Differentiation Is the Wrong Target
The brand strategy conversation has been asking the wrong question for thirty years.
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