Most businesses do not have a brand strategy. They have a collection of marketing decisions made by different people in different quarters.
Strategy built on assumptions about the customer collapses at contact with reality.
In 2011, JCPenney hired a new CEO to transform the department store chain. The strategy was radical: eliminate coupons, replace promotional pricing with everyday pricing, and redesign stores to resemble fashion boutiques. Within eighteen months the company had lost a quarter of its revenue. Customers didn't recognise the store they'd been shopping in for decades. The repositioning was built on what the leadership team wanted the customer to think, not on what the customer actually thought.
Nobody had asked.
This is the coherence problem. A diagnosis can be correct. A competitive position can be sound. But if the execution is built on assumptions about the market rather than evidence from it, the strategy collapses at the point of contact with reality.
The core idea
Most businesses do not have a marketing strategy. They have tactics without architecture. They run campaigns without segmentation, target everyone without choosing anyone, and set objectives that are dreams rather than commitments. Brand coherence requires market discipline: know the customer as they are, segment the market as it is, choose one target, position against the real competitor, and align every activity.
Most marketing fails not because the creative is poor, but because the strategic foundation was never built.
The market orientation trap
Mark Ritson identifies a foundational problem in marketing: the moment you get paid to work for a company, you can no longer see the product as customers see it. The longer you're inside, the worse it gets. You start believing your own positioning. You stop checking whether the customer agrees.
In PE contexts this is amplified. Operating partners inherit management teams who've been inside the business for years. Everyone "knows" the customer. Nobody has verified it recently. The brand deck from two years ago is treated as current intelligence.
Coherence starts with what Ritson calls creating the vacuum: confronting the team with the possibility that everything they think about their customer might be wrong. Not to demoralise them, but to create the intellectual humility required for honest research.
Without this step, companies collect research but don't believe it, look at it, or use it.
Research that produces strategy
Ritson's research sequence is specific: qualitative first, then quantitative. Never skip qual.
Qualitative research generates the attributes. You go into the field, observe customers choosing and consuming, and discover what actually matters to them. Not what you think matters. What they demonstrate through behaviour.
Quantitative research measures those attributes at scale. The critical technique: don't ask customers what's important. Correlate attributes against the purchase funnel and let the data reveal what actually drives behaviour. Self-reported importance is unreliable. Correlation against outcomes is not.
The result is a map of perceptions, competitive position, and behavioural drivers that the leadership team has never seen before. It is almost always uncomfortable. The attributes the business thinks matter often don't. The segment the business thinks it owns is often being lost.
This discomfort is the foundation of coherence. Strategy built on reality, not narrative.
Segmentation is not targeting
Ritson's most important distinction: segmentation has nothing to do with your company. It is a diagnosis of the market. Everyone in the potential market appears in one segment. Competitors using the same data would reach the same conclusions.
Most portfolio companies conflate segmentation with targeting. They start with "our customer is..." and work backwards. That is confirmation bias with a research budget.
Each segment needs four things: a behavioural name, size in people, total value of consumption, and the company's current share. When segmentation is done properly, the target becomes obvious. The segment, as Ritson puts it, reaches out its hand and shows you where to go.
The discipline of one
This is where coherence demands courage.
Target one segment if it's big enough. Maybe two. Every additional segment requires a different approach, which dilutes resources. Spreading investment across five segments is not ambition. It is the absence of strategy.
The selection criteria: size and value potential, current market share, competitor strength, product fit, and influence on adjacent segments. When targeting is right, the rest of the plan writes itself. The positioning follows from the target. The objectives follow from the positioning. The budget follows from the objectives.
When targeting is wrong, or when targeting is avoided entirely, every subsequent decision is compromised. The creative tries to speak to everyone and connects with no one. The media plan scatters spend across channels without concentration. The sales team pursues leads that don't convert because they were never the right leads.
Positioning and objectives
Positioning follows targeting. Maximum four or five attributes. Each must pass three tests: the target customer wants it, the business can deliver it better or differently than the segment's actual competitors, and it will be commercially viable.
Then objectives: one or two maximum. Each tied to a specific funnel metric, a specific segment, a specific timeframe. Most companies have twelve "objectives" with no dates and no accountability. Those are not objectives. They are aspirations that will not be met.
The businesses that set two objectives and hold people accountable for them outperform the ones that set twelve and hold nobody accountable. This is not a theory. It is an observable pattern in every portfolio.
What this means
Diagnose identifies the structural problem. Codify identifies the competitive position. Cohere makes it executable by grounding every decision in market evidence rather than internal assumption.
Coherence is not visual consistency. It is the disciplined alignment of targeting, positioning, and activity against a single strategic direction, informed by research the leadership team actually believes because it confronted their assumptions before confirming them.
One position, one target, total commitment.