The Discipline Gap: Why Most Brand Strategies Die in Execution Tobias Dahlberg October 30, 2025 – 2 min read Share this post Brand The Brand Strategy You Can't Actually Strategize 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, By Tobias Dahlberg • 4 min read Brand Bland or Brand: Why Most Value Propositions Fail the 10-Second Test 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’ By Tobias Dahlberg • 3 min read Brand How Much Is Your Relevance Gap Costing You? Growth rarely collapses overnight. It erodes quietly. Revenue softens. Win rates dip. Discounting increases. Sales cycles stretch. Teams work harder. Margins thin. Boards ask sharper questions. And most leadership teams respond the same way: more activity, more campaigns, more initiatives, more optimization. But activity is not causality. The real question By Tobias Dahlberg • 3 min read Signals The GLP-1 Consumer Is Rewriting the Value of Every Bite The GLP-1 Consumer Is Rewriting the Value of Every Bite By Tobias Dahlberg • 2 min read Intelligence AI Is Becoming the First Sales Meeting 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markets, shortlist suppliers, By Tobias Dahlberg • 5 min read Journal Why Your Growth Strategy Is (Likely) Built on Outdated Assumptions Every growth strategy contains a hidden set of assumptions. But are they true? By Tobias Dahlberg • 9 min read brand strategy The Cost of Choice Confusion 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 By Tobias Dahlberg • 3 min read Strategy Differentiation Is the Wrong Target 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 By Tobias Dahlberg • 5 min read Strategy Positioning Strength: The Measure Of Choice. 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, By Tobias Dahlberg • 3 min read
Brand The Brand Strategy You Can't Actually Strategize 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, By Tobias Dahlberg • 4 min read
Brand Bland or Brand: Why Most Value Propositions Fail the 10-Second Test 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’ By Tobias Dahlberg • 3 min read
Brand How Much Is Your Relevance Gap Costing You? Growth rarely collapses overnight. It erodes quietly. Revenue softens. Win rates dip. Discounting increases. Sales cycles stretch. Teams work harder. Margins thin. Boards ask sharper questions. And most leadership teams respond the same way: more activity, more campaigns, more initiatives, more optimization. But activity is not causality. The real question By Tobias Dahlberg • 3 min read
Signals The GLP-1 Consumer Is Rewriting the Value of Every Bite The GLP-1 Consumer Is Rewriting the Value of Every Bite By Tobias Dahlberg • 2 min read
Intelligence AI Is Becoming the First Sales Meeting 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, By Tobias Dahlberg • 5 min read
Journal Why Your Growth Strategy Is (Likely) Built on Outdated Assumptions Every growth strategy contains a hidden set of assumptions. But are they true? By Tobias Dahlberg • 9 min read
brand strategy The Cost of Choice Confusion 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 By Tobias Dahlberg • 3 min read
Strategy Differentiation Is the Wrong Target 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 By Tobias Dahlberg • 5 min read
Strategy Positioning Strength: The Measure Of Choice. 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, By Tobias Dahlberg • 3 min read
