Photo by Koushik Pal / Unsplash Unilever’s Purpose Pivot: When Brand Values Meet the CFO’s Axe Tobias Dahlberg October 01, 2025 – 2 min read Share this post Brand When The "Brandless Brand" Wins, And Why It Happens. 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 By Tobias Dahlberg • 4 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 Journal The Customer Is Allowed to Be Ignorant. You Are Not. "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." Usually attributed to Churchill. Probably not his. Still quoted constantly, because it captures something people recognize. There's a version of it in business, and it isn't about customers. Customers aren& By Tobias Dahlberg • 1 min read Strategy The Relevance Gap™: Why Every Safe Decision Has a Price. 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 By Tobias Dahlberg • 4 min read Brand When The "Brandless Brand" Wins, And Why It Happens. 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 By Tobias Dahlberg • 4 min read Intelligence Wellness Is Shifting from Optimisation to Regulation The next wellness winner may promise less ambition and more equilibrium. 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 By Tobias Dahlberg • 3 min read Journal You Don’t Need a Bigger Lake. You Need Better Bait. 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 By Tobias Dahlberg • 3 min read Intelligence Gen Z Discovers Everywhere and Trusts Almost Nothing Why the biggest challenge in modern marketing is no longer getting discovered—it’s getting believed. In Brief Gen Z has more ways to discover brands than any previous generation. They encounter products and brands through TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, creators, AI assistants, online communities and social commerce. And what& By Tobias Dahlberg • 2 min read
Brand When The "Brandless Brand" Wins, And Why It Happens. 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 By Tobias Dahlberg • 4 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
Journal The Customer Is Allowed to Be Ignorant. You Are Not. "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." Usually attributed to Churchill. Probably not his. Still quoted constantly, because it captures something people recognize. There's a version of it in business, and it isn't about customers. Customers aren& By Tobias Dahlberg • 1 min read
Strategy The Relevance Gap™: Why Every Safe Decision Has a Price. 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 By Tobias Dahlberg • 4 min read
Brand When The "Brandless Brand" Wins, And Why It Happens. 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 By Tobias Dahlberg • 4 min read
Intelligence Wellness Is Shifting from Optimisation to Regulation The next wellness winner may promise less ambition and more equilibrium. 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 By Tobias Dahlberg • 3 min read
Journal You Don’t Need a Bigger Lake. You Need Better Bait. 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 By Tobias Dahlberg • 3 min read
Intelligence Gen Z Discovers Everywhere and Trusts Almost Nothing Why the biggest challenge in modern marketing is no longer getting discovered—it’s getting believed. In Brief Gen Z has more ways to discover brands than any previous generation. They encounter products and brands through TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, creators, AI assistants, online communities and social commerce. And what& By Tobias Dahlberg • 2 min read
