In Brief

For decades, the buying journey began with a search engine, a sales representative or a recommendation from a colleague.

Increasingly, it begins with an AI.

Whether using ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google’s AI Mode, Perplexity or enterprise AI assistants, buyers are asking machines to summarise markets, shortlist suppliers, compare products and explain differences before they ever visit a company website or speak with a salesperson.

This is more than another marketing channel.

It represents a structural shift in how commercial decisions begin.

For many companies, AI is quietly becoming the first sales meeting.

What Is Happening

The way people discover businesses has been remarkably stable for nearly two decades. Buyers searched Google, clicked through websites, downloaded content, compared vendors and eventually spoke with sales.

That sequence is beginning to change.

Large language models are increasingly acting as research assistants that compress hours of exploration into minutes. Instead of reviewing ten websites, a buyer can ask a single question:

“Which CRM platforms are best suited for mid-sized manufacturing companies?”

Or:

“Which toothpaste brands have the strongest sustainability credentials?”

Or:

“Which Nordic agencies specialise in food and beverage branding?”

Rather than directing users to a list of links, AI produces an answer.

The conversation often ends there.

This matters because the earliest stage of buying has always been the stage where perceptions are formed.

If AI determines which companies deserve consideration, visibility increasingly depends on being included in an AI-generated shortlist rather than merely ranking well in traditional search.

This is already visible across both consumer and business markets.

McKinsey has described AI search as a “new front door to the internet,” arguing that generative interfaces are changing how consumers discover brands and products. At the same time, enterprise software buyers are increasingly using AI assistants to accelerate vendor research, reducing the time spent reviewing marketing materials and websites.

The result is a subtle but profound shift:

buyers are outsourcing more of the evaluation process to machines before involving humans.

The Evidence

Several independent developments point in the same direction.

AI assistants are becoming mainstream.

Hundreds of millions of people now use generative AI tools every month. ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google’s AI experiences and Perplexity have rapidly expanded from experimental tools into everyday research assistants.

Search behaviour is changing.

Google itself has responded by integrating AI-generated answers directly into search results, reducing the need for users to click through to websites.

Ironically, the world’s largest search company is signalling that traditional search behaviour is evolving.

Enterprise buying is already changing.

Research from Gartner, 6sense and G2 has consistently shown that B2B buyers now spend the majority of their purchasing journey conducting independent research before contacting vendors.

AI dramatically increases the efficiency of this self-directed research.

Instead of reading twenty whitepapers, buyers increasingly ask AI to synthesise them.

Discovery is becoming compressed.

A task that previously required:

• multiple Google searches

• analyst reports

• comparison websites

• customer reviews

can increasingly be replaced by one conversation.

That fundamentally changes which companies enter the consideration set.

Not Everyone Agrees

There is an important nuance.

Some researchers argue AI will simply become another interface layered on top of search rather than replacing it entirely.

Others point out that large language models still make factual errors, omit important suppliers and occasionally fabricate information.

These criticisms are valid.

The question is not whether AI is perfect.

The question is whether buyers increasingly begin their thinking there.

The evidence suggests they do.

What It Means

Most companies still think about marketing in terms of traffic.

Traffic to websites.

Traffic from Google.

Traffic generated through advertising.

But traffic is no longer the earliest stage of customer acquisition.

Conversation is.

The first interaction with a brand may increasingly happen inside an AI model that the company neither owns nor controls.

This changes several assumptions simultaneously.

The website becomes the second touchpoint.

Historically, a website introduced the company.

Increasingly, it validates what AI has already said.

That reverses the role of digital marketing.

Brand strength becomes machine-readable.

Brands have traditionally competed through awareness and emotional associations.

AI introduces another dimension.

Can the machine confidently explain:

• what you do

• who you serve

• why you’re different

• when you’re relevant

Companies with vague positioning become difficult for AI to recommend.

Ironically, strong positioning becomes even more valuable in an AI-mediated world.

Content changes purpose.

Many businesses still create content to attract clicks.

Increasingly, content must help AI models understand expertise.

Depth, clarity, consistency and original thinking become strategic assets because they increase the probability of being referenced, summarised or recommended.

Publishing less—but publishing genuinely distinctive thinking—may become more valuable than producing endless SEO content.

Categories become simpler.

Large language models naturally compress complexity.

When buyers ask for recommendations, AI often presents a manageable shortlist rather than an exhaustive market map.

That creates a powerful commercial implication:

being included matters more than being ranked tenth.

The Original Minds Perspective

Most discussions about AI focus on productivity.

Faster writing.

Better coding.

Lower costs.

Those gains are real.

But they may not be the biggest commercial shift.

The more profound change is that AI is becoming an intermediary between buyers and markets.

For decades, brands competed for attention.

Increasingly, they will compete for recommendation.

That is a fundamentally different competitive game.

The companies that succeed will not necessarily be those producing the most content.

They will be those whose positioning is so clear, evidence so credible and expertise so distinctive that both humans and machines can explain them confidently.

In that sense, AI is not replacing branding.

It is exposing weak branding.

What to Consider

Leadership teams should begin asking different questions.

Not:

“How should we use AI internally?”

But:

“How does AI currently describe our business?”

“Would it recommend us?”

“For which buying situations?”

“Against whom?”

“Why?”

These questions may become as important as monitoring Google rankings once was.

Companies should also reconsider whether their current positioning is sufficiently precise.

If an AI assistant cannot explain your relevance in two or three sentences, prospective customers may struggle as well.

Finally, leaders should recognise that discovery is becoming conversational rather than navigational.

That means commercial advantage increasingly depends on being understood before being visited.

Strategic Questions for Leadership Teams

• If AI created a shortlist of suppliers in our category today, would we appear on it?

• Can our positioning be explained accurately in less than thirty seconds?

• Are we publishing original knowledge or merely repeating industry consensus?

• Which evidence helps AI recognise our expertise?

• If our website disappeared tomorrow, would AI still understand what makes us different?

Original Minds Conclusion

Search changed how customers found businesses.

AI is changing how customers form opinions before they ever meet one.

The companies that adapt first will not simply optimise for algorithms.

They will become easier to understand, easier to recommend and harder to ignore.

Because the first sales meeting is no longer always between a buyer and a salesperson.

Increasingly, it is between a buyer and an AI.

And that conversation has already started.

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This intelligence brief was created by Original Minds Intelligence™, our proprietary platform and methodology that monitors signals that we interpret and publish. For our clients, we take things further and interpret signals specifically using your strategy and brand lens, giving you strategic recommendations based on the ever-changing market forces. Our goal is to help you become the most relevant choice within your space.

It may not appear in the financial model, the board presentation or the three-year plan. But underneath every decision to enter a market, reposition a brand, launch a product or increase marketing spend sits a collection of assumptions about the future. Peter Drucker called it the Theory of Business (although his definition was more internally focused).

Customers will continue to value what they valued before. The category will evolve broadly as expected. Competitors will behave rationally. The brand’s reputation will remain an asset. Distribution will continue to provide access. Pricing power will hold. What worked yesterday will, with some optimisation and additional investment, work tomorrow.

This is how companies plan. It is also how they get into trouble. It has been said that the nr.1 reason companies fail is because they base the business on outdated assumptions about the market, customers, and their own capabilities. I don’t have a stat to back it up, but my intuition says this is probably accurate.

The uncomfortable reality is that most growth strategies are assembled using a market picture that is already ageing. Management teams may believe they are discussing the future, but they are often doing so through the lens of customer research commissioned twelve months ago, category definitions established five years ago and beliefs about the brand that have circulated internally for even longer.

The spreadsheet may be current. The assumptions underneath it are not.

This matters because markets do not usually announce that they have changed. There is rarely a ceremonial moment when consumers declare that a former advantage is now merely expected, that a new competitor has reset the standard or that a once-distinctive proposition has become interchangeable.

Instead, change appears gradually and then all at once.

Acquisition becomes more expensive. Conversion weakens. Customers grow more price-sensitive. Campaigns require more weight to produce the same result. Sales teams report that buyers are taking longer to decide. A competitor that once appeared marginal begins winning important accounts. None of these signals is individually catastrophic. Together, they suggest that the company’s understanding of the market may no longer match the market itself.

The usual corporate response is to adjust execution.

Marketing is asked to produce a stronger campaign. Sales is given a more ambitious target. Product teams add features. Prices are discounted. Agencies are invited to refresh the brand. The organisation becomes busier without necessarily becoming wiser.

This is the strategic equivalent of pressing harder on the accelerator because the map is wrong.

Strategy has an expiry date

Executives are accustomed to thinking of strategy as a durable asset. Considerable time and money are invested in defining a direction, and once approved, the strategy is expected to guide the organisation for several years.

The logic is understandable. Constantly changing direction is expensive, confusing and usually a sign of weak leadership. But there is an important distinction between strategic consistency and strategic rigidity.

A company can maintain a clear direction while continuously updating its understanding of the environment. In fact, it must.

The problem is not that strategies are designed to last. The problem is that the assumptions supporting them are rarely assigned an expiry date.

Consider the standard strategy process. A company conducts research, reviews performance, interviews customers, assesses competitors and holds a series of management workshops. A strategic thesis emerges. The organisation then moves into execution.

Over time, however, the research is cited more often than it is refreshed. Customer segments become permanent fixtures in presentations. Competitor maps are copied from one planning cycle to the next. The original strategic choices gradually harden into institutional truths.

Eventually, the organisation stops asking whether the assumptions are still valid and begins using them to explain away evidence that they are not.

This is how corporate folklore develops.

“Our customers value quality over price.”

“Our brand is trusted.”

“That competitor serves a different segment.”

“Our buyers are not ready for that.”

“We win because of our service.”

Any of these statements may be true. The danger lies in how little evidence is usually required for them to remain true inside the company.

Markets are less sentimental.

Customers do not preserve a company’s positioning because it appeared in a board-approved brand platform. They compare the business with whatever alternatives are available at the moment of choice. Those alternatives may include direct competitors, new business models, cheaper substitutes, internal workarounds or simply doing nothing.

The competitive frame can change while the company’s category definition stays the same.

The half-life of commercial knowledge is shrinking

This problem has become more severe because the useful life of market knowledge is getting shorter.

Consumer expectations now travel quickly across categories. A customer who becomes accustomed to the convenience of one digital service does not confine that expectation to the original category. The experience becomes a reference point elsewhere.

A bank is compared not only with other banks but with the best digital experiences its customers use. A restaurant is judged against changing expectations around health, convenience and hospitality. An industrial supplier may still compete on engineering expertise, but buyers increasingly evaluate it through standards of responsiveness, transparency and ease borrowed from consumer technology.

Categories used to set their own rules. Increasingly, customers import the rules from somewhere else.

Meanwhile, competitive boundaries have become more porous. A company may monitor the organisations it has historically regarded as rivals while missing a new alternative that solves the customer’s underlying problem differently.

This is particularly dangerous for established firms. Their market intelligence systems are usually organised around existing categories, existing competitors and existing customer definitions. They are excellent at describing the game the company believes it is playing.

They are less capable of recognising that the game has changed.

Technology has added another layer of volatility. Artificial intelligence, automation and cheaper access to sophisticated capabilities are allowing smaller competitors to look larger, move faster and personalise more effectively. Advantages that once required scale can now be rented. Expertise can be embedded into software. Production costs fall. The premium attached to certain forms of knowledge erodes.

This does not mean every business is about to be disrupted by a teenager with a laptop. It does mean that past competitive assumptions deserve less deference than they once did.

The tyranny of internal evidence

Management teams rarely lack information. They lack an integrated view of what the information means.

The chief executive has investor conversations, customer meetings and performance data. The chief marketing officer has brand tracking, campaign results, consumer research and agency reports. Sales has CRM data and anecdotes from the field. Product teams have usage information. Customer service hears complaints. Finance sees where margins are moving.

Each function owns a piece of the market. Nobody necessarily owns the whole picture.

This fragmentation creates two problems.

The first is that organisations tend to overweight evidence that is easy to measure and internally available. Revenue, leads, campaign performance and customer satisfaction are useful, but they mostly describe outcomes inside the company’s existing commercial system.

They are less effective at revealing emerging shifts outside it.

The second problem is political. Evidence is rarely interpreted neutrally. Sales sees a lead-quality problem. Marketing sees a conversion problem. Product sees an adoption problem. Finance sees a cost problem. Each diagnosis points towards investment in a different function.

The strategy meeting becomes a contest between partial truths.

In the absence of a shared external fact base, hierarchy and confidence fill the gap. The most senior person, the most persuasive presenter or the department with the cleanest dashboard often wins.

This is not strategy. It is organisational theatre with charts.

A credible growth plan requires more than internal performance data. It requires a current view of how the market is changing across multiple dimensions: the macro environment, cultural shifts, category conventions, competitive behaviour and customer choice.

Most companies monitor some of these forces. Few connect them.

A growth strategy is only as good as its theory of choice

One reason outdated assumptions survive is that many companies still organise their market understanding around customers rather than choices.

They know who the customer is. They may have segmentation models, personas, demographic profiles and detailed descriptions of attitudes and needs. Yet they often know surprisingly little about the actual decision.

What causes the customer to enter the market? What alternatives are considered? What trade-offs are made? Which risks matter? What creates urgency? What creates hesitation? Who else influences the decision? What makes the easiest option attractive, even if it is not objectively superior?

Growth happens when more people choose the company, choose it more frequently or pay more when they do. This sounds almost insultingly obvious. Yet much of corporate strategy operates several steps removed from this basic reality.

Companies discuss audiences, propositions, channels, content and customer journeys while leaving the central question underexplored: why should the customer choose us now?

The word “now” matters.

A proposition that was compelling three years ago may no longer be distinctive. A benefit that once created preference may have become the category standard. A customer problem may still exist, but the preferred solution may have changed. A brand can remain familiar and respected while becoming less relevant to the decision.

This is why revenue performance can be deceptive. Growth can continue for a period through distribution, price increases, acquisition, category momentum or sheer marketing weight. The numbers may appear healthy even as the underlying strength of customer choice deteriorates.

By the time this becomes visible in the income statement, the strategic problem is already mature.

From annual planning to continuous intelligence

The answer is not to commission more reports.

Most executives already have more material than they can use. The typical organisation produces a steady stream of dashboards, studies, presentations, trend reports, competitor updates and agency recommendations. The issue is not information scarcity. It is interpretation.

What matters is the ability to identify which changes are commercially significant, connect them to the company’s strategic assumptions and determine what decision follows.

This requires a shift from episodic research to continuous intelligence.

Traditional research is designed to answer a question. Continuous intelligence is designed to keep the organisation’s understanding of the market current.

The distinction is important.

A market study might reveal how customers view the brand at a particular moment. An intelligence system asks whether those perceptions are changing, why they are changing, which external forces are driving the shift and what the implications are for growth.

A competitor report describes what rivals are doing. Intelligence asks whether those moves are changing customer expectations or altering the basis of competition.

A trend report identifies cultural signals. Intelligence determines whether those signals are relevant to the company’s category, proposition or strategic choices.

The value lies not in seeing more, but in knowing what deserves attention.

For mid-sized companies, this capability is often missing. They are large enough to face complex markets, multiple competitors and significant strategic risk, but too small to maintain the research and insights infrastructure of a multinational.

They may have a capable marketing team, but not a dedicated intelligence function. They rely on agencies whose perspective is shaped by the work they sell, data providers that describe rather than interpret and occasional consulting projects that produce a moment of clarity before the market moves again.

The result is an intelligence gap between the importance of the decisions being made and the quality of the evidence informing them.

The cost of being wrong

Executives sometimes treat market intelligence as a supporting activity: useful, but secondary to action.

This reverses the sequence.

The most expensive decisions in business are not usually badly executed small decisions. They are well-executed large decisions based on faulty assumptions.

A company launches into the wrong market with discipline and energy. It invests heavily behind a proposition customers no longer find distinctive. It hires a sales team before validating demand. It refreshes the brand without addressing the underlying relevance problem. It increases promotional spending when the real issue is that the basis of choice has shifted.

Execution does not rescue a flawed premise. It compounds it.

This is especially important for chief executives under pressure to produce growth and chief marketing officers under pressure to prove commercial impact. Both have incentives to move quickly. Neither can afford to confuse speed with certainty.

The objective is not perfect foresight. Markets are too complex, competitors too unpredictable and customers too inconsistent for that.

The objective is better decision confidence.

That means knowing which assumptions matter most, how current the evidence behind them is and what signals would indicate that the strategy needs to evolve.

It also means creating a shared view of the market across leadership. When the chief executive, chief marketing officer, sales leader and product team work from different versions of reality, alignment workshops will not solve the problem. They need better common evidence.

The question behind the strategy

Every leadership team should be able to answer a deceptively simple question:

What has changed in the market since we last changed our strategy?

Not what has changed in the company. Not what has changed in the marketing plan. Not which campaigns performed well or which projects were completed.

What has changed in the world of customer choice?

Have new needs emerged? Have old expectations become more demanding? Have competitors altered the standard? Has the category expanded or fragmented? Have cultural values changed what customers reward or reject? Have economic pressures changed the trade-offs they make?

If the answer is vague, the growth strategy is resting on faith.

That may be sufficient when markets are stable and competitors predictable. It is a poor basis for capital allocation when both are moving quickly.

Companies do not need to reinvent their strategy every quarter. They do need to stop treating market understanding as something that can be completed.

Strategy is a set of specific choices you make to get specific customers to choose you over alternatives. Intelligence keeps those choices connected to reality.

Without it, even the most elegant growth plan eventually becomes a historical document.

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P.S Reach out to me if you’d like to discuss setting up a custom intelligence system for your brand and business. Our intelligence system pits external market forces against your strategy, brand, and customer profile to capture not just “what is changing”, but what to do about it, before it shows up on your P&L.

If you work with strategy, you’ll know what I am talking about.

So many companies think they have an awareness problem. “If only more people knew about us”.

While this might be part of the problem, the underlying issue is a bigger one.

They have a choice problem.

The choice problem exists downstream from the awareness problem. Potential customers know they exist. They may even have a positive impression of the brand.

But when the moment of choice arrives, they hesitate.

Or worse, they choose someone else.

Not because the competitor has a better product.

Because the competitor is easier to choose.
More readily available or accessible, or more convenient to choose.
But there is more to it.
Brands that lack clarity don’t get chosen.
As the saying in sales goes “a confused mind doesn’t buy”.

One of the biggest myths in marketing is that growth comes from getting noticed.

Getting noticed is fairly easy.

Getting chosen is hard.
There is a huge difference between the two.
Attention is scarce, sure, but every brand can find a way to get noticed.

We’ve never lived in a world where brands could generate so much attention, publish so much content, or reach so many people at such a low cost.

Yet customer acquisition costs continue to rise across many industries. Marketing budgets have grown. Sales cycles have lengthened. Brands are producing more than ever.

Something isn’t adding up.

The problem isn’t attention.

It’s interpretation.

Customers don’t wake up hoping to understand your business.

They’re trying to solve a problem.

Reduce a risk.

Save time.

Look smart.

Feel confident.

Become a slightly better version of themselves.

Your job isn’t to tell them everything about your company.

It’s to make one thing immediately obvious:

Why should they choose you?

If they can’t answer that question quickly, your competitors will answer it for them.

I often see leadership teams spend months refining positioning statements.

They debate words like:

“innovative”

“customer-centric”

“trusted”

“leading”

But...

More or less every competitor says exactly the same thing.

When everyone claims everything, nothing means anything.

Customers aren’t confused because there are too few messages.

They’re confused because too many brands sound interchangeable.

Choice confusion is expensive.

It rarely shows up as one dramatic event.

Instead, it quietly leaks value throughout the business.

Sales teams need longer conversations.

Marketing needs more impressions.

Price negotiations become tougher.

Discounting becomes more frequent.

Win rates slowly decline.

The organisation responds by working harder.

The real problem is that customers still don’t know why they should choose you.

The irony is that companies often react by adding even more.

More messaging.

More products.

More proof points.

More campaigns.

More options.

Psychologist Barry Schwartz famously argued that an abundance of options can make decisions harder, not easier. His work on the “Paradox of Choice” showed that more choice often increases anxiety and reduces satisfaction.

Brands do exactly the same thing to customers.

Instead of reducing uncertainty, they increase it.

The companies growing fastest are often doing the opposite.

They’re becoming simpler.

Sharper.

More opinionated.

They make choosing feel easy.

Think about a brand you love.

You know what they stand for almost immediately.

Their value isn’t necessarily simple.

Their proposition is.

This is why I believe the real competitive advantage isn’t differentiation alone.

It’s clarity.

Clarity reduces cognitive effort.

Clarity builds confidence.

Clarity increases pricing power.

Clarity shortens sales cycles.

Clarity compounds.

And, most importantly, relevance, the nr.1 driver of choice.
Relevance asks “Is this the right choice for me, given who I am, what I want, right now”?

Because in the end, customers aren’t rewarding the brand that says the most.

They’re rewarding the brand that makes the choice feel obvious.

That’s the hidden cost of choice confusion.

And it’s probably much larger than your marketing budget.

In Brief:
Thirty years of brand strategy has been optimising for the wrong thing. The goal was never to be different. It was to be chosen. To be chosen, a brand does not need to be the most different. It needs to be the most relevant. Those are not the same — and confusing them is costing more than most companies realise.

Ask any leadership team what their brand strategy is trying to achieve and some version of the same answer comes back. We need to differentiate. We need to stand out. We need to be distinctive in a crowded market.

It sounds right. It has the weight of thirty years of strategy orthodoxy behind it. Porter built a framework on it. Brand consultants have built entire practices around it. And it is, in a specific and important sense, the wrong target.

Not because differentiation doesn’t matter. It does. But differentiation is extrinsic — it is a comparative judgment. We notice what is different. We may prefer it. But noticing something is different is not the same as feeling it is for us. Differentiation operates relative to alternatives. Relevance operates relative to the self.

Relevance is intrinsic. It comes from what a person actually values — who they are, what they want, how they want it, why it matters, in what context and at what moment. It is not a verdict on how a brand compares to its competitors. It is a verdict on fit: is this the right choice for me, given everything about my situation right now? And that is not the same as utility. It’s “is this for me?”. Differentiation can help earn that verdict — particularly when alternatives are similar and distinction creates the perception of superior value. But it cannot substitute for it. A brand can be genuinely different and still fail the relevance test entirely, because the difference is not one the customer cares about.

The goal was never to be different. It was to be the answer to that question.

Difference without relevance is noise. A brand can be genuinely distinctive — memorable, differentiated, impossible to confuse with a competitor — and still lose the decision to a brand that understood its customer more deeply. Because the customer was never asking “which of these is most different?” They were asking “which of these fits best?”

Fit is a relevance question. And relevance requires something differentiation alone can never deliver.

Relevance is a relationship, not a property.

It happens when you feel like a product, service, or a brand was made just for you. It connects on multiple levels.

A brand does not have relevance the way it has a logo or a tagline. Relevance exists in the space between what the brand stands for and what the customer is reaching for — and that space is shaped by forces neither the brand nor the customer fully controls. Culture shifts. Categories recompose. New voices emerge that change how a customer sees themselves and what they aspire to become. The economy moves. A competitor reframes the conversation.

A brand that was deeply relevant five years ago can drift into irrelevance without making a single strategic mistake. Not because it changed — because the world did, and the brand didn’t move with it.

This is why becoming the most relevant choice is not a positioning exercise you do once. It is a diagnostic discipline you maintain continuously. And it requires getting three things right simultaneously.

The first is your customer — not as a demographic, but as a person in motion.

Most customer understanding stops at the surface. Segment data. Persona descriptions. Purchase behaviour. These are useful as far as they go, which is not far enough. The customer who matters most is not a profile. They are a specific person, with a specific identity they are trying to protect and project, reaching toward a version of themselves they want to become, navigating a set of anxieties they would never put on a survey form.

Understanding that person — at the level of how they actually choose, what they are really trying to achieve, what a wrong decision would cost them beyond money — is the foundation of everything. Because relevance is always relevance to someone specific. A brand cannot be relevant in the abstract. It can only be relevant to this person, in this moment, given everything else they are weighing.

The second is the forces shaping your customer’s world — and yours.

Customers do not choose in a vacuum. Their decisions are shaped by forces operating around them that most brand strategies never formally account for. The macro environment — economic conditions, regulation, structural change — sets the boundaries of what is possible and affordable. Culture determines what is desirable, what signals the right identity, what feels aspirational versus outdated. The category defines the frame within which choice begins, and that frame is always shifting. Competition determines who else is making a credible claim on the same customer.

And then there is a force that receives less attention than it deserves: the people who influence the decision. Not the customer themselves, but the social architecture around the choice — the peers whose opinion matters, the communities whose norms shape what feels acceptable, the creators and experts whose endorsement changes the calculus, the reference groups against which the customer measures whether their choice is the right one. No customer chooses alone. The forces operating on their decision extend well beyond what any traditional competitive analysis captures.

A brand that understands its customer deeply but misreads these forces will be relevant to who their customer was — not who they are becoming. The forces are what make relevance dynamic rather than static. They are why a diagnostic that was accurate twelve months ago may already be producing the wrong answers.

The third is your brand — what it actually stands for and how clearly it expresses that in the world.

This is where most brand strategy starts. It should be where it ends.

Because clarity about what your brand stands for is only valuable in relation to what the customer needs and what the forces demand. Brand strategy that begins with the brand — what do we want to say, how do we want to be perceived, what is our positioning — is answering a question before it has been asked. The question is always: given who this customer is, given the forces shaping their world, given the alternatives they are weighing — what does this brand need to be, say, and do to become the most relevant choice?

That is the question brand strategy should be designed to answer. It requires customer understanding as the starting point and force analysis as the frame. The brand’s job — its positioning, its expression, its communications, its product and service design — is to close the gap between what the forces demand and what the brand currently delivers.

That gap is the Relevance Gap™. And it is measurable.

This is what the Brand Relevance Diagnosis™ is built to surface. Not how differentiated the brand is in the abstract. Not whether the positioning statement is well-constructed. Whether the brand is the most relevant choice for the customers it most wants to win — and where, specifically, the gap between current reality and that standard is widest.

The findings are almost always uncomfortable in the same way. Not because the brand has made obvious mistakes. Because the gap between what the brand believes about its own relevance and what the customer actually receives is wider than the leadership team knew. And because that gap — invisible from the inside, clearly visible from the outside — is the precise location of all the growth the brand is not achieving.

Differentiation is part of closing it. It is not the same as closing it.

Tobias

In Brief: Most companies have a positioning strategy. Very few have a market position. The gap between the two is where growth quietly disappears.

Somewhere in your organisation there is a document that describes your positioning. It was probably developed carefully and expensively. Lots of workshops, debate, tasting of words, semantic debate, you name it.

I’ve facilitated hundreds of these workshops, and they are never easy. But eventually, you get there. The document gets written, each word crafted and tasted like vintage wine.

It captures your differentiation, your target customer, and the desired space you want to occupy in their minds. Leadership agreed on it. It lives in the brand guidelines and shows up in the sales deck. Finally!

But it means nothing unless your customers can feel it. And for them to feel it, to perceive your as the most relevant choice for them, your positioning must be translated into action, and that action must be perceived in a way that matches your intention.

Your positioning strategy might not be just fine (often it’s not). But a positioning strategy is an intention — and intention is not the same as position. A position is what the customer actually holds in their mind when they choose. It is the sum of every signal your brand sends, every experience it delivers, every price it charges, every promise it keeps or quietly breaks. You do not own your positioning. Your customers do. You just influence it — or fail to.

This distinction is costing companies far more than most leadership teams realise.

The gap between what a brand intends to stand for and what customers actually receive can be measured. In fact, we’re doing it. And when you measure it, the findings are almost always the same: companies believe they are differentiated on dimensions their customers are not perceiving. They are charging premiums the customer has not yet been given sufficient reason to accept. They are competing for choice on ground that exists in the strategy document but not in the customer’s mind.

Every point of that gap is lost choice. Lost Penetration — customers who should have chosen you but didn’t find the proposition compelling enough. Lost Price — customers who would have paid more if the value had landed. Lost Frequency — customers who tried you, found nothing distinctive enough to anchor their return, and quietly stopped coming back.

None of this appears as a single line item. It shows up as a growth rate that never quite reaches its potential, a conversion that stays frustratingly flat, a pricing structure that always seems to require a little more discounting than it should. The leak is real. The source is invisible without the right diagnostic.

Positioning Strength™ measures the distance between what a brand intends and what the market receives — across all five market forces shaping customer choice: Macro, Culture, Category, Competition, and Customer.

But the critical insight is not just the overall score. It is the gap between four specific lenses.

Strategy is what the brand has decided to stand for.
Expression is what the brand actually signals through its products, pricing, communications, and behaviour.
Perception is how customers actually read the brand in the moment of choice. Future Readiness is whether any of it will still be true as the market forces continue to shift.

Most positioning assessments only examine the first lens. They audit the strategy and ask whether it is well-constructed. The commercially relevant question is different: is the strategy making it through to what customers actually perceive?

In the majority of companies we assess, the answer is no — and the collapse happens between Expression and Perception. The brand signals something the strategy intended; the customer receives something different. A twenty-point drop between Strategy and Perception is not unusual. It is, in our experience, closer to the norm.

The most expensive version of this problem is the one that is hardest to see: a leadership team that believes the positioning is working because the strategy is sound. The internal conversation is about execution — reaching more customers, converting better, growing faster. The real conversation should be about signal — whether what the brand is actually saying is being received the way it was intended, and whether it is saying it clearly enough to make the choice feel obvious rather than effortful.

You only get chosen when you are the most relevant option available in a specific moment for a specific customer. Relevance is not claimed. It is perceived. And whether it is being perceived, and how strongly, and where the gaps are widest — that is a measurement question, not a strategic one.

Most companies have never measured it. The ones that do rarely like what they find. And almost all of them find it worth knowing.

Positioning Strength™ measures the gap between what your brand intends and what your market receives — across all five Market Forces, through four diagnostic lenses. The gap has a score. The score has a commercial cost.

In Brief:

Most value propositions are too generic. They are written to explain what the company, brand, product, or service delivers. They should be written to win customer choice. The difference between those two things is costing more than most leadership teams realise.

Value propositions exist at many levels of a business. The brand promise. The product pitch. The service offer. The pricing rationale. Each one is an attempt to answer the same underlying question: why should someone choose this over everything else available to them?

You do not get chosen because you have a value proposition, of course. You get chosen because, in that moment, you are the most relevant option available. Those are not the same thing. And most value propositions are several layers of abstraction away from the second one.

The problem is not copywriting. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of how value works.

Most companies treat value as a property of their product or service. Features deliver benefits. Benefits are valuable. Write it down clearly and the customer will understand why to choose you. This is logical. It is also how almost nobody actually decides.

Value is not a property of a product. In fact, there is no value inherent in anything you sell. Value is a subjective experience in the mind and body of a specific customer at a specific moment — entirely relative to what else is available. It’s relative to what that person is trying to achieve, what problems they want to solve, what pain to escape, and who they are trying to become. The same product can be highly valuable in one context and completely irrelevant in another, and for another person.

Which means a value proposition written and extracted from the product or service level is answering a question the customer is not asking. They are not asking what your product is. They are asking what it will do for them. They are asking: of everything available to me right now, which fits best? That requires a different kind of answer.

Here is where it gets expensive.

Most companies compete in markets where functional differences are shrinking. Same with experiences. Products converge. Features get copied. Experiences too (UX and Experience Design had a good run). Perceived value and relevance is the primary battleground. And perceived relevance is not about clarity of description — it is about fit. Does this feel like it was made for me and exactly my situation? Does it address what I actually care about, in the hierarchy I care about it?

Value propositions need to go far beyond the WHO and the WHAT. They need to include HOW, WHY, WHEN, and WHERE. Context matters.

Most value propositions fail this test. They are comprehensive when they should be specific. They speak to stated needs while missing the latent ones — the real motivation underneath the surface reason, the anxiety the purchase is quietly resolving, the identity signal the choice is sending.

The result is a proposition that nobody actively rejects and almost nobody finds compelling. It gets you into consideration without getting you chosen. In a competitive market, that is an expensive place to live.

No wonder so many value propositions are “good”, but not truly remarkable or worth sharing.

The deeper failure is not understanding how value stacks.

Customers experience value as a hierarchy. At the base is outcome value — does this deliver the outcome I want? The function, the emotion, the social status, and the transformation. Above that is experience value — is this easy, confidence-inspiring, frictionless? How is this experience more relevant?

This is where preference starts to form. And above that is “meaning value” — what does choosing this say about me? How does it connect to my deeper human needs and values?This is where premium pricing lives. And at the top, rarer but more powerful, is “identity transformation value” — does this help me become who I am trying to become?

Most value propositions compete entirely at the lower first level. They describe the ideal customer + outcome and stop. Which means they are fighting hardest on the dimension where differences are smallest — while leaving the levels where pricing power actually lives completely uncontested.

This is why we measure Proposition Fit™.

The question is not whether your value proposition is well written. It is whether it is winning decisions. Proposition Fit™ measures the six most important value drivers for your specific ICP — the factors actually operating in the decision, not the benefits you have chosen to communicate. Then it maps your current proposition against those drivers and identifies the gaps: where you are addressing something the customer does not weight heavily, where you are missing something they weight decisively, where a competitor is occupying territory you have left uncontested.

And that creates The Relevance Gap™ - the space that is costing you money.

The findings are almost always uncomfortable. Not because companies are doing something obviously wrong, but because the gaps are subtle enough to survive every internal review while remaining wide enough to materially affect commercial performance. A proposition that is ninety percent right can still lose the decision at the margin. And in competitive markets, the margin is where most of the available growth lives.

There is a version of this that shows up as a pricing problem. Margins are thin. Customers seem price-sensitive. The sales team lacks confidence. But the more likely explanation is that the value proposition is not making the case at the levels where pricing power is earned.

You cannot charge a premium for a proposition that reads like a product description. Premium pricing is a verdict — what happens when a customer believes the value they are receiving is sufficiently greater than the alternatives to justify the difference. That belief is built through relevance. Deep, specific, layered relevance to what the customer actually cares about.

Fix the proposition. The pricing follows.

To be provocative, I like to tell clients it’s never about price, it’s always about relevant value. It’s true enough to make people think.

Meeting expectations is nothing to write home about. The bar is already set high. But you need to go beyond. Which is why you are probably trying to win the choice of too many different segments and customer profiles. What is broad becomes weak.

The cost of a weak value proposition is not always visible in the obvious places. It is in the pricing power you never had. The frequency you never built. The customers who tried you once and found nothing to anchor their loyalty. The market position that feels solid until a more relevant competitor arrives.

You only get chosen when you are the most relevant option available. Not the most described. Not the most distributed. The most relevant. That is a precise standard — and meeting it requires understanding your customer at a depth most value propositions were never built to reach.

The gaps exist. They are measurable. And they are quietly costing.

Proposition Fit™ measures the distance between what your value proposition says and what your most important customers need to hear to choose you. The gap has a number. The number has a cost. To get a taste of it, email hello[at]originalminds.co

In Brief: The cultural moment is rewarding brands that look like they’ve stopped trying. Which creates a problem. Because the moment you try to stop trying, everyone can tell.

There is a memo going around marketing departments right now. It has different subject lines depending on the company, but the content is roughly the same. We need to be more authentic. More human. Less corporate. Have you seen what Duolingo is doing?

The memo is well-intentioned. It is also, in a quietly devastating way, proof that the company sending it has already missed the point.

Something real is happening in culture. A generation that has been algorithmically marketed to since adolescence has developed an almost clinical sensitivity to performed personality. They can feel the strategy session that produced the Instagram caption. They can sense the brand guidelines behind the tweet. They know, with uncomfortable precision, when a company is being spontaneous on purpose — and they find it roughly as convincing as a politician doing a shot of tequila at a campaign rally.

The brands breaking through are doing something that looks, from the outside, like they’ve simply stopped caring about any of this. Duolingo’s unhinged owl threatening users in comment sections. Scrub Daddy — a sponge, one of the least inherently interesting objects in domestic existence — commanding genuine cultural attention through content that appears to have been made by someone with absolutely nothing to lose. Liquid Death building a devoted following around canned water by being more committed to their own strangeness than any focus group could ever sanction.

These brands look like they’re winging it. They are not winging it. But here is where it gets complicated.

The paradox is this: the quality these brands are being rewarded for — the looseness, the confidence, the apparent indifference to approval — is precisely the quality that cannot be implemented as a strategy.

You cannot put “be more unpolished” on a brand roadmap. You cannot run a workshop on spontaneity. You cannot hire an agency to produce irreverence on a monthly retainer and expect it to land the way irreverence lands when it’s real. The committee that has spent three years softening every edge, qualifying every claim, and routing every piece of content through four layers of sign-off cannot simply decide to stop doing that and expect what comes out the other side to feel free.

It will feel like a committee pretending not to be a committee. Which is somehow worse than just being a committee.

This is the trap the memo sets. The senior leadership reads about Off-Script brands and concludes the answer is a tone of voice refresh, a new social media hire, a directive to “take more risks with content.” The team dutifully produces riskier content. Legal reviews the riskier content. Brand reviews the riskier content. The riskier content is made significantly less risky. It goes live. Nobody notices. The memo gets sent again six months later with a different subject line.

The output was never the problem. The output is just the symptom.

What the brands doing this well actually have is not a better content strategy. It is a more resolved sense of identity. They know, with unusual precision, who they are and who they are for. They have made the decision — consciously or by instinct — about which customers they are optimising for and which ones they are not. And that clarity, that genuine narrowness of focus, is what makes it possible to say the slightly wrong thing occasionally without it feeling like a crisis.

Duolingo is not nervous about alienating people who find their owl annoying. Those people are not their customer. Liquid Death is not worried about the consumers who find their brand too aggressive. Those consumers were never going to choose canned water with a death metal aesthetic anyway. The apparent recklessness of their communication is underwritten by a very clear decision about who they exist for — and an equally clear decision about who they don’t.

That is not a communications strategy. That is an identity strategy. The communications are just what identity looks like when it’s been resolved rather than managed.

Most brands have not resolved their identity. They have documented it — in brand guidelines, positioning statements, value proposition frameworks — without ever making the harder choices those documents are supposed to represent. The result is a brand that knows its personality adjectives but cannot act on them in real time without checking whether this particular execution is still on-brand. Which means the personality exists as a description rather than a conviction. And descriptions do not produce the kind of instinctive, confident communication that this cultural moment is rewarding.

The Culture Force™ does not care about your brand guidelines. It shifts based on what people find credible, what signals confidence, what feels like it comes from somewhere real. Right now, in a significant number of categories — particularly those carrying identity weight, where what you choose says something about who you are — that credibility is flowing toward brands that have clearly stopped seeking permission from their audience.

And here is the commercial consequence that makes this more than a Friday observation about funny social media accounts. The brands that cannot access this energy are not just losing cultural relevance. They are losing pricing power. Because the premium a brand can charge above a functional substitute is almost entirely a function of what choosing it signals — to others and to yourself. When a brand’s communications read as anxious and approval-seeking, that anxiety transfers. It undercuts the very confidence the customer is trying to buy.

You cannot charge a premium for belonging to something if the something in question is visibly uncertain about what it is.

So what do you actually do with this, if you are a brand that recognises the gap but cannot simply decide to be more unpolished and expect it to work?

The honest answer is that you go back further than the communications. Not to the tone of voice. Not to the content calendar. To the harder questions about who you actually are, who you are genuinely for, and what you believe with enough conviction that you would be willing to lose some people over it. Because that last part — the willingness to not be for everyone — is what produces the clarity that makes everything downstream feel real rather than performed.

The unpolished output is not the goal. It is the evidence that the identity work has been done.

Most brands are trying to copy the evidence without doing the work. Which is, when you think about it, the most on-brand thing they could possibly do.

We continually monitor five forces that shape customer choice. The Culture Force is about the shifts in values, attitudes, social norms, and codes that shift demand, months before it shows up in the numbers.

In Brief
Lots of brands have failed with DTC. And lots of brands have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

DTC didn’t fail. Bad DTC did.
The model was never “sell direct and run ads.”
The model — when it works — is:

Build meaning → create demand → own the relationship → scale distribution later.

The brands that understand this are compounding. The rest are quietly burning cash.

What Is Happening

The first wave of DTC was built on arbitrage.
Cheap Facebook ads. Clean Shopify sites. A slightly better product.

That worked — until it didn’t. Customer acquisition costs rose. Platforms got crowded. Products became interchangeable.

And suddenly, “direct-to-consumer” became expensive, fragile, and dependent on paid media. At the same time, something more important shifted.

Discovery moved into content and culture.

Not search. Not shelves.

Nearly half of consumers now buy directly through social platforms

Gen Z trusts creators and peers more than ads.

And most critically:

People don’t choose brands based on product differences alone.

They choose based on what feels familiar, relevant, and meaningful

Which changes the game entirely.

What Does It Mean

DTC is no longer a distribution strategy.

It’s a demand system.

The winners don’t start with:

“How do we sell this online?”

They start with:

“Why would anyone choose this — and keep choosing it?”

That shift separates two types of brands:

1. Transactional DTC Brands

• built on performance marketing

• optimized for conversion

• dependent on paid traffic

• easily replaceable

2. Choice-Led DTC Brands

• built on identity and relevance

• powered by content and community

• generate organic demand

• scale beyond channels

The second group is where the real growth lives.

What the Best Are Doing

1. They Build Identity Before Distribution

Huel (just sold for 1B).
Liquid Death.
Celsius.
Nocco.
Oatly.
Gymshark.
RevolutionRace.
On.

The list goes on.

They won because they made a clear promise about who the customer becomes.

• rebellion

• progress

• cultural awareness

• performance identity

• etc.

In Choice-Led Growth terms:

They nailed WHO + WHY, not just WHAT.

2. They Treat Content as Core Infrastructure

Most brands “do content.”
The best brands are content systems with content-led growth engines behind them. They leverage communities, consumers, and influencers (especially micro-influencers today).

Gymshark runs challenges like Gymshark66 — turning customers into participants.

Oatly publishes cultural commentary, reports, and provocative messaging — acting like a media company.

Liquid Death builds entertainment, not ads.

This matters because:
Content is what builds mental availability (a fancy term for awareness)— the likelihood of being chosen when the moment comes

Without it, you’re invisible.

3. They Create Participation, Not Just Reach

Audience is passive. Community is active.

The best brands design challenges, rituals, events, ambassador systems, reward loops, etc.

This turns customers into repeat buyers, advocates, and distribution channels

In effect:

Community becomes free media with memory.

4. They Use DTC to Learn — Not Just Sell

DTC gives something more valuable than margin.

It gives signal.

Brands like On and RevolutionRace use direct channels to:

• test demand

• refine positioning

• understand behavior

• improve products faster

That creates a compounding advantage:

Better insight → better product → stronger relevance → more choice → more growth.

5. They Expand After Demand Is Proven

Here’s where most people misunderstand DTC.

The goal is not to stay “pure DTC.”

The goal is to earn the right to scale.

• On expands into retail while growing DTC fast

• Gymshark builds flagship stores as community hubs

• Huel moves into 25,000+ stores after building a direct base

DTC is the launch system.

Not the end state.

Where Most Brands Go Wrong

They reverse the order.

They start with:

• product

• performance marketing

• distribution

And then try to “add brand” later. But growth doesn’t work that way.

Psychology → Value → Relevance → Choice → Growth

If you skip the early steps, the later ones become expensive.

Where the Upside Is

The opportunity is not in “doing DTC better.” It’s in building owned demand.

That means:

• less reliance on paid acquisition

• stronger pricing power

• higher lifetime value

• faster feedback loops

• more resilient growth

In a market where CAC keeps rising and attention keeps fragmenting, this is not a nice-to-have.

It’s survival.

What Leaders Should Do

1. Redefine DTC internally

It’s not e-commerce. It’s demand creation + relationship ownership.

2. Start with identity, not product

Who is this for?

Who do they become by choosing you?

3. Invest in content like a capability, not a channel

Consistency beats campaigns.

Meaning beats volume.

4. Design participation loops

Make customers part of the system, not just buyers.

5. Use DTC as intelligence infrastructure

Every interaction is a signal. Use it.

The Bottom Line

DTC didn’t stop working. Shortcut DTC stopped working.

The brands winning today aren’t better at ads.

They’re better at being chosen.

And they’ve built systems — content, community, identity — that make that choice feel obvious.

Here’s a brutal question I like to ask leadership teams:

Can a customer understand why they should choose you in under 10 seconds?

Not after a demo.
Not after a white paper.
Not after a 42-slide pitch deck.

Ten seconds.
Cold.

If the answer is no, you don’t have a marketing problem.
You have a clarity problem.

And clarity is the gateway drug to growth.

Confusion Is Expensive

Customers don’t sit around trying to decode you. They’re not archaeologists. They’re busy, distracted, skeptical, and swimming in alternatives that all claim to be “innovative,” “leading,” and “customer-centric.”

When they walk into your store, browse your website, check your social media, feel out your products, talk to your customer service...do they instantly get your brand?

It’s the good old “brand or bland” test.

When your proposition is vague, complex, or generic, one thing happens immediately:

They move on.

Not because you’re bad.
Because you’re not obvious.

In a choice-saturated market, the easiest option is rarely the cheapest. It’s the clearest.

The Hidden Consequences of Failing the Test

When customers can’t quickly grasp why you matter, the damage spreads quietly across the business.

Price becomes fragile because you haven’t established a compelling reason to pay more. You end up competing on cost, not value.

Sales cycles stretch because every conversation starts with basic education instead of moving toward decision. Your sales team becomes interpreters of your own company.

Marketing costs rise because you need more impressions, more touchpoints, more retargeting, more “nurture” just to get to baseline understanding. You’re paying to compensate for weak clarity.

None of this shows up on a single dashboard. But it shows up everywhere.

Why This Happens So Often

Most value propositions are written from the inside out.

They describe what the company does, how the product works, how long the firm has existed, how many awards it has won. In other words, they answer questions customers never asked.

Customers are asking something much simpler:

Why is this the best choice for me right now?

Not “Tell me your story.”
Not “Walk me through your capabilities.”
Not “Show me your org chart.”

Just: Why you?

The Market Readiness Reality Check

Before you pour money into campaigns, partnerships, or expansion, there’s a more fundamental test:

Are you even ready to be chosen?

Market readiness isn’t about having a product. It’s about having a proposition that lands instantly — one that fits a specific customer, situation, and outcome so cleanly that the choice feels obvious.

When that alignment exists, marketing accelerates growth.

When it doesn’t, marketing amplifies confusion.

Obvious Beats Impressive

Companies often try to sound sophisticated. They pile on features, jargon, and positioning statements that read like they were assembled by committee.

But customers don’t reward sophistication. They reward certainty.

They want to know:

Will this solve my problem?
Will it work for someone like me?
Will it make me look smart for choosing it?

If those answers aren’t clear quickly, doubt fills the vacuum.

And doubt kills deals.

The Real Goal

Your value proposition doesn’t need to be poetic. It doesn’t need to be clever. It doesn’t need to win awards.

It needs to be understood.

In ten seconds, a customer should be able to say:

“I get it. This is for people like me, with a problem like mine, and it will get me where I want to go.”

If they can say that, price becomes stronger, sales become easier, and marketing becomes more efficient.

If they can’t, no amount of activity will save you.

The Bottom Line

Growth doesn’t come from being visible.
It comes from being the obvious choice.

And obviousness is not a branding afterthought. It’s a strategic asset.

So here’s the uncomfortable closing question:

If a perfect prospect landed on your website right now, would they understand why they should choose you before their coffee gets cold?

If not, you don’t need more leads.

You need more clarity.

Most functional beverage brands think they’re competing on ingredients.

They’re not. They’re competing on relevance — and many are losing without noticing.

We’ve just published a new Category Brief™: Functional Beverages, looking at how customer choice is shifting across North America and Europe. Not trends. Not tactics. The mechanics of why people choose one drink over another — and why so many brands are becoming interchangeable.

A few nuggets from the Brief:

• Function is everywhere. Meaning is scarce.
  Ingredients no longer differentiate. Felt benefit and identity fit do.

• Consumers aren’t choosing categories — they’re choosing moments.
  Your real competitors may be supplements, coffee rituals, sleep aids, or doing nothing.

• Wellness has fragmented.
  Calm, focus, discipline, softness, performance — there is no single “healthy” narrative anymore.

• Premium survives only when value is emotionally justified.
  Clean labels aren’t enough. People need to feel the benefit — fast.
  
  This free Brief is a short-form intelligence snapshot — designed to help leaders see where the Relevance Gap™ is opening in the category.

For clients, we go much further.

Our Strategic Intelligence subscription includes:

• In-depth category and demand-side reports

• A specific lens on your brand, your offering, and your ideal customer profiles

• Ongoing signal monitoring across our Five Forces

• Live briefing sessions with leadership teams

• And strategic interventions when relevance, growth, or positioning is at risk

The free Brief shows how we think.
The paid work is where this thinking gets applied — continuously, contextually, and decisively. We offer both one-off diagnosis and strategic interventions, as well as an ongoing “demand radar”, complemented with monthly briefs and interventions.

👉 Read the free Category Brief here

And if you’re responsible for growth, relevance, or long-term advantage — you’ll recognize why this matters now.

Clarity beats activity.
Judgment beats more data.
Choice beats noise.

— Tobias, Original Minds

Let’s say the quiet part out loud.

Most companies have a shockingly weak understanding of their ideal customers.

Not vague. Not “room for improvement.” Weak.

And I don’t mean they lack data. They often have plenty of data.

What they lack is understanding.

I see this constantly—across operating companies, scale-ups, incumbents, even firms that pride themselves on being “customer-centric.” Ask a few basic questions and the cracks show immediately.

Who is your ideal customer, really? What is the best, most potential customer segment or segments for your brand and business? Why?

What outcome are they actually trying to achieve? What matters to them while they’re trying to achieve it? What are they trying to avoid? What frustrates them? What do they fear going wrong? Who do they want to become as a result?

Cue the silence. Or worse: generic personas, demographic fluff, and surface-level “needs” that every competitor could copy-paste.

Here’s the brutal rule of the market:

If you don’t understand your customer better than your competitors, your chances of satisfying them better are close to zero.

Most ICPs Are Defined at the Surface. That’s the Problem.

Most companies stop at who:

• company size

• industry

• job title

• age, income, geography

That’s not an ICP. That’s a mailing list.

When I ask companies about their ideal customer/consumer, I hear profiling like this. most of the time:

“Our ideal consumers are active women aged 25-45 who care about health. They like yoga and eat healthy.” That’s about it. Then they want to sell this “segment” food products, wellness services, functional beverages, subscriptions, or whatever.

This kind of understanding might work for media buyers who look for the right places to advertise, but it certainly does not uncover why these people choose.

An actual ICP lives at a deeper level.

Because people don’t choose based on who they are. They choose based on what they are trying to get done, how they want it done, and why it matters to them.

If you serve both buyers and end users (which many businesses do), the problem multiplies.

Retail buyer ≠ end consumer. Procurement ≠ daily user. Economic buyer ≠ emotional user.

Different outcomes. Different risks. Different definitions of “success.”

If you don’t understand both—and how they diverge—you’re designing products, experiences, and messaging that satisfy no one particularly well.

The Four Layers Most Companies Miss

To truly understand your ICP, you need to go beyond profiles and into choice logic.

We break it down like this:

1. WHO — The actor

Not just role or segment, but identity within context: Where they sit, what pressure they’re under, what success and failure look like in their world.

2. WHAT — The outcome

What are they really trying to achieve? Not “buy software” or “choose a supplier,” but the result they want in their life or business.

Outcomes can be:

• functional

• emotional

• social

• professional

• existential

Most are a combination.

3. HOW — The experience

This is the most neglected layer, yet the space where lots of innovation take place.

How do they want to go about achieving the outcome?

• Fast or thorough?

• Guided or autonomous?

• Low risk or high upside?

• Simple or sophisticated?

This is where pains and gains live:

• What frustrates them?

• What slows them down?

• What must not happen?

Two customers can want the same outcome—and choose entirely different brands based on how they want to get there.

For example, two brands offer the same outcome, but in totally different ways. You can fly London to New York in economy or first class. Same destination, very different experience.

4. WHY — The deeper motivation

This is where most companies stop asking questions far too early.

The why is rarely visible on the surface. You uncover it by asking “why?” repeatedly—until you hit something human:

• fear

• pride

• safety

• autonomy

• belonging

• competence

• control

This is where relevance is born. This is also where most great brands build their differentiation and stickiness, because when you deliver meaning, you matter.

Identity Transformation Is the Highest-Value Layer of All

There’s one more dimension most ICPs completely ignore:

Who does the customer aspire to become?

People don’t just buy outcomes. They buy identity progress.

• “A smarter leader” (The Economist)

• “An everyday athlete” (Nike)

• “A responsible buyer” (Patagonia)

• etc.

If you don’t understand the identity your customer is moving towards, you’re competing on features while someone else is competing on meaning.

And meaning wins.

Why This Matters More Than Ever

We’re in a choice-saturated economy.

Customers don’t lack options. They lack clarity. And clarity only comes from brands that get them—deeply, precisely, uncomfortably well.

That level of understanding feeds everything:

• strategy

• innovation

• positioning

• brand

• messaging

• sales

• pricing power

Without it, you’re guessing. With it, you’re designing choice.

Data Isn’t the Problem. Interpretation Is.

This is where many organizations get defensive.

“We have surveys.” “We have dashboards.” “We have personas.”

Good. That doesn’t mean you understand your customer.

Understanding can come from great triangulation:

• qualitative insight

• behavioral signals

• cultural context

• category dynamics

AI can help accelerate this. Customer interviews can deepen it. But tools don’t replace thinking.

Insight isn’t collected. It’s constructed.

A Simple Question for Leaders

Here’s the test I leave leaders with:

Do you understand your ICP so well that you could predict their choices better than anyone else in your category?

If not, ask yourself:

• How will you out-innovate them?

• How will you out-position them?

• How will you out-market them?

• How will you justify a premium?

You won’t.

Because in a choice-driven market, relevance isn’t a slogan. It’s earned through understanding.

And the brands that understand best don’t just compete.

They become the most relevant choice.

Tobias

Interested in developing a richer understanding of your ideal customers and using these insight to drive choice-led growth? Email us at hello[at]originalminds.co

In Brief
Netflix trying to buy Warner Bros Discovery isn’t a content play. It’s a response to a deeper problem: choice fatigue. And the next phase of streaming won’t be won by whoever owns the most IP — but by whoever becomes the default choice in an overcrowded decision environment.

SIGNAL — What’s happening?

According to The Economist, Netflix is weighing a blockbuster acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery, potentially fending off interest from Paramount Global.

On the surface, this looks like:

• a scale grab

• a content arms race

• a defensive move as subscriber growth slows

Investors are nervous because it feels like Netflix is admitting its organic growth engines are weakening.

But that interpretation misses the real signal.

INSIGHT — The real problem isn’t growth. It’s choice.

Streaming has quietly crossed a critical threshold: There are now too many “good enough” options.

When every platform has:

• premium production values

• global hits

• deep back catalogues

the consumer problem is no longer availability. It’s decision-making.

And in markets like this, choice doesn’t scale linearly with options. It collapses.

Consumers respond by:

• defaulting to one or two services

• rotating subscriptions

• cancelling aggressively

• or not choosing at all

This is classic choice compression.

From a choice perspective, Netflix’s move isn’t about owning more shows. It’s about becoming the safest, simplest, most justifiable default in a noisy category.

In other words:

“If I only keep one service, it should be Netflix.”

Owning Warner’s IP isn’t about marginal content gains. It’s about reducing the cognitive risk of choice.

Why investors are uneasy — and why they might be wrong

Investors worry that acquisitions signal weakness.

But in choice-driven markets, consolidation is often a sign of category maturity, not failure.

When growth slows, brands have three options:

1. Fight harder for attention

2. Compete on price

3. Absorb choice alternatives

Netflix choosing option three suggests a strategic insight:

Growth now comes less from adding new choosers — and more from becoming the final chooser.

This isn’t about penetration anymore. It’s about retention through inevitability.

OPPORTUNITY — What this means beyond streaming

This is not just a media story. It’s a playbook for any saturated category.

When categories overload consumers with options, the winner is the brand that:

• simplifies the decision

• feels culturally central

• reduces regret

• becomes the “no one ever got fired for choosing this” option

In choice terms, Netflix is trying to shift from:

“Best streaming service” to “The only one you really need.”

That’s not a content strategy. That’s choice dominance.

The bigger takeaway for leaders

If your growth plan assumes:

• more features

• more options

• more launches

you may be accelerating choice fatigue — not demand.

In mature markets, growth comes from absorbing choice, not multiplying it.

Netflix’s boldest bet isn’t that Warner’s content will grow subscribers. It’s that reducing the perceived need to choose will.

And that’s a lesson far bigger than streaming.

Most brands (the companies behind them) assume their biggest battles are inside the category.
They’re wrong.

The biggest threat to FMCG and wellness brands in 2026 isn’t competition. It’s Cultural Drift — the widening gap between what the world signals and what your brand expresses.

Here’s how cultural drift actually works (few leaders understand this):

Culture moves →
Consumers reinterpret meaning →
Categories reshuffle →
Competitors reframe →
Your brand stays still →
Relevance erodes silently.

No crisis.
No disaster.

Just a slow, compounding misalignment between you and the world you’re trying to matter in. A brand can be well-run and still drift. In fact, the more established the brand, the more likely it is to drift because internal momentum is often stronger than external change.

FMCG and wellness brands are especially vulnerable because:

• tastes evolve faster

• rituals shift

• identity signals matter more

• wellness culture moves weekly

• consumers upgrade their expectations continuously

The problem?
Most organizations don’t measure cultural drift.
They only feel it when innovation stalls, campaigns flatten, retailers push back, pricing power weakens,

or category adjacency disappears.

By then, you’ve already lost ground.

If you want clarity on your own cultural drift — and how to close it — I can run a Brand Relevance Score™ for your brand.
hello[at]originalminds.co

In Brief

Right now, CMO’s and marketing teams are busy creating plans or starting to execute their 2026 marketing plans. But way too few of these plans are connected to the real drivers of growth, and too few marketing people can explain how their work will hit the growth number. In 2026, that gap is where brands quietly lose.

What’s happening?

I’ve had the same conversation too many times.

A CMO walks me through the plan: brand refresh, positioning work, agency brief, campaign rollout, content calendar, a shiny new platform idea, maybe a social play that “will drive engagement.” They are awfully busy briefing agencies, driving campaigns, sticking to their plans.

All solid. All familiar. Nothing wrong about this, accept:

Then I ask one question:

“How does this get you to your growth target?” “Do you know why your audience chooses you?” “Do you know why they don’t?”

And the room goes… silent.

Not because they don’t care — but because in many organizations, marketing has become a high-output project machine. The work gets done. The decks get approved. The agencies get fed. The campaign launches. Companies loose sight of the big picture.

But the link between marketing investment and growth is often a foggy hope, not a disciplined system.

What does it mean?

Growth is not a marketing activity problem.

It’s a choice problem.

All growth problems are choice problems. Why? Because choice is the only path to revenue growth, and there are only three ways growth happens in the real world:

1. More people choose you (penetration)

2. People choose you more often (frequency)

3. People choose you at a higher price (pricing power)

That’s it. Everything else is a supporting act.

Brand strategy matters — but it only matters if it increases one of those three forms of choice. Positioning matters — but only if it changes who chooses you, why they choose you, or what they’ll pay. Campaigns matter — but only if they shift behavior, not just awareness.

All marketing effort should be connected to the three ways to grow (above), otherwise they are disconnected from growth.

A lot of marketing is “good work” that doesn’t move choice.

It looks like progress. It feels like progress. It often wins awards for progress. But it doesn’t produce growth because it isn’t built on a clear theory of why humans choose — and what specifically must change for them to choose you.

That missing link is the void.

And the void is expensive.

CMOs are often managing a factory of activity while being asked to deliver an outcome of psychology.

That’s not a skills gap. It’s an operating gap.

Where should you focus?

If you’re a CMO in 2026, the job evolves from “marketing leader” to something sharper:

1) Become Chief Choice Officer

Not in title. In practice.

Every major initiative should answer:

• Which choice lever are we moving? (penetration / frequency / price)

• Which audience segment’s choice are we changing?

• What is the psychological barrier today?

• What must be true in their mind for them to choose us?

If an initiative can’t answer those questions, it’s not strategy. It’s motion.

2) Replace the “Marketing Plan” with a Choice Plan

A marketing plan lists activities.

A choice plan links activities to outcomes.

Your plan should read like a chain of causality, not a list of deliverables.

Example:

• We are losing new buyers because the category sees us as “a good choice, not the most relevant choice”

• We’re only chosen during weekends, what new formats and occasions do we need to invest in to drive frequency during weekdays?

• So we will sharpen a single, defensible value proposition with new offerings and marketing campaigns centered around certain occasions and moments.

• Then we will reduce trial friction (availability, onboarding, sampling, guarantees).

• Then we will deploy comms that create reassurance and identity fit.

• Result: more people choose us this quarter.

That sounds more like a growth plan linked to growth.

3) Stop worshipping “brand work” as the answer

Brand matters more than ever — but the role of brand is not decoration.

Brand is a value perception system.

If your brand work doesn’t change how value is perceived (and therefore chosen), it’s not brand strategy. It’s brand therapy.

What should you consider doing?

Here’s a practical tool you can introduce in the article. It’s simple. It’s brutal. It’s useful.

The Choice Ledger (run every initiative through this)

For every major marketing investment, write a one-page “Choice Ledger”:

1. Primary choice lever: penetration / frequency / price

2. Target chooser: who specifically must change behavior?

3. Current barrier: what stops them choosing today?

4. Desired belief: what must they believe for choice to change?

5. Mechanism: how will this initiative create that belief?

6. Proof: what will make it credible (product, service, people, environment, comms)?

7. Leading indicator: what signal tells us choice is moving before revenue shows up?

If you can’t fill this in, pause the project. Not because it’s bad work — but because it’s unlinked work.

What “choice-linked marketing” looks like in real life

• Product: sharper value promise, fewer confusing variants, better “first experience,” stronger proof points

• Service: remove friction, simplify onboarding, reduce risk, make switching easy

• People: train frontline and sales to deliver the same promise (consistency is underrated)

• Environments: retail, digital, packaging — eliminate doubt and amplify the “why us”

• Comms: not louder; clearer. Not more content; better meaning.

The blank stare test (use this as the punch)

If you’re a CMO, try this in your next leadership meeting:

“If we don’t understand how choice happens, and if we don’t invest in it, how do you suppose we will grow the business?”

When brands don’t grow, they drift. They leak. We call it The Relevance Gap™ (because relevance is the key driver of chocie).

This is the gap we obsess over at Original Minds.

Not “how to do better campaigns.” Not “how to write nicer positioning.” But how to close the distance between:

• what makes humans choose and

• what brands actually deliver and communicate

Because relevance isn’t something you claim. It’s something customers grant — in a specific moment, in a specific context, against specific alternatives.

And when that alignment drifts, growth doesn’t collapse overnight.

It erodes.

Quietly.

Then suddenly.

If you’re a CMO or commercial leader and you want a clean read on where your brand is being chosen vs quietly losing choice, DM “Score” and we’ll help you understand where you’re Relevance Gap™ lies, and how to close it.

Brand-building is an infinite game.

Advantage is hard to come by. At least the sustainable kind.

First you work hard to be able to provide clean products, only to find yourself in the same game with most of your competitors. What was first an advantage turns into a hygiene factor, and ticket to entry in the category.

In Brief

“Clean” is everywhere. But in today’s world, clean labels don’t create preference anymore.

SIGNAL — What’s happening?

“No sugar”, “no additives”, “no preservatives”.

It’s the gold standard now.

Walk down any aisle and you’ll find it plastered on nearly every product. Clean, pure, free from anything “bad”.

What was once a differentiator is now the bare minimum.

Consumers expect it.

But here’s the catch: expectation isn’t desire.

Clean labels have become so ubiquitous that they no longer mean anything.

They’re just… safe.

INSIGHT — Why this matters

Consumers don’t buy absence — they buy meaning.

The truth is, clean labels aren’t enough to capture attention. In a market flooded with “better-for-you” claims, brands need to stand for something that cuts deeper than just “no bad stuff”.

Consumers want a brand that reflects who they are, not just what they consume.

The brands that thrive today are those that can tie their products to a larger cultural relevance, values they believe in, and stories that resonate with people on a personal level. That’s what creates loyalty. Not just avoiding sugar or preservatives.

THE DRIFT — Where clean labels miss the mark

Clean is no longer revolutionary — it’s just standard.

So, what’s the mistake brands are making?

They stop at clean.

They use “no artificial anything” as a shield, not realizing that this is the baseline now, not a badge of honor.

It’s a trap many brands fall into: competing on what’s “not in the product” rather than what’s meaningfully in it.

You’re left with a label that says “we’re good”, but doesn’t say anything about the purpose of the brand.

STRATEGIC SHIFT — The commitment to meaning

Winning brands are the ones who go deeper than clean. They’re not just telling you what they’ve removed — they’re showing you what they stand for.

This takes a real commitment. It means brands need to:

• Have authentic values and communicate them clearly.

• Align their purpose with consumers’ aspirations.

• Create emotional resonance, not just functional promises.

This is the real magic. The ones who do this earn preference.

When you show up with a message that resonates with your audience — something that truly matters to them — you create true differentiation.

Meaning is what makes consumers stick. It’s what makes a product more than just a commodity.

EXECUTION — What this looks like in practice

In the age of clean labels, boldness wins.

1. Product: Function is important, but positioning your product as an experience tied to a broader mission is what drives choice.

2. Packaging: Shift from “free from…” to “for…”. What’s the promise behind it? How does it serve the consumer’s lifestyle?

3. Messaging: Move away from just “clean” to authentic purpose-driven messaging. Be the brand that shows up with meaning, not just absence.

4. Culture & Content: Brands that live their values — through storytelling, culture-building, and consistency — earn more than clean labels. They build emotional connection.
   

THE BOTTOM LINE

Clean labels will get your product to the shelf.

Meaning will get it chosen.

Brands need to go beyond “no bad stuff” and show consumers what good looks like in a way that resonates with who they are.

That’s the future. Not just clean. But meaningfully clean.

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Original Minds® is focuses on helping companies grow by becoming the most relevant choice. We look at the factors affecting choice and relevance and provide intelligence and strategy to accelerate growth.

In Brief

Functional FMCG is drifting into commodity science. What once differentiated brands now barely gets them noticed.

SIGNAL — What’s happening?

Protein is everywhere. Gut health is everywhere.

“No sugar”, “added vitamins”, “immune support”, “energy”, “focus”, “hydration” — everywhere.

Walk down any grocery aisle and you’ll see the same functional promises repeated with minor variations. Different fonts. Same claims. Same logic.

What used to be innovation has become hygiene.

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I remember running innovation projects ten years ago for FMCG brands across multiple categories when “functional” was the future. It caught on.

INSIGHT — What it really means

Function used to win choice.

Now it only earns entry.

The category has mistaken utility for relevance.

Consumers assume functionality. They don’t reward it.

They don’t choose brands because they work.

They choose brands because they mean something.

When every product promises better digestion, more protein, or cleaner energy, the decision moves elsewhere — to identity, emotion, aesthetics, and worldview.

This is where many FMCG brands get uncomfortable.

Because science feels safe.

Identity feels risky.

So they double down on ingredients, charts, and claims — and quietly slide into sameness.

THE DRIFT — Where brands are going wrong

Most functional brands are still asking the wrong question:

“How do we prove this works?”

The modern consumer is asking something else entirely:

“What does choosing this say about me? What does it make me?”

Functional brands that fail to answer that question don’t become disliked.

They become interchangeable.

And interchangeable brands don’t win preference.

They compete on price, promotions, and shelf position — until margins evaporate.

STRATEGIC SHIFT — Where the winners are moving

The brands pulling ahead aren’t abandoning function.

They’re reframing it.

They understand that:

• Function is table stakes

• Meaning is the differentiator

• Identity is the accelerator

Winning brands translate function into identity outcomes, not technical benefits.

EXECUTION — What this looks like in practice

Product

Function stays — but is framed as a means, not the hero.

Packaging

Less clinical. More cultural. Visual cues signal who the product is for, not just what it contains.

Messaging

From claims → convictions. From features → worldview.

Culture & Content

Participation in identity spaces, not just nutritional conversations.

Experience

The brand feels like an ally in a lifestyle — not a supplement label with opinions.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Function gets you on shelf.

Meaning gets you chosen.

The future of FMCG isn’t won by brands with the best science.

It’s won by brands that translate science into self-image.

Brands that keep selling ingredients will fight for attention.

Brands that sell identity will earn preference.

That’s the difference between growth and drift.

Want to know if your brand is competing on relevance or just function?

Tobias

DM/Message “Score” and I’ll run your free Relevance Score™ – you’ll get valuable insights about what is shifting, and how it’s affecting your category and brand.

Around this time of the year, companies around the world perform the same ritual: They gather in meeting rooms, open a fresh slide deck, and announce, “Let’s build our 2026 plan.”

“What is our GTM plan? Commercial Growth Strategy? Marketing Strategy?”

Whatever you call it, it all comes down to “how do we grow in 2026?”.

And yet — here’s the uncomfortable truth: Most 2026 plans are not plans. They’re presentations of ambition, not engines of growth.

Why? Because they aren’t connected to numbers that explain where growth actually comes from. The logic is missing. The mechanism is missing. The math is missing.

THE BLIND SPOT: MOST PLANS ARE NOT CONNECTED TO CHOICE

The most worrying thing about 2026 planning season is this: Teams are crafting brand strategies, marketing strategies, innovation roadmaps, and commercial growth plans without grounding them in the only thing that creates growth:

Customer choice.

The lifeblood of every business.

You grow only when more people choose you, or the same people choose you more often, or when they pay more when they choose you.

Everything else — campaigns, line extensions, channel plays, product launches — is theatre unless it moves one of these levers.

THE ONLY THREE WAYS TO GROW

Every business, every category, every market, every model ultimately comes down to three numbers:

1. Penetration — How many people choose you.

More buyers, more households, more trial. This is the growth engine for 90% of brands, yet it’s the least explicitly modeled.

2. Frequency — How often they choose you.

Your existing customers already know you and already buy you. Often the biggest, fastest win in FMCG and retail is increasing the number of occasions you exist in.

A 20–30% increase in frequency can transform a brand — without a single new product. But you only see that when you break your numbers down.

3. Pricing Power — How much they pay when they choose you.

Premiumisation isn’t a slogan. It’s the commercial reward for building meaning, relevance, distinctiveness, and trust.

If your 2026 plan talks about “brand building” without connecting it to pricing power, you’re not doing strategy — you’re doing poetry.

THE MOMENTS YOU AREN’T IN ARE THE GROWTH YOU DON’T HAVE

If you’re an FMCG or D2C brand, for example, frequency is usually the biggest blind spot. Ask yourself:

• How many times per week, month, or season should people be buying?

• How many times do they actually buy?

• Where are the missing occasions?

• What moments are you invisible in?

• What rituals haven’t you created?

If you are bought 3 times a month, and you can become a 4-times-a-month brand, you don’t need a new market — you need to enter the moments that matter.

Growth hides in the calendar: mornings, commutes, workouts, late nights, celebrations, recoveries, holidays, winters, summers.

Strategy is about owning more of these moments.

THE 2026 REALITY CHECK

Too many 2026 plans are built around launches, campaigns, or expansion — not around the mechanics of how money will actually be made.

Here’s the rule: If your plan doesn’t start with penetration, frequency, and pricing power, it’s not a growth plan. It’s a wishlist.

And wishlists don’t survive in competitive markets.

THE SHIFT LEADERS MUST MAKE

1. Start with the numbers, not the narrative.

Before you talk about “brand love” or “modernisation” or “awareness,” ask: Where, precisely, will revenue grow? From whom? In which lever? In which market? In which moment?

2. Tie every strategic choice to one of the three growth levers.

If it doesn’t move penetration, frequency, or pricing power, cut it, shrink it, or ignore it.

3. Recognise that growth = choice.

This is the through-line of your entire 2026 strategy. Your job isn’t to get seen — it’s to get chosen.

THE BOTTOM LINE

If your 2026 plan isn’t built on the math of choice, you’re not preparing for growth — you’re preparing to be disappointed.

Growth isn’t mysterious. It’s mechanical. It’s measurable. It’s predictable.

More people choose you. People choose you more often. People choose to pay more when they choose you.

Everything else is noise.

If you want to anchor your 2026 plan to the hard commercial truth of how growth actually happens, DM “2026” and I’ll show you where your biggest relevance — and revenue — gaps are hiding.

🚀 And, if you want, we can help you create a GTMP plan, Growth Strategy, Marketing Strategy, (or whatever name you prefer) that drives growth through CHOICE.

Are you ready to look at how culture and values are changing for 2026 and beyond?

Here’s the pattern:

From wealth → wellbeing → wisdom → autonomy.
What brands must signal to feel modern and desirable.

In Brief

Aspiration has quietly rewritten itself.
Money no longer signals status in the same way as before.
Wellness is table stakes.
Wisdom is rising.
And autonomy — the ability to live on your own terms — is becoming the ultimate flex.

The brands that win in 2026 will be the ones that understand this new hierarchy of desire — and signal the identity consumers are now chasing.

SIGNAL — What’s happening?

Across categories, consumers are abandoning traditional status cues:

• Flashy consumption feels insecure.

• Performative wellness has peaked.

• “Hustle culture” is losing social capital.

• Optimization has replaced indulgence.

• People want privacy, competence, and control — not noise, hype, or drama.

The new cultural aspiration is sovereignty — owning your time, energy, and identity.

Autonomy is emerging as the highest form of status:

• Financial autonomy

• Wellness autonomy

• Location autonomy

• Emotional autonomy

• Professional autonomy

The shift is simple:
People now aspire to become less dependent on systems, institutions, and noise — and more self-directed.

INSIGHT — What it means

The modern consumer no longer buys a product.
They buy a promise of who they can become.

Yesterday’s aspiration was wealth — signal power.
Then came wellbeing — signal balance.
Now the cutting edge is wisdom and autonomy — signal independence, direction, and self-mastery.

This shift is happening because:

• People trust institutions less than ever.
  They trust outcomes, proof, and self-guided systems.

• Everyone is overwhelmed.
  Simplicity, clarity, and competence have become luxury goods.

• Identity is the new economy.
  People choose brands that confirm their worldview and reflect the “future self” they are building.

• Freedom is the new aspiration.
  Not freedom as rebellion — freedom as control, capability, and sovereignty.

The new status symbol isn’t a Rolex.
It’s optionality.

STRATEGIC SHIFTS — What brands must signal

To feel modern and desirable in 2026, brands must shift from “look at us” to “this is who you become with us.”

1. Signal Capability, Not Consumption

Avoid flashiness; elevate competence.
Make your customer more capable — physically, mentally, financially, creatively.

2. Signal Calm, Not Chaos

Clarity and focus are premium.
Design, language, and experience should give people cognitive space.

3. Signal Proof, Not Promises

Consumers want receipts.
Outcomes, evidence, progress dashboards, meaningful testimonials.

4. Signal Identity, Not Utility

Tell them who they are becoming with your brand.
Identity is the new conversion engine.

5. Signal Autonomy, Not Attachment

Build products and systems that give people control, flexibility, and sovereignty.
Anything that reduces dependence becomes magnetic.

If you’re a modern leader, your brand cannot signal yesterday’s aspiration.
Your customer has evolved.
Their desires have matured.
Their status cues have shifted toward:

less noise, more meaning
less display, more depth
less dependence, more autonomy.

Your job is not to keep up.
It’s to help them move forward.

Final Words

The next decade belongs to the brands that understand what consumers truly want: not more products — but more power over their own lives.

If your brand doesn’t signal that, it risks drifting into irrelevance, no matter how strong your product is.

Tobias

Want to know if your brand signals the right aspiration for 2026?
Reply with “Score” and I’ll run your Brand Relevance Score™.

or...want the full picture to inform your relevance and growth in 2026?
The Brand Relevance Playbook™ combines a broad range of signals (macro, culture, category, competition, consumer/customer, brand) with sense-making and insights, strategic direction, and a broad range of execution examples and ideas. DM for more.

Each brand reviewed will get a Relevance Verdict, similar to our Relevance Score. So, we’ll see how this goes...I am sure I’ll trigger some people...hopefully not too much. But true to my nature, I’ll be straight and share my honest view as a brand strategist, informed by all the signals, trends, and insights provided by our Brand Intelligence System at Original Minds®.

Here is the first verdict, and I’ll start with a brand we all know: BOSS

BOSS sits in a dangerous middle lane of global fashion — premium pricing without luxury status, mass distribution without mass love. Once a symbol of sleek German precision, it now competes in a hyper-fragmented market where identity, culture, and meaning drive choice.

Its category stakes are high: men’s fashion is undergoing a generational shift toward personal style, cultural codes, and values-led brands. BOSS remains a household name — but names alone don’t buy relevance anymore.

Signals

1. Identity-first fashion: Consumers (especially Gen Z–Millennials) buy brands that mirror who they are or who they want to become — not just what fits.

2. Cultural diffusion: Streetwear, luxury, nostalgia, and creator-led brands are rewriting the style codes BOSS once owned.

3. The Brand Barbell: The market squeezes the middle — cheap or luxury wins. Mid-tier fashion brands must deliver meaning or die.

How They’re Showing Up

BOSS is leaning heavily into celebrity marketing and high-polish campaigns. Visually clean, expensive-looking, often athletic-infused. But the brand lives mostly in traditional advertising spaces, not cultural ones. The work signals aspiration but not identity. It feels controlled, safe, and slightly generic — a premium fashion brand trying to play modern but still anchored in a 2010s aesthetic of “sharp suits, perfect people, controlled confidence.”

Verdict: Relevant or Redundant?

Relevant — but sliding toward Redundant.

BOSS still has equity, reach, and recognition. But it’s operating at a cultural delay. The brand is visible, but not vital. Present, but not participating. It’s in the danger zone where middle-tier brands lose cultural permission quickly if they don’t evolve.

The Relevance Gap™

The gap sits between cultural codes and brand expression. Culture has shifted to personality, story, craft, subculture, and lived authenticity — but BOSS still communicates perfection, control, and sanitized aspiration. Consumers want identity-driven brands; BOSS delivers image-driven branding. The result: it lacks emotional resonance with younger audiences, lacks cultural authority, and lacks distinct meaning in a world where “looking good” is no longer enough.

How to Close the Gap

1. Inject cultural specificity — tap subcultures, creators, and lived narrative—not celebrities and gloss.

2. Move from ‘perfect aesthetic’ to ‘personal identity’ — help people see themselves, not an unattainable ideal.

3. Develop distinctive codes — modern German precision reinvented for today: functional beauty, quiet confidence, utility-meets-style.

4. Redesign the brand’s emotional role — from “look sharp” to “show who you are.”

5. Shift from campaigns to cultural participation — creators, micro-scenes, product storytelling, craftsmanship, transparency.

The Bottom Line

BOSS can still lead — but only if it stops acting like a premium legacy brand trying to stay relevant, and starts behaving like a cultural contributor with a point of view. Modern leaders know: relevance is not inherited; it’s earned in real time.

Feel free to share your thoughts.

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Want to know how relevant (or redundant) your brand is?
DM or reply “Score” and we’ll run your Brand Relevance Score™.

I’ve run a good amount of Brand Relevance Scores for FMCG brands this last month.

Here’s the uncomfortable pattern: the categories aren’t stale — the brands are.

Most FMCG brands aren’t losing relevance because of competition.

They’re losing relevance because culture moved and they didn’t notice.

Here are some problems that keep showing up in the data (these issues don’t apply to all brands I measured, obviously, but the pattern is clear:

Most Brands are 5-10 years behind culture in brand expression.
Still pushing the same safe visuals, the same tired claims, the same category clichés.

It’s like watching someone show up to a 2025 party dressed for 2014.

Zero identity play.
The consumer shifted from “Does this taste good?” to “Does this say something about me?”

Most brands missed it. People want meaning and belonging, not just taste. And brands need it to connect on a deeper level.

The content? Painfully safe.
Product shots. More product shots.
Stock-feeling “lifestyle.”
Awkward influencer bits without cultural context.
This is participation cosplay. Not culture.

The speed problem.
Culture moves in weeks.
These brands move in quarters.
Relevance doesn’t wait.

What this means:
FMCG brands don’t have a marketing problem.
They have a meaning problem — and a decision-speed problem.
Inside, many of these brands are playing the game like it’s 2020.

If you want to know where your brand is drifting — and how deep the drift is — run a Relevance Score™.

It’s shocking how quickly the picture becomes clear.

Reply if you want one - it’s free for brand leaders, CMO’s and CEO’s.

Tobias

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P.S If you are an agency or consultant - I’m looking for partners for Original Minds Intelligence™, and I’ll be happy to discuss.