three audiences. The convinced, the unaware, and the moveable middle.
Our job every single day is to give that middle group a reason to come experience what this neighborhood actually is now. Not what they remember. Not what they assume. What it is when they walk through it today. And the most satisfying thing about this work is that we keep seeing it happen. More and more people coming through and making new memories here. Core memories. Repeat memories. It’s all upside.
You can’t argue someone out of a preconception. You have to replace it with an experience.
And by the way, this isn’t just true for theme parks and neighborhoods. This framework applies to how any brand is experienced across the entire marketing playbook. Your website, your packaging, your customer service, your social presence, your retail environment. Wherever someone encounters you for the first time or the fifteenth time, the question is the same: are you earning it, or are you assuming they’ve already decided?