Signal over noise: why most brand strategies fail before they start
Every agency says they do strategy. Very few mean it. The difference between a positioning that works and one that gathers dust is a single uncomfortable question.
Strategy without a point of view is just a document. Most brand strategies fail not in execution but in the room where they are written — because nobody in that room is willing to say what the brand should stop doing.
Rory Sutherland calls this the problem of optimising the wrong variable. We spend enormous energy making things cheaper, faster, more featureful — and almost no energy asking whether those are the variables our audience actually cares about.
The brands that cut through share one thing: a clear answer to 'what do we refuse to be?' That refusal is the strategy. Everything else is design.
