There’s someone missing from a lot of conversations between brand leaders, agencies and consultants.

You know who.

The customer.

Ideas get tossed around. Strategies take shape. Assumptions become conclusions. Personal preferences develop impressive strategic justifications.

Meanwhile, the person whose choice pays for all of this hasn’t said a word.

Then we build the positioning, the campaign, the packaging and occasionally the entire growth plan.

That’s an expensive way to find out we were wrong.

I know the pattern. I’ve been a strategist for twenty years, and I’ve participated in plenty of these conversations myself.

Quantitative research has its place. But I’ve also worked through enough 80-page decks to know that more charts don’t necessarily mean more understanding.

Some of the most useful insights I’ve found came from interviews and observation. Hearing someone explain their last purchase. Finding out what they considered, what bothered them, and what finally tipped the decision.

The interesting bit usually comes after the first answer.

But getting those conversations organised, conducted and interpreted takes time and money. Which is often why they never happen.

We built Talk™ by Original Minds to make them easier to bring into the work.

Talk holds individual conversations with real customers, by voice or text, with multiple interviews running at once. An AI interviewer asks the questions and follows up on their answers.

Then we do the interpretation: what we heard, what it means for the brand, and what to consider next.

AI interviewing already exists. Our focus is on connecting those conversations to the brand, its market and the decision someone actually needs to make. This is what the Original Minds Intelligence system is built for - continuous reading, interpretation, diagnosis, and recommendations.

You could use Talk to explore why customers choose a competitor. Understand what people make of a new product idea. Or find out whether the promise everyone loved in the meeting means anything outside the meeting.

For agencies, strategists and designers, it brings customer evidence into the brief while there’s still time to change it.

For brand and business leaders, it helps investigate a question before committing to a bigger decision.

You can start with one question. No need to commission a small library.

Take a look at Talk™

I’ll send you an invitation soon to try a short conversation yourself. Afterwards, I’ll share what we learn and how we interpret it.

Meanwhile, hit reply:

What’s one question about your customers—or a client’s customers—you wish you could answer properly?

Tobias

In Brief:
Most brand promises and value propositions are designed around functional outcomes and category-level claims. This framework I created 15+ years ago was designed to uncover deeper levels of value, helping you craft highly relevant, differentiating propositions and brands.

Want to become chosen by more customers, more time?

Having helped craft closer to 1000 propositions for clients, I see the following issues over and over:

👉 most propositions focus mostly on functional outcomes
👉 most propositions are mere category promises, meaning they fail to provide relevance and differentiation, leading to lost choice

You get chosen only when customers see you as their most relevant choice.
And to become the most relevant choice, you have to start by understanding how specific customers judge value.

The good news is, there are many levels of value, and you are likely not leveraging them all.

In the video below, I explain how we build "demand models" for clients, and how we use a tool called Proposition Fit™ to diagnose and craft highly relevant propositions.

If you'd like to diagnose your brand promise or value proposition(s), I'll show you how to stop choice (=revenue) from leaking, and how to get chosen more.

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Proposition Fit™ - a model that measures how well what your offer vs. what they want.

You don’t get chosen for being different. You get chosen for being the most relevant option available to a specific person in a specific moment. Difference is comparative — it asks how you stack up. Relevance is intrinsic — it asks whether this is for me, given who I am and what I want.

A brand can be genuinely distinctive and still lose the decision, because the difference wasn’t one the customer cared about. And relevance is a match: what they want on one side, what you promise on the other. The closer those sit, the more obvious the choice feels.

When they drift apart, nothing dramatic happens. You stay in consideration. You get evaluated. You lose at the margin to someone whose promise fitted better. Nobody tells you — there’s no exit interview on a four-second decision. It surfaces months later as flat conversion, as campaigns that cost more for the same result, as a discount nobody planned to offer.

So where do propositions actually fall short?

Almost always in the same place. They answer one level of what the customer wants and leave three untouched.

Because customers don’t want one thing. They want four, and they’re weighing all of them at once.

What they want is the outcome — the job to be done. This is where nearly every proposition lives. It’s also where you and your competitors look most alike, because if you couldn’t do the job you wouldn’t be in the consideration set at all.

How they want it is the experience — what they’re trying to maximise and minimise on the way to that outcome. Netflix and Blockbuster offered the same what: a film tonight. Netflix won on how. Same job, completely different experience of getting there.

Why they want it is the meaning — the values and beliefs and higher-order outcomes sitting behind the job. This is where a proposition stops describing and starts mattering.

Who they want to be is the identity — who the customer is being when they choose, and who they’re moving toward. A great many purchases are identity decisions wearing functional clothing.

All four are present in every category. What changes is how much each one carries. In some decisions the outcome dominates. In others, particularly where the purchase is visible or carries real identity weight, meaning and identity decide more of it than any functional claim.

Which means the first strategic error is assuming you know which levels are doing the work in your category. Most companies don’t. They know which levels they’re good at, and the proposition was built around those.

This is what Proposition Fit™ measures.

On one side, what the segment wants at each of the four levels — built from evidence, and crucially, built before the brand is examined at all, so the model isn’t shaped by what anyone would like the answer to be.

On the other, what the proposition actually promises at those same four levels. Not what gets delivered — that’s a separate instrument. What is claimed, in words, in visuals, in price, in what the brand chooses to show.

Fit is how well the two match, level by level.

And the shape of the result is the finding, more than any single number. Strong on outcome, thin on meaning is the most common pattern we see. It means the brand is competing hardest where the differences between it and everyone else are smallest, while leaving the ground where preference and pricing power are built completely open.

That’s not a messaging problem. It’s a proposition that was never designed to answer three of the four questions.

A closing thought on why this is worth measuring rather than debating.

Most propositions are evaluated by the people who wrote them, against criteria they also chose. That process can produce something well-argued and still leave it answering a question customers aren’t asking. The only way out is to establish what the customer actually wants first, independently, and then read the promise against it.

Proposition Fit™ runs as one of four instruments inside the Relevance Diagnosis™ — a thirty-day read on why your ideal customers choose you, why they don’t, and what to close first.

If you’d like to see what yours looks like, that’s where to start: originalminds.co/diagnosis

In late 2008, started my first company, a brand consultancy.
That was six weeks after Lehman collapsed. I know, brilliant timing.

Here are ten things I’ve learned about brand-led growth through both obsessive reading and practical application since then:

1. Differentiation isn’t the game. Relevance is.
Being different gets you noticed. Being relevant gets you chosen.

2. If people don’t know why to choose you, they won’t.
A mediocre proposition is expensive to amplify. Most companies still can’t answer “why us?” in one sentence. An LLM won’t fix that for them.

3. Opinions start debates. Evidence ends them.
Experience doesn’t win the argument in the boardroom. Everyone has biases, and worldviews collide. Evidence cuts through.

4. Reach scales choice. It doesn’t create it.
Marketing is obsessed with reach and awareness, a bigger lake to fish in. Fixing the bait is job one. Otherwise you just get more fish swimming past you with a smirk.

5. Customers know before your dashboard does.
Most trackers and KPIs are lagging indicators. Leading indicators measure why people choose you, or don’t.

6. Compete on what your product does, and you’ll end up competing on price. There are many levels of value. Functional outcomes are just one of them, and represents mostly red ocean territory.

7. A growth target is not a strategy.
Don’t even get me started. Strategy is about the specific choices you makeabout how you’ll win with specific customers. Wanting to sell the most widgets in your category is not strategy.

8. Relevance leaks in the gap between what you build and what you promise.
Product says one thing, marketing another, and the customer hears neither. That’s where money quietly walks out.

9. Nobody chooses rationally. Plan accordingly.
Psycho-logically, yes. Rationally, no. Over a decade ago I watched dentists drool over the “Rolls-Royce of dental imaging equipment.”

9b. Never underestimate the power of “mine is bigger than yours.” Relates to the last point, maybe should have made it a separate point.

10. Strategy is deciding what you refuse to be.
You can’t be the most relevant choice while fishing the whole lake. Find the best customers and become their indisputable choice.

What are your best lessons learned?

P.S After all those years running a brand consultancy, and loving both the strategic and the creative (I always felt I have my feet planted in both camps - to me they are one anyway), I’ve since geeked out completely on building intelligence and diagnosis tools. Not because its sexy (it’s not), but because they help bring the much-needed evidence, proof, and rigor to the board room.

If you want help building your case, finding the gaps and the direction for your brand (as CMO, CEO, agency owner, or independent consultant), our system provides them. Never in my wildest imagination as a strategist would I have dreamt of having the tools available that we now have. They are good for reading the market, however, I believe human judgement is still 100% needed. That’s why we let the machines do the heavy lifting, and experienced analysts and strategists do the judgement.

hello[at]originalminds.co

If you run an agency, consultancy, or work as an independent strategist, this one is specifically for you.

About a year ago, I started pivoting Original Minds toward something I believe there is a clear need for: an independent intelligence system designed to understand why brands are chosen, why not, and what to do about it.

Since then, we’ve spent more than 4,000 hours on methodology development, coding, iteration and running intelligence for clients.

The system continuously reads markets, customers and brands to identify where relevance is being won and lost. The machine does the heavy lifting; our strategists and analysts do the diagnosis and judgment.

Over the past eight months, we’ve used it with multiple clients. My focus has primarily been CMOs and CEOs of €20m–€300m brands.

But I’ve realised there’s another group that can get a lot of value from it:

People like you who advise those clients.

So I’m opening the Original Minds Partnership Programme to a handful of agencies, consultancies and independent strategists.

What’s in it for you?

We provide the independent intelligence. You use it to win more work, solve the right problems, make stronger recommendations, prove your impact and find the next opportunity with your clients.

You get ongoing intelligence, diagnosis and recommendations on how your clients can become more relevant — and get chosen more.

You keep the client and the work. We don’t sell strategy or execution around you. And when you introduce business to Original Minds, you share in the revenue.

This isn’t something you pay for. It’s designed to help you make more money — and become the partner your clients rely on most.

I’ve put the whole thing together here:

→ See the Original Minds Partnership Programme

If it sounds interesting, leave your details on the page. I’ll get in touch and we’ll jump on a call.

I’m deliberately starting with a small group.

Tobias

p.s. you can also reply to this email if you are interested

In Brief: Nobody is average. And a brand built for the average customer is built for someone who does not exist — which is why it struggles to be the most relevant choice for anyone.

The average person has one testicle.

The line is crude but it makes the point faster than any statistic. Average the population and you get a person with one testicle, one ovary, and slightly under two legs. The average is real as arithmetic. It corresponds to nobody.

There is a more serious version of this, and it cost the US Air Force a great deal before anyone noticed.

In the late 1940s, American fighter pilots were crashing at an alarming rate with no mechanical explanation. The cockpits had been designed in the 1920s around the average dimensions of the pilots of the day, and the assumption was that pilots had simply got bigger. So the Air Force commissioned new measurements — thousands of pilots, ten physical dimensions each, to recalculate the average and redesign around it.

A young researcher named Gilbert Daniels asked a different question. Not what the new average was, but how many pilots actually matched it. He took the middle 30% range on each of the ten dimensions and counted how many pilots fell inside it on all ten.

Zero. Out of more than four thousand.

Not a single pilot was average. The cockpit had been designed with precision for a man who did not exist, and every real pilot was fighting it.

Most brands are still building that cockpit.

The average customer in your category wants moderate quality at a moderate price with moderate convenience. Build for them and you produce something that fits nobody particularly well. Which leads to “meh” brands. Unremarkable. Boring.

It is not that the proposition is wrong. It is that it has been optimised for a statistical artifact rather than for a person — and people are who make the choice.

This is how brands end up acceptable to many and compelling to none. The positioning is broad enough to include everyone, which means it speaks to no one in particular. The proposition covers the full range of use cases, which means it excels at none of them. The identity is carefully calibrated not to exclude, which means it attracts nobody strongly enough to defend it.

Strategy, after all, is about making specific choices that lead to specific people choosing specific choices.

Every one of those decisions was made to expand the addressable market. Collectively they produce a brand nobody has a strong reason to choose.

There is a legitimate counter-argument, and it deserves stating properly before dismissing it.

Some brands genuinely should speak broadly. Coca-Cola is not trying to be the most relevant choice for a specific segment — it is trying to be available to everyone, everywhere, all the time. In categories with low involvement, low differentiation, and enormous scale, penetration logic dominates and broad appeal is the correct strategy.

But that strategy has a prerequisite most companies quietly ignore: you have to already be the leader, with the distribution and the media weight to sustain it. Broad appeal is what market leadership looks like from the outside. It is not the route to getting there.

If you are a €20–200M brand competing against someone larger, broad appeal is not a strategy. It is the absence of one — and it puts you in a fight you are structurally certain to lose, because the incumbent can outspend you on every dimension where you have chosen not to be specific.

The only viable path is to be more relevant to someone than the leader is, and accept being less relevant to everyone else. That is not a compromise. It is the mechanism. And that means making choices.

Who will think you are the most relevant choice for them?
The answer is never “everyone”.

Which raises the harder question: relevant to whom?

Most companies answer this badly, because most segmentation is descriptive rather than causal. And making choices about who NOT to serve can feel painful. Age brackets, income bands, urban professionals, health-conscious consumers, mid-market B2B. These describe people. They do not explain choice. Two thirty-five-year-old urban professionals with identical incomes can want fundamentally different things from your category, judge value on different criteria, and choose completely differently. Grouping them together tells you nothing you can design against.

The method we use is Choice-Based Segmentation, and it starts from a different definition. A segment is not a group of similar people. It is a recurring pattern in how people choose.

Specifically: a segment exists where a shared desired outcome produces a repeatable choice pattern, held together by a recognisable identity pattern. The outcome clusters it. The choice pattern proves it. The identity makes it nameable and designable-for.

The test is unforgiving, and it should be. If you cannot say how this group chooses differently from the next one, you have not found a segment. You have found a description, or perhaps, a population.

That distinction disqualifies most of what passes for segmentation. A shared want is not a segment — plenty of people want the same thing and choose entirely differently. A shared circumstance is not a segment either; circumstance is usually the cause of an unmet outcome, discovered afterwards, not the basis for the cluster. And a segment that demands the same strategic answer as the one next to it is not a segment at all. It is decoration. It merges.

Demographics still have a role. They describe a segment, size it, and tell you where to find it. They may never define its choice logic. That is the inversion most segmentation work gets backwards.

Done properly, this produces two to five segments for a category, not twelve — and each one demands a genuinely different answer across positioning, identity, proposition and execution.

Then comes the commercial question, which is separate and should be kept separate: which of these are actually worth building toward? Attractiveness is a function of the value pool, the degree of unmet need, your ability to win, and your ability to reach them. A segment can be fascinating and commercially irrelevant. Another can be unglamorous and be the whole business.

The question worth taking into your next strategy session is not how to reach more people. It is this: which segments are most profitable for this brand specifically, and what would it look like to design the offering, the proposition and the brand around what those people actually want — rather than around the average of everyone we could theoretically serve?

That question tends to be uncomfortable, because the honest answer usually means giving something up. Narrowing the proposition. Accepting that some customers are not yours. Building something that some part of the market will actively reject.

Every one of those feels like a risk in the room. All of them are the price of being chosen rather than considered.

Finding “where to play” is half of strategy. The other half is knowing whether you are currently winning there — and most companies discover, when they finally measure it, that their brand was built for a customer who never existed.

The Relevance Diagnosis™ maps the segments in your market, defines who your brand is most built to win, and reads your positioning, identity, proposition and execution against what those customers actually choose on. Thirty days. Every gap named, evidenced, and priced. originalminds.co/diagnosis

Attention grabbing. Different. Chosen?

In Brief:

In competitive markets, differentiation has become the default answer to a question it does not actually solve. The goal was never to be different. It was to be the most relevant choice — and that requires knowing, precisely, what your customers value and whether your proposition delivers it.

Walk into any strategy session in a crowded category and the conversation lands in the same place. “We need to differentiate”. “We look too similar to the competition”. “We need a clearer point of difference”. “What are we saying that is different?”

The questions are common. And poorly framed.

Because the problem is not that these brands are insufficiently different. It is that they are insufficiently relevant — to someone specific, on the dimensions that person actually uses to decide. Difference is comparative; it asks how you stack up against alternatives. Relevance is intrinsic; it asks whether this is for me, given who I am, what I want, how I want it, and why it matters.

A brand can be genuinely distinctive and still lose the decision, because the difference was not one the customer cared about. And a brand can be barely different at all and win consistently, because on the handful of dimensions that actually drive the choice, it is the best available answer.

Being chosen requires three things. Focus on customers specific enough to be understood. Understanding of how those customers judge value — better than your competitors understand it. And a proposition designed to signal and deliver that value across every dimension on which the decision is made.

Most companies do the first partially, the second superficially, and the third by accident.

Start with the second, because it is where the leverage sits.

Value is not a property of a product. It is a judgment made by a specific person weighing a specific decision, and that judgment is far more layered than most propositions account for. Customers are not running a feature comparison. They are assembling an answer to four questions simultaneously — usually without articulating any of them.

WHO — identity. Is this for someone like me? Does choosing it fit, or contradict, how I see myself and how I want to be seen? This dimension is almost never addressed explicitly and frequently decides the outcome.

WHAT — outcome. Does this deliver what I need it to deliver? The functional core. Necessary, rarely sufficient, and the dimension on which competitive differences are smallest.

HOW — experience. Is this easy, confident, low-friction? Does the way I get it and use it feel right? This is where preference forms and where most brands quietly lose customers they had already won.

WHY — meaning. Does this matter beyond its function? Does it connect to something I care about, stand for something, mean something? This is where premium pricing lives, and it is the dimension most propositions leave completely uncontested.

Together these form the 4D Value Stack — not a hierarchy of importance, but four distinct registers on which a proposition either lands or doesn’t. Their relative weight shifts by category, by segment, and by choice occasion. In some decisions WHAT dominates. In others, particularly where the purchase carries identity weight, WHO and WHY carry more of the outcome than any functional claim.

Which means the first strategic error most brands make is assuming they know which dimensions are doing the work in their category. Usually they don’t. They know which dimensions they are good at, and they have built the proposition around those.

The tool I developed for this is what I call The Proposition Fit™, and it measures the distance between the two sides. I used this for 15+ years, but now with a little help from the machines, and a lot of help from smart strategists, it can be better standardized and measured. Which is what we do.

On one side, what the customer actually demands on each of the four dimensions — modelled brand-blind, weighted by importance, and frozen before the brand is examined at all. On the other, what the proposition actually signals and delivers. The gap between them, dimension by dimension, is the reading.

Each dimension resolves into one of four bands. Strong — the proposition meets or exceeds what the customer requires. Holding — adequate, but with no margin. Contested — a competitor is making a better claim on ground you need. Exposed — the customer weights this dimension heavily and your proposition has effectively nothing there.

The composite number matters less than the shape. A proposition scoring Strong on outcome, Contested on identity, and Exposed on meaning is telling you something precise: you are competing hard on the dimension where the differences are smallest, while leaving the dimensions where preference and pricing power are actually built completely open.

That shape is the most common one we find. It is also the most expensive.

The practical consequence of all of this is a different kind of proposition work.

Not finding a cleverer articulation of what you already do. But asking, against evidence rather than instinct: what do our highest-potential customers actually weight, in what proportion, and where does our proposition currently fail to meet it? Then designing against the answer — narrowing where narrowing earns relevance, building meaning where meaning is absent, fixing the experience that is quietly vetoing the choice before your positioning ever gets read.

This is different than a differentiation exercise and it produces something more durable. Because a proposition built to be different is competing on a claim. A proposition built to be relevant is competing on fit — and fit is much harder to copy, because it is specific to a customer your competitor has probably not bothered to understand as precisely.

You do not get chosen for being different. You get chosen for being the best available answer to a question the customer is asking in that moment.

Most brands have never established what the question is.

Proposition Fit™ is one of four instruments in the Relevance Diagnosis™ — a 30-day read on why your ideal customers choose you, why they don’t, and what to close first. Every gap named, evidenced, and carried to its commercial consequence. originalminds.co/diagnosis

In Brief:
No company decides to become irrelevant. They arrive there through a long series of reasonable, defensible, individually harmless choices — each one costing a little bit of choice, none of them visible on their own. Yet, all visible without explanation, 12 months later in the P&L.

Nobody ever sat in a boardroom and decided to make their brand less relevant.

That is what makes the Relevance Gap so difficult to see. It is not created by bad decisions. It is created by safe ones, by compromises — dozens of them, spread across years, each perfectly defensible in the room where it was made.

You know them. The positioning that was sharpened until it stopped offending anyone. The last-minute addition by the board (clueless to the much of the work done). The proposition broadened to cover a second segment, then a third. The campaign that tested well because it tested inoffensively.

The price held rather than raised, because raising it felt risky. The identity refresh that modernised the logo and left the meaning untouched. The product roadmap that prioritised parity features over the one thing nobody else was doing.

(As I am writing this, I am fresh out of a meeting with a client where I witnessed this force at play).

Every one of those was the reasonable call. Collectively they produce a brand that nobody has any strong reason to choose.

This is the shape of the problem. Relevance is not lost in a single failure. It leaks, decision by decision, through the accumulated preference for the option that carries the least risk.

And the leak is invisible because each individual choice is too small to measure. You cannot attribute a revenue shortfall to a slightly softer proposition statement. You cannot trace lost pricing power to a campaign that was fine. The cost is real and it compounds, but it never appears as a line item. It appears as a growth rate that never quite reaches its potential, a conversion rate that stays frustratingly flat, and a strange sense that the company is working harder than the results suggest it should have to.

Meanwhile the customer’s side keeps moving. What they value shifts, pushed by the alternatives they now see, by what a competitor just made standard, by what culture has decided is desirable this year. Their expectations advance. Your brand, for entirely rational reasons, holds position.

The distance between those two things is the Relevance Gap™. It is not a metaphor. It is a measurable distance between what your ideal customers now choose on and what your brand currently offers them. And every point of it is choice you are not winning.

Here is the part that should be more uncomfortable than it usually is.

Ambivalence transfers.

A brand that was ambivalent in the making produces ambivalence in the choosing. When a leadership team cannot decide who they are for, the customer cannot decide whether it is for them. When a proposition has been widened to avoid excluding anyone, no one experiences it as built for them specifically. When a positioning has been softened until it is safe, it lands as a brand with nothing much at stake — which is exactly how it will be chosen, or more accurately, tolerated.

Customers are remarkably good at detecting conviction. Not through what a brand claims, but through the coherence of everything it does. A brand that has made hard choices feels different from one that has avoided them, even when the customer could not articulate why. It reads as clarity. And clarity, in a category where most options are broadly similar, is one of the few things that reliably tips a decision.

The absence of it does not read as neutral. It reads as a reason to keep looking.

Almost no brand reaches the position that actually matters commercially: being seen as the most relevant choice by the customers it is most built to win.

Not a good option. Not a shortlisted option. The most relevant one — the choice that feels obvious rather than effortful, that requires no persuasion, that a customer would defend to a colleague without being asked.

That position is where all the good economics live. The pricing power that does not need discounting to defend. The retention that does not need a loyalty programme to sustain. The word of mouth that no media budget can manufacture. The conversion rate that makes the sales team look brilliant and is actually the proposition doing the work.

Most companies are competing several rungs below it, in the space where they are considered, evaluated, and frequently passed over in favour of something that fits better. That gap between considered and chosen is where nearly all the available growth in a market sits. And it is bridged by relevance - not by more activity, more reach, or more spend.

What makes this genuinely difficult is that closing the gap requires the opposite of what feels safe.

To become the most relevant choice for someone specific, you have to accept being less relevant to everyone else. And boy, is this hard. You have to make the proposition sharper, which means narrower. You have to take a position that some part of the market will reject. You have to price with enough conviction that the price itself becomes a signal. You have to decide, explicitly, who you are not for.

Every one of those decisions feels like a risk in the room. Each of them is, in fact, the only route to the position where growth compounds.

The safe alternative does not remove risk. It relocates it — from a visible decision that could be wrong to an invisible drift that is quietly costing every quarter, and that nobody will be asked to account for because nobody can see it.

The Relevance Gap™ can be measured. That is the point of measuring it: to convert an invisible, diffuse, uncomfortable-to-discuss problem into something specific enough to act on.

The Relevance Diagnosis™ names the gaps. It models how your highest-potential customers actually decide — built brand-blind and frozen before your brand is examined at all — and then reads your positioning, identity, proposition, and execution against their criteria rather than yours. Every gap that comes back is named, attributed to a lever you can pull, evidenced, and carried through to what it is costing you in choice.

Thirty days. Half a day of your attention. What you get is not an opinion about your brand. It is a map of where choice is leaking, and what to close first.

Most leadership teams discover that the gaps are not where they assumed. Almost all of them discover that the total is larger than they expected — because the cost of ambivalence has been accumulating quietly for years, in a hundred decisions that each seemed reasonable at the time.

The Relevance Diagnosis™ exposes the gaps between what your ideal customers now choose on and what your brand currently offers. Every gap named, evidenced, and priced. originalminds.co/diagnosis

In Brief

Every few years a company with no heritage, no advertising history, and no place in anyone’s brand tracker takes serious market share from businesses that have spent decades and fortunes building their names. The industry response is always the same: confusion, then rationalisation, then a think piece about whether brand still matters. It does. That is not the interesting question.

The Wrong Diagnosis

BYD had 1% brand recognition in Britain in 2023. By mid-2026 it had registered over 44,000 cars. Oatly built a category on the back of a font and a provocation. Airbnb took lodging market share from hotel groups that had spent a century accumulating trust. In each case, the established players looked at what happened and asked: how did they build their brand so fast?

That is the wrong question. It assumes brand is what won.

The confusion is understandable. Brand is the vocabulary the industry has. When something wins in the market, the instinct is to explain it in brand terms — awareness, equity, distinctiveness, trust. And those things are real. They do matter. The problem is that they are downstream of something more fundamental that rarely gets named clearly.

Relevance.

Not brand relevance — the marketing department version, which usually means “does the advertising feel right for us.” Genuine commercial relevance: is this the most fitting choice for this specific person, in this specific context, against these specific alternatives, right now.

That is what wins. Brand is one of the inputs. It is not the mechanism.

What the New Entrant Actually Did

The Jaecoo buyer did not make a brand-light decision. They made a differently weighted relevance decision.

A segment of the car-buying market had already restructured what they were optimising for. Not badge. Not heritage. Not the reassurance that comes from thirty years of advertising. They were optimising for: does this do what I need, is it demonstrably good, and does the value equation make sense? Against those criteria — and against a European competitive set that had spent decades competing on identity signals while letting product and value drift — a well-made Chinese EV at a compelling price point is not a surprising choice. It is the obvious one.

The mistake is reading that as evidence that brand doesn’t matter. It is evidence that for a meaningful and growing segment, the brand dimensions that matter most are product integrity and value delivery. Functional outcome. Experience quality. Not social status, not identity enhancement or transformation. We’re not all buying into that side of “brand value”. Although I must confess I personally tend to. But not all do. And that’s great for business.

It is relevance architecture. Different customer, different weights, different winner.

The European incumbents are not losing because they have weaker brands in any absolute sense. They are losing because their brands are optimised for a choice architecture that a growing portion of the market has quietly abandoned.

The Differentiation Trap

Here is where the industry debate gets genuinely unhelpful.

You might have heard it. Byron Sharp vs. Mark Ritson. Or whatever is the right way to frame it.

One person/school says: build distinctive assets, maximise mental availability, don’t worry about differentiation — most buyers don’t care, they just need to think of you first. Another school says: find your defensible position, own a territory, be meaningfully different. Both are describing real phenomena. Neither is asking the prior question. Neither is asking the most relevant question, that of relevance.

Different from what, for whom, on what dimension, and does that difference map to something the ICP actually uses to make their decision?

Distinctiveness without relevance is memorability without consequence. You are recalled and not chosen. Differentiation without relevance is positioning without purchase. You have a territory and no customers in it.

The new entrant that wins without an apparent brand is almost always highly relevant to a specific ICP that the established players had stopped paying close attention to. They did not win despite having no brand. They won because they had precisely the right value proposition for a customer whose choice architecture the market had misread.

BYD did not sneak past inattentive incumbents. It addressed a customer who wanted an EV, wanted demonstrable quality, and was not prepared to pay a £15,000 premium for a badge. That customer existed in volume. Nobody was talking to them well.

The Question Worth Asking

When a new entrant takes share without an obvious brand advantage, the useful question is not “how did they build trust so fast.” It is: which customers did they understand better than everyone else, and what were those customers actually choosing between?

The answer is almost never “they had better marketing.” It is almost always “they had better relevance to a specific customer the market had underserved or misread.”

Brand matters enormously in that story — as the signal of relevance, as the carrier of trust, as the reason a customer tells someone else. But it is not the source of the win. Relevance is the source. Brand is the residue that relevance leaves behind.

Companies that build brand first and hope relevance follows are doing it backwards. The ones that engineer relevance precisely — for a specific customer, at a specific moment, against a specific competitive set — find that brand accrues almost as a byproduct.

That is the lesson the new entrants are teaching. Not that brand is dead. That relevance is the engine and brand is the exhaust.

In Brief

For much of the past decade, wellness has been sold as a project of continuous self-improvement: sleep better, train harder, eat cleaner, track more, optimise everything.

You’ll know this from all the fitness and sleep trackers, promises about more vitality, higher performance, the ability to do more, and be more.

A different need is becoming visible.

Today, as I sat with a leadership team, helping them align their brand with this mega-trend, we had this exact conversation.

Consumers increasingly want help managing the everyday fluctuations of modern life: more stable energy in the afternoon, better sleep at night, less stress, improved gut health, greater focus or simply the ability to unwind.

The wellness shift is moving from “help me optimize and perform better” to “help me feel better about myself”. The wellness trend is moving toward holistic wellbeing.

The shift might sound subtle but its commercially important. Wellness is moving from optimising the self toward regulating the day.

The evidence is still emerging. But if the direction holds, the opportunity for brands is less about promising transformation and more about providing useful, repeatable support.

What Is Happening

The wellness market is still growing. McKinsey estimates global consumer wellness at around $2 trillion and found in its 2025 survey of more than 9,000 consumers across the US, UK, Germany and China that younger generations increasingly see wellness as a daily, personalised practice. Sleep and health rank particularly highly, while mental health, cognitive health and mindfulness remain areas of unmet need.

Look at where product innovation is occurring and the pattern becomes clearer.

Functional food and beverages are increasingly organised around specific need states: energy, gut health, hydration, sleep, focus, relaxation and stress. Around half of consumers surveyed by McKinsey in the US, UK and Germany had purchased functional-nutrition products in the previous year, rising to roughly two-thirds among Gen Z and millennials.

In UK research, 62% of shoppers expressed interest in functional drinks supporting sleep health, while stress and anxiety support, gut health and caffeine-free energy also attracted substantial interest. And functional drinks is growing at a rate of around 11.2% (CAGS), vs. ca -2% for traditional soft drinks.

The language of wellness is becoming increasingly temporal: morning focus, afternoon energy, post-exercise recovery, evening relaxation, better sleep.

These are not grand transformations.

They are small attempts to regulate how we feel throughout the day.

What It Means

This may signal an interesting correction to the optimisation culture wellness helped create.

The promise of optimisation is inherently demanding. There is always another metric to improve, habit to master, supplement to take or routine to perfect.

For some consumers, wellness itself can begin to feel like work.

Regulation offers a different proposition.

Instead of becoming a better version of yourself, the promise becomes much more immediate:

Help me feel better equipped for the life I’m already living.

That creates different opportunities for brands.

A beverage isn’t necessarily competing in “functional nutrition.” It might be competing for the 3 p.m. slump.

A hotel isn’t selling wellness. It might help someone recover after three days of travel.

A food brand might support sustained energy rather than promise an abstract healthier lifestyle.

The unit of competition shifts from the wellness category to the human moment.

The Original Minds Perspective

There is a temptation to call every new functional ingredient a wellness trend.

The more interesting development may be the need underneath them.

People don’t wake up wanting adaptogens, electrolytes or magnesium. They want energy without a crash. They want to concentrate. They want their stomach to feel better. They want to switch off. They want to sleep. To want to feel good, simply put.

That distinction matters.

The next generation of successful wellness propositions may therefore be smaller, more credible and considerably more useful.

Less: optimise your life.

More: make today work better.

That can also create stronger commercial behaviour. Specific daily need states naturally produce occasions, and occasions can become habits. A product associated with winding down every evening has a clearer route to frequency than a brand promising vaguely to improve “wellbeing.”

What to Consider

For leaders in food, beverage, beauty, hospitality and wellness technology, the strategic question is:

Does our wellness proposition add another task to people’s lives—or make their lives feel more manageable?

Look at the moments customers are actually trying to regulate: waking up, focusing, recovering, managing hunger, decompressing, socialising and sleeping.

Then ask whether your proposition can credibly become useful in one of them.

Wellness spent a decade telling us to become better versions of ourselves.

There may be a very large market in simply helping us feel a little better by Tuesday afternoon.

Tobias

p.s. our intelligence platform tracks market forces and consumer sentiments every day across specific client categories, then pits their brand, strategy, and goals against the changing forces. This reveals their Relevance Gap™, the drift that occurs silently, which can be measured in lost customer choice (= lost money). If you’d like to set up Brand Relevance Tracking for your brand, or collaborate with us, reach out to hello[at]originalminds.co

There is a question that comes up surprisingly often in strategy discussions. This came up today in a board meeting I attended.

“How big is the market for this segment? Is it big enough”.

It’s a perfectly sensible question. Investors ask it. Boards ask it. Management teams ask it. I guess we all do.

It’s rational, of course.

“If we’re going to focus on this customer, this segment or this particular part of the market, how many people are actually there? Are there enough of them? Aren’t we limiting our growth?”.

The underlying instinct is understandable: if you want to catch more fish, find a bigger lake.

But I’ve started wondering whether we reach for that answer too quickly.

Because in many of the businesses I work with, there are already plenty of fish in the lake.

They’re just not taking the bait.

And those are two very different growth problems.

If your company needs to grow 10% next year, you probably don’t need 10% more people to exist in your market. You don’t necessarily need another customer segment, another geography or another category either.

You may simply need to get chosen more often by the people who are already there.

That changes the strategic question.

Instead of asking:

How do we find a bigger market?

We should perhaps first ask:

Why aren’t enough people choosing us in the market we already have?

That is a much less comfortable question.

Because market size is external. Preference is personal.

The first lets us talk about demographics, TAMs and expansion opportunities. The second forces us to look at our own proposition, positioning, product, experience and brand.

Are we relevant enough to the people we want to choose us?
Do people understand why they should choose us?
Does our proposition create enough value?
What other choices are they considering? Why?
Are we genuinely more relevant than the alternatives?

Or are we simply standing beside a very large lake holding mediocre bait?

Unfortunately, this is true for nine out of ten brands.
Ok, I made up the stat, but I believe it’s more or less accurate.

Bigger Isn’t Always Better

One reason leadership teams resist narrowing their focus is that choosing a customer can feel like rejecting everyone else.

If we say this is the customer we’re designing the brand around, what about everybody else?

Won’t we lose them?

Possibly. It depends. But more often than not, not that likely.

But that misses something fundamental about how brands become strong.

The objective isn’t necessarily to prevent everyone else from buying. It’s to become exceptionally relevant to someone. And that takes focus. It takes understanding those people better and deeper than anyone else, and designing for them, not for everyone. The most relevant choice is rarely the most compromised choice.

A restaurant designed around the specific needs and aspirations of health-conscious, urban, Gen-Z women will likely attract other genders, older and younger. A B2B software company built around the problems of a very specific commercial leader can still attract adjacent buyers. And they probably will. Especially if the true motivations are understood, and if the positioning, identity, and proposition align.

Focus defines who you need to win with, not necessarily who you are allowed to sell to.

The alternative is often a proposition designed to offend nobody and excite nobody.

The lake is enormous.

The bait tastes like cardboard.

Growth Comes From Choice, And Markets Are Made Up Of Choices.

This is why I increasingly think market-sizing discussions should be paired with something else:

Choice sizing.

How many relevant buying occasions already exist within the market?

How often are we currently considered?

How often are we chosen?

What would happen economically if our share of those choices increased slightly?

Sometimes the answer is surprising.

A company may discover that it doesn’t need a dramatically larger addressable market to achieve its growth ambitions. It needs a relatively small increase in penetration, frequency or willingness to pay among customers and occasions already within reach.

That’s fundamentally a relevance problem.

And relevance problems shouldn’t automatically be solved with expansion.

They should first be solved by becoming more relevant.

Fix the Bait Before Changing Lakes

There are absolutely situations where the lake really is too small.

Markets mature. Demographics change. Categories decline. Companies outgrow geographies. New technologies destroy old demand.

At some point, growth genuinely requires finding another lake.

But expansion shouldn’t become an escape from fixing weak preference.

Because if customers aren’t choosing you strongly enough in one market, taking the same proposition into a larger market doesn’t necessarily solve anything.

You’ve just found more fish to ignore you.

So perhaps the order matters.

Before asking where else we could compete, ask whether we’ve earned the right to expand.

Before adding another segment, ask whether we’re sufficiently relevant to the segment we’ve already chosen.

Before calculating how many fish are in the next lake, take a harder look at the bait.

There may already be more than enough fish.

The real question is why they’re choosing someone else.

Tobias

In Brief

GLP-1 medications such as Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro are doing more than helping people lose weight. They are changing the economics of food consumption.

As appetite declines, consumers are becoming more selective about what they eat. Calories are no longer an abundant resource to fill—they are becoming a limited budget to invest wisely.

This is beginning to reshape demand across food, beverage and restaurants, shifting value away from volume and towards nutritional quality, protein and products that feel genuinely worth consuming.

For many categories, this could become one of the most significant changes in consumer behaviour in decades.

What Is Happening

The rapid adoption of GLP-1 medications is already influencing purchasing behaviour, particularly in the United States, where usage has grown quickly. Research from PwC found that households with a GLP-1 user buy fewer sugary snacks, confectionery and alcohol, while increasing purchases of protein-rich foods, fresh produce and nutrient-dense products.

The impact extends beyond grocery baskets. Restaurant visits, portion sizes and eating occasions are also changing as consumers seek meals that provide greater nutritional value rather than simply satisfying hunger.

While Europe remains at an earlier stage of adoption, awareness is rising rapidly. As access improves over the coming years, similar shifts are likely to emerge across many European markets, although the pace and scale will vary by country.

What It Means

The most important implication is not that people are eating less. It is that they are becoming more intentional about what deserves to be eaten.

For decades, growth in many food categories has relied on larger portions, more frequent snacking and encouraging consumers to eat more. GLP-1 challenges that assumption.

When appetite becomes constrained, every bite competes harder for a place on the plate.

Products that deliver protein, satiety, nutrition or a genuinely enjoyable experience become more valuable. Those that depend primarily on habit or impulse may face increasing pressure.

This is not simply a health trend. It represents a shift in how consumers evaluate value itself.

The Original Minds Perspective

Many companies are asking whether they need a “GLP-1-friendly” product.

That is the wrong question.

GLP-1 is not creating a new customer segment. It is creating a new demand architecture.

The winners will not be those who add another label or reformulate one product. They will rethink the role their brands play when consumers become more selective, portions become smaller and nutritional usefulness matters more than sheer quantity.

Growth will increasingly come from helping consumers choose better—not consume more.

What to Consider

Leadership teams should revisit some fundamental assumptions:

• Which parts of our growth strategy still depend on increasing consumption?

• Which products become more valuable when every calorie must justify itself?

• Are our portion sizes, menus and pack formats aligned with more intentional eating?

• Where should we innovate to deliver greater nutritional value rather than greater volume?

Original Minds Conclusion

GLP-1 is often described as a pharmaceutical breakthrough.

It may prove to be an equally important commercial one.

Because when consumers become more selective, competition shifts from selling more food to creating food that is more worthy of being chosen.

The brands that understand this earliest won’t simply adapt to a new health trend.

They’ll be designing for a new era of customer choice.

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This brief is provided by Original Minds Intelligence - our proprietary intelligence platform that scans the world for data, signals, and trends, and interprets them specifically for categories and brands, based on their specific strategy. This content is the free version of our platform.

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.