One principle.
Two core questions.
A strategic intelligence and advisory firm built to help you become the most relevant choice.
Original Minds measures why customers choose — continuously, and specific to a single brand. We read the forces shaping choice in a market, diagnose where a brand stands against them, and advise on what to change to become the most relevant choice within your category.
We work with brand-led companies: the ones whose growth depends on being preferred rather than merely available.
We are a Nordic company working for clients mostly across Europe and North America through our two subsidiaries.
Founded on a simple principle and two existential questions.
Original Minds was founded and is led by Tobias Dahlberg, a strategist and entrepreneur with twenty-five years building and reinventing brands and businesses across the Nordics, Europe, and the United States.
His work has spanned global icons, national category leaders, and hundreds of challenger brands — including global engagements with Coca-Cola, Nike, and The Home Depot at previous firms — across brand strategy, research, innovation, and marketing.
Across all of it, one core insight became apparent: customers always choose the option most relevant to them, in any given moment. While differentiation and distinctiveness matters, relevance is what makes customers choose one over another.
This insight led Tobias to ask clients two existential business questions:
Why should they choose you?
How can you be chosen more?
Learning how few could say precisely why they were chosen — or what would increase choice systematically. Original Minds was built to answer that question properly: with an instrument rather than an opinion, continuously rather than once, and for a specific brand rather than a category in general.
Four commitments.
We we monitor the changing world by connecting millions of data points in order to understand markets and consumers, then pit signals against client strategies and brands. Our product and main value is judgement and strategic recommendations.
We aggregate, curate, and interpret from every relevant source, free and paid. We do not run primary research, and we do not pretend to. What compounds is not the volume of what we read but the interpretation held across quarters — a versioned read of a named subject, re-judged as the market moves. That is the thing a general-purpose tool structurally cannot produce.
We diagnose and recommend. We do not design, build, or run campaigns, so nothing we advise earns us downstream work. When we say the answer is a product change rather than a communications one, there is no commercial reason for us to say it other than that it is true.
Some months, nothing important has changed. We say so. A category everyone assumes is shifting and isn't is one of the more valuable things we can tell a client, and it is not in our interest to pretend otherwise.
The boundary, stated plainly.
Where the work we recommend needs to be produced, we say who should produce it and stay in the room to measure whether it moved choice.
Start with your category.
Tell us the category and the brand. We will show you what the Relevance Gap™ looks like there — what is moving, and where the opportunity sits.
Start with your category