In Brief:
Growth happens at a level of specificity that most strategies never reach — in the precise moments where a specific person, with a specific intention, in a specific context decides. To grow, you must understand which Choice Spaces to battle for, and how to win in them.
Most companies work hard on their positioning than on anything else in their commercial strategy. And rightly so. They get the brand right. They craft the value proposition. They define the target customer, who they are, what they value. And then they go to market wondering why growth remains harder than it should be — why conversion is lower, why pricing power is softer, why customers who should choose them keep choosing someone else.
The positioning is fine. The top-level brand promise too. That's not the problem.
The problem is that positioning and brand promise operates at an altitude where the actual decision never happens. As important as they are, of course.
Solving the questions of "Why Should They Choose Us" is absolutely critical - because customer choice is everything. Without it, you will not be in business.
But to solve the customer choice question properly, you have to dive deeper.
Where does choice happen? When? How? By who?
And i which choices do we play?
How do we win in these choices people make?
A positioning tells the market what you stand for. It does not tell you why a specific person, in a specific moment, with a specific need in front of them, picks you or doesn't. It cannot — because it was never designed to. It is an approximation. A signal broadcast at a segment level to an audience whose individual reality is far more granular than any segment description can capture.
And choice is granular. Uncomfortably so.
Here is what is actually happening when a customer decides. They are not consulting your brand positioning. They are not weighing your value proposition against a competitor's. They are in a moment — a specific situation, with a specific intention, shaped by everything about who they are right now and what they need right now — and they are asking, often in a fraction of a second, which of the available options fits best.
That choice space is the unit of growth.
Not the segment. Not the persona. Not the target audience. The moment and the context around it — what we call a choice space.
A choice space is not an occasion. It is not a use case. It is more precise than both. It is the intersection of a specific person, a specific intention, and a specific context — and it is in that intersection that need occurs, consideration begins, and the decision is made. A category can contain dozens of choice spaces. A single customer can move through several of them in a week. Each one has its own logic, its own hierarchy of relevance, its own competitive dynamics.
A person choosing a coffee at 7am on the way to a meeting is in a different choice space than the same person choosing a coffee at 3pm on a slow afternoon. The category is the same. The product might be the same. The customer is nominally the same. But the intention is different, the context is different, the emotional state is different — and therefore what makes one option more relevant than another is different.
If you treat your whole market with one proposition, you are likely not going to be the most relevant choice. It all starts with the right framing.
This is where most growth strategies break down — not at the level of positioning, but at the level of structure. The market is not a flat landscape of customers waiting to be targeted. It is a terrain of choice spaces, each with its own conditions, each requiring its own form of relevance. Some of those choice spaces are occupied — there is a clear leader, the choice is habitual, switching costs are high. Some are contested. Some are wide open, not because no product exists to serve them, but because nobody has understood them clearly enough to design for them deliberately.
That last category is where most of the available growth is hiding.
Companies that compound growth over time tend to share one capability: they understand the choice space structure of their market better than anyone else. They know which spaces they own, which they are losing, which remain unclaimed. They know what relevance looks like in each one — not at the brand level, but at the moment level. What does this specific person need to feel, believe, and understand in this specific context to choose us over everything else available to them right now?
That is the question that drives category leadership. It is also the question that most leadership teams have never formally asked.
To understand your market this way requires a different kind of customer intelligence. Not segmentation — segmentation clusters people by shared characteristics, which is useful for broad targeting but tells you almost nothing about the dynamics of specific moments. Not customer journeys — journeys map the path from awareness to purchase, but they flatten the richness of what is happening at each step. What you need is a genuine understanding of choice architecture: how needs form, how consideration begins, what shifts relevance in a particular context, what would make the decision feel obvious rather than effortful.
Specifically: WHO this person is at the moment of decision, WHAT outcome they are reaching for, WHEN, WHERE...HOW they want the experience to feel, WHY it matters at a level beneath the stated reason, and who they are BECOME-ing — the version of themselves they are moving toward and that this choice is helping to express or enable.
Every choice space activates a different profile of that model. The same customer is a different decision-maker in a different moment. Get specific about the moment and the whole system sharpens — your product design, your communication, your channel strategy, your pricing. Because you are no longer designing for a demographic. You are designing for a decision.
The implication for growth strategy is significant and somewhat inconvenient.
It means that knowing your positioning is necessary but nowhere near sufficient. It means that understanding your customer at a demographic or persona level gives you maybe thirty percent of what you need to consistently win choice. The remaining seventy percent lives in the granular structure of the market — in the specific, mappable, improvable moments where people decide.
It also means that the companies you are competing against may not be who you think they are. Competition is choice-space specific. In one context your primary competitor is the obvious category rival. In another it is a substitute product from a different category entirely. In another it is the option of doing nothing. Knowing your competitive position in the abstract is far less valuable than knowing your competitive position in the moments that matter most — and whether that position is strengthening or eroding.
The Relevance Gap™ is ultimately a measure of this. Not brand health in the abstract, but the distance between what a specific choice space is demanding and what you are currently delivering into it. That gap has a cost — in lost choice, in pricing power foregone, in frequency that never materialised. Closing it is the work. Knowing where it is widest tells you where to start.
Positioning tells the market who you are. Choice space strategy tells you where, specifically, you need to win — and what relevance looks like when you get there.
Growth lives in the second question. Most strategies stop at the first.
Written by
Comments
