Parliament | By Closing the Door, You Create the Room
The most generous thing you can do for your brand is close the door.
Not because you're being exclusive for exclusivity's sake. But because knowing who you're not for is the only way to know who you are for.
Priya Parker writes in The Art of Gathering that "by closing the door, you create the room." She's talking about gatherings, but she might as well be talking about brands. Without boundaries, there's no container. Without a container, there's no space for the magic to happen.
The Problem with “For Everyone”
When you say your brand is for everyone, you're actually saying it's for no one.
You're the host at a party who invited everyone on your contact list—acquaintances, vendors, your dentist, that guy from the conference—and now nobody can have a real conversation because the room is too crowded and nobody knows why they're there.
Seth Godin nailed it: "People like us do things like this." But you can't say that if you don't know who "us" is. And you can't know who "us" is until you've decided who "us" isn't.
The Responsibility of Stewardship
Closing the door isn't about discrimination. It's about discernment. And discernment is your responsibility as a brand steward.
When you fail to close the door—when you try to be everything to everyone—you're not being generous or inclusive. You're being neglectful. You're letting the wrong people waste their time with you. You're letting the right people get diluted by noise. You're letting your team spin their wheels trying to serve contradictory needs.
Worse, you're lying to yourself about who you actually are.
What Closing the Door Actually Means
Closing the door means:
Knowing your values so precisely that some people will disagree with them
Defining your audience so clearly that you'll repel people outside of it
Standing for something specific enough that it excludes the alternative
Hiring for culture fit even when the resume is impressive
Turning away clients who aren't aligned, even when you need the revenue
This isn't cruelty. It's clarity.
And clarity is the most generous gift you can give—to your customers, your employees, and yourself.
The Wrong Fit Costs Everyone
The people hurt most by your failure to close the door are the ones who shouldn't be in the room in the first place.
The customer who buys from you expecting something you never promised to be. The employee who joins your team hoping for a culture that doesn't exist. The partner who thought you stood for something you don't.
When you're vague about who you are, you attract people who will be disappointed. When you're specific, you attract people who will be devoted.
Your Brand is Not Democratic
Your brand is not a democracy. It's a dictatorship. A benevolent one, ideally, but a dictatorship nonetheless.
You don't get to abdicate the responsibility of deciding who you're for by pretending you're for everyone. You don't get to avoid the discomfort of exclusion by including everyone and creating mediocrity.
You get to—you must—close the door.
Because by closing the door, you create the room. And in that room, with those people, for that purpose—that's where your brand can actually mean something.
The Hard Part
The hard part isn't closing the door. The hard part is knowing who you are well enough to know where to put the door in the first place.
That's the work. That's Brand Being.
And it's the hard work that matters.
At Hoot Design Company, we help you figure out where the door goes. Because we're not here to change how the world sees you—we're here to change how you see yourself. And sometimes, that means helping you see who you're not.
We’re loving the prompts from this content creator on Instagram. When you leverage powerful prompts with a Brand Being Manual, you get AI content gold 🥇
