The Best Strategy Question You Never Heard Before.
This is the revealing question that you probably never asked about your brand or business.
There is a great strategic question I like to ask my brand and business clients, a provoking, revealing question that you probably did not hear before.
In fact, it’s my second go-to question after “Why Should They Choose You” - my favorite brand strategy question.
It’s uncomfortable. It forces you to confront the elephant in the room. Or many of them. And it will expose the weaknesses, the gaps, and, most crucially, the truth about where your brand stands.
It forces you to ask yourself whether your focus is on the right customers and consumers, and how relevant your brand really is.
And best of all, it exposes you to your big potential, because it can be measured.
The question is deceptively simple:
Why does not everyone in your category choose our brand?
Eh...what?
No, really.
Taste it. Think about it.
Now you have to ask yourself:
What is our category, really?
What business are we really in?
Who are our ideal customers (consumers) and how do we matter to them?
Are we a bit too broadly defined?
This question exposes what I call The Relevance Gap™. More on this below.
It’s the distance between:
👉 What the world now expects
👉 What culture now values
👉 What customers now desire
👉 What the market now rewards
👉 And what your brand currently delivers
This gap is real, measurable, and it’s the reason brands lose. And the longer you ignore it, the more likely you are to drift and fade from relevance.
So, here’s the uncomfortable truth: If your brand isn’t being chosen, it’s because you’re not as relevant as you think.
Relevance is not binary, it’s a continuum. You can be “kind of relevant”, or “the only choice for me”.
Customer choice is binary, people either choose your brand, or they don’t.
The next question is, how often do they choose you?
To maximise your revenue, you want to be chosen by:
More people
More times
At higher prices
These are the only three factors you can leverage to to grow any business, by the way.
Irrelevance Is The Killer
The real issue behind this question isn’t a lack of awareness. It’s the fact that your brand, as it stands, is out of sync with the world. Maybe you’re still selling the same thing you sold 5 years ago — when customer needs, culture, and expectations have all shifted.
It’s easy to blame the market, competition, or, even the economy. But here’s the thing: You don’t lose because the world changes. You lose because you fail to change with it.
The Relevance Gap™ is the space between where you are and where your customers, culture, and market have moved. The more misaligned you are with any of those, the more you lose choice.
The Relevance Gap™ Can Be Measured
Let’s get a bit more technical. The Relevance Gap™ measures the disconnect between your brand’s offering and what’s happening in the world. It’s a bit like a GPS: if you don’t know where you are in relation to where the world is, you’ll keep driving in the wrong direction. Here’s the formula again:
Relevance Gap = (Total Category Choice Potential - Brand’s Current Choice Capture)
The key here? It’s choice. Your customers’ choice. The world is more fragmented than ever. Choices are abundant. If your brand isn’t the first (or second) choice, then you’re just a “maybe” in a sea of alternatives.
Let’s your category consists of roughly 1M potential buyers. And let’s say they spend $100 per year on widgets like yours. The category is currently worth 100M.
What is your share of it? Let’s assume 10%, or 10M.
Your Relevance Gap™ is 90M.
Let that sink in. It’s not about competing against rivals in the traditional sense. It’s about your brand’s actual share of the category’s total potential — how much of the market is willing to choose you. If you’re not capturing enough of that potential, your relevance gap is wide.
I know, next you’ll tell me this is theory, and that no one can capture 100% of a category. But that’s not the point I am making. Instead, I am asking you to think about a) where your focus needs to be (strategy), and b) how you can become significantly more relevant to your most potential customers (consumers).
The Relevance Gap™ tells you roughly how much you are paying for not having a more focused strategy and a more relevant brand.
Why This Matters
Because relevance drives everything: customer acquisition, retention, price premiums, and repeat business. The problem is, most brands still think in terms of reach, frequency, and differentiation—when what really matters is being for someone, right now.
Sure, differentiation matters, but it’s secondary to relevance. Differentiation is what makes you stand out when someone is already considering you. Relevance is what gets you into the conversation in the first place. If you’re not relevant, you’re not even in the race.
Here’s the simple equation: Relevance = Customer Choice.
That means if people aren’t choosing you, it’s because they don’t see you as relevant to their needs right now.
How We Help You Stay Relevant at Original Minds®
Relevance isn’t a branding theory, it’s a business metric. We’ve built a proprietary system to quantify and close your Relevance Gap™ — because, let’s be honest, guessing isn’t a strategy.
Relevance isn’t a one-time project either. It’s a living, breathing system.
We start through an audit and a full-blown Intelligence Report + Strategic Recommendation + Actionable Brand Playbook.
The Brand Relevance Playbook™ delivers a holistic, actionable framework with actionable with insights, strategy recommendations, and actions (50-100 pages) for realigning the brand to become the most relevant choice in its category, driving customer acquisition, retention, and loyalty. It makes your static brand book look like a pea gun.
We keep you tuned in with the Brand Intelligence Suite:
The Brand Intelligence Platform — Always-on, real-time access to curated signals and insights to keep your brand in the know.
The Brand Pulse™ — A periodic briefing that turns new market signals into immediate action for your brand.
The Brand Intelligence Briefing™ — A quarterly update that recalibrates your strategy, ensuring you stay relevant as the world shifts.
Together, they form a living intelligence loop that tracks change, senses meaning, and keeps your brand the most relevant choice on the market.
The Bottom Line
Relevance isn’t just a buzzword — it’s the metric that determines if your brand wins. Close the Relevance Gap™ and you’ll see bigger customer choice, higher pricing power, and more loyalty.
You don’t need to shout louder — you just need to fit better.
Because in a world that’s always changing, the most relevant brand always wins.
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p.s. are you a consultant who would love to plug in brand intelligence into your work? Partner with us and use what we built. You’ll be able to get an advantage over competition, provide deeper insights, strategy, and creative, and you’ll make money from every transaction. For more, reply or email us here.