Every strategy studio claims to think differently. Ours is specific about what that means in practice: before we propose a direction, we map every claim the category has already made — not just direct competitors, but adjacent categories a customer might mentally compare against — and we refuse to add another brand to a pile of near-identical claims.
This takes longer than starting with mood boards. It is also the only reliable way we have found to avoid producing a brand that looks confident in isolation and disappears on the actual shelf, website, or pitch deck it will sit next to.
The output of this stage is rarely exciting to look at — a grid of what everyone else already owns. But it is the only honest starting point for a position, because a position is defined by what it is not, as much as by what it is.