Relevance Diagnosis — 30 days
Know why people choose your brand. Or don't.
The Relevance Diagnosis tells you why customers choose you, why they don’t, how choice is changing, and what to do about it.
Customers you should be winning quietly choose someone else. Not because your team lacks activity. Because customer expectations move. Culture moves. Categories change. Competitors reset the rules. And the brand—its position, proposition, identity, and execution—can drift out of sync with how people now choose. And this is costing you.
30 days · fixed scope · no workshops
The problem we solve
Growth is hidden in the decisions where choice is lost. We uncover them.
Your reporting tells you what happened. Revenue is down. Consideration has flattened. A competitor is gaining attention. Price pressure is rising. Campaigns are working harder for less return. But those are lagging indicators. The real problem starts earlier: when the things customers value begin moving faster than the brand’s strategy, proposition, identity, and execution.
Traditional tools cannot see the whole problem
- Trackers give you numbers without explaining what they mean for your brand.
- Trend reports explain change without applying it to your business.
- Agencies give you recommendations without independent evidence.
- Dashboards show activity without showing where customer choice is leaking.
You cannot fix what you cannot see.
The Relevance Gap™
We identify the relevance gaps that prevent your brand from being chosen by more people, more times, and at higher prices.
Every brand loses choice. And all brands can grow choice, and thereby revenue. Lost choice means lost revenue, and the gap between being chosen and being ignored is what we call The Relevance Gap™. Why? Because people always opt for the choice that is the most relevant to them, given the circumstances.
The Relevance Gap™ is the distance between what your ideal customers now value and choose on, and what your brand currently offers them. Their side keeps moving — pushed by the alternatives they see and the forces reshaping your market. Your side — brand, proposition, delivery — tends to stand still. The gap between the two is where choice leaks.
Positioning, identity, proposition, execution: those are levers you can pull. The Relevance Gap tells you which ones matter, and how urgently. We read the distance first, then trace it to the levers that close it.
The Diagnosis surfaces your gaps by name: the specific places where the two sides have drifted apart. Every gap is attributed — positioning, identity, proposition, or execution — and backed by its evidence. Together they roll up to the umbrella verdict, Brand Relevance: how strongly you’re positioned to be chosen, today and on trajectory — never reduced to a single number, always traceable to why.
The Relevance Gap™
What prevents more people from choosing you, more times, at better prices?
What we answer
Six questions answered, with evidence, to give you the confidence to make better decisions.
Nº 01 — 06
- 01
Who are your highest-potential customers — and why?
Relevance is always relevance to someone. We read the segments available in your market, define your ICPs — the customers your brand is most built to win — and map where their choice actually happens: the occasions, moments, and channels where they decide. A brand can only be diagnosed against a chooser and a choice situation, so this is where everything starts.
- 02
How do customers judge value and make choices?
Using our proprietary demand model, we go beneath stated preferences into the motivation and value layers of choice — from the functional to the emotional to the identity level — and turn them into an importance-weighted set of decision criteria. Built brand-blind and frozen before we look at your brand at all: the standard you’re measured against is theirs, never yours.
- 03
Positioning Strength™
How strong is your positioning?
Whether the position you’ve chosen is desired by your ideal customers, distinct from the alternatives they consider, and credibly yours to claim — and whether it stays strong as the market moves.
- 04
Brand Identity Fit™
Does your brand identity resonate?
Whether who you are — as defined, and as actually expressed in words and visuals — coheres, and whether it resonates with what your choosers value. Strong identities compound relevance; incoherent ones leak it.
- 05
Proposition Fit™
How strong is your proposition?
Whether what you’ve actually designed and priced — the offer itself — matches what your chooser wants. A brand can be well positioned and still sell the wrong thing.
- 06
Execution Strength™
How well do you deliver the value you intend?
Whether you signal and deliver your intended value everywhere the chooser meets you — product, packaging, place, communication, experience — weighted by what you claim and what they demand, never by a checklist.
What we need from you
Half a day of your attention, in total.
One input session at the start — your ambition, your growth goals, your audience choice, your constraints, your competitive set — plus a short materials list: your strategy on a page, your brand as you’ve defined it, your current positioning, and what you already know about your customers.
Then we read everything through four perspectives at once: your strategy (what you intend), your goals (what growth must come from), your brand (as defined, and as actually expressed), and your customer’s perspective (how they actually choose). The diagnosis is measured against your intent and your chooser’s reality — never against a generic template.
We read the market; you keep running the company.
How it works
Three steps. Thirty days from intake to better decisions.
- 01Intake
We start by digging into what is true today, and what you want to be true in the future.
A working session on your growth goals, the segments you’re built to win, and what you currently believe about why customers choose you. Alongside it, a short materials list — strategy, brand, propositions, pricing, research, and your main competitors.
- 02Diagnosis
We then research and diagnose your customer, markets, brand, and proposition.
We model your customers before we examine your brand: segments read, ICPs defined, choice occasions mapped, then decision criteria weighted and frozen. Only then do the four instruments run — Positioning Strength, Brand Identity Fit, Proposition Fit, Execution Strength — each read on its own evidence.
- 03Delivery
We deliver a report outlining the gaps, and what you should decide and do to close them.
A written diagnosis built to be read by a leadership team and defended in a board meeting, ending in the Relevance Gap Map: every gap named, attributed, evidenced, and carried to its commercial consequence. Then ninety minutes with me on what it means and what to close first. The demand model and ICP work are yours to keep.
Who it’s for
For leaders making choices that depend on being chosen: CEOs and founders weighing growth, market, or brand decisions; CMOs who need more than campaign metrics; commercial leaders who need to know why choice is shifting before it becomes a P&L problem; investors and boards who want independent, demand-side evidence on a brand they back.
Most valuable at the moments relevance is in motion — entering a market, repositioning, launching, facing a credible new competitor, or growing slower than the effort says you should.
What you get
Seven things, all yours to keep.
- A written diagnosis, built to be read by a leadership team and defended in a board meeting.
- Clarity on your highest-potential customers — who they are, and what they actually value most.
- The real criteria behind their choice, weighted by what matters, not what they say.
- An honest read on how strong your position, identity, proposition and execution are against those criteria.
- The specific gaps costing you choice — each one named, evidenced, and tied to what it’s costing.
- What to close first, in what order, and what each is worth.
- Ninety minutes with us on what it means and what to do about it.
What it is not
Not a brand tracker
Numbers without explanations.
Not a trend report
Explanations without your brand in them.
Not a strategy project in disguise
We tell you where the gaps are and what to close first; the closing work itself is separate, with us or with anyone.
Who does the work
Tobias Dahlberg
Founder · Original Minds®
Built from the experience from 500+ commercial cases.
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 engagements with Coca-Cola, Nike, and The Home Depot at previous firms — across brand strategy, research, innovation, and marketing.
Across all of it, one insight became apparent: customers always choose the option most relevant to them, in any given moment. Differentiation and distinctiveness matter, but relevance is what makes a customer choose one brand over another.
The two questions
Why should they choose you?
How can you be chosen more?
Few clients could say precisely why they were chosen, or what would increase choice systematically. Original Minds was built to answer that properly: with an instrument rather than an opinion, continuously rather than once, and for a specific brand rather than a category in general.
In their words
“Tobias Dahlberg is one of the brightest minds in strategy today. He’s a natural teacher who can simplify a concept like nobody else. Anyone who follows Tobias will end up smarter, richer, and probably more beautiful.”
“I have known and worked with Tobias Dahlberg for more than a decade, and it would be hard to find a more clear-eyed strategic thinker. If you are looking to go beyond the ordinary, you should get to know Tobias.”
Just 30 days from now, you can know why you’re chosen — and why you’re not.
Tell us a little about your situation and we’ll come back with times. No commitment at this point.