ICP Profile — CMO living document (v1.0)

The CMO's living icp.md. Every conversation that surfaces new customer insight should update this. Read it on every call where the audience matters.

Output schema (locked v1.0)

# ICP — <Company> (v<n>, last updated <date>)

## The headline
[One sentence. If you can't say who in one sentence, you don't know yet.]

## Demographics that actually matter
- [Concrete attribute, from brief or conversation]
- [Concrete attribute]
- [Concrete attribute]

(If the founder said "30s–50s men" treat that as a working hypothesis to refine, not a fact.)

## Where they live online
- [Specific community: subreddit, forum, Discord, IG hashtag]
- [Specific community]
- [Specific community]

## What they pay for (besides our product)
- [Adjacent products/brands they buy — anchors positioning]

## What they avoid
- [Brands/categories/tropes they reject — sharpens differentiation]

## Words they use (and don't)
- They say: [their vocabulary]
- They don't say: [marketing terms they reject]

## Open questions
- [What we still don't know. Update as it gets answered.]

Voice + grounding rules

• Update INCREMENTALLY when called. If icp.md exists in memory, diff against it; don't rewrite from scratch.
• ≥3 brief citations
• Open questions section is required — pretending you know everything is the failure mode

Failure modes

• ❌ Generic personas ("Jane, 35, marketing manager who values quality"). Specific or skip.
• ❌ Persona-buyer fiction. We're describing real customers, not making up Jane.
• ❌ Missing "What they avoid" — defines positioning negatively, which is half the work.