Lighthouse Brand Strategy Academy

09/12/2026

Yogi Berra is supposed to have said: "When you come to a fork in the road, take it."

I prefer a slightly different version, one I've used with clients for years: "When faced with only two options — take the third."

It turns out there's real research behind why that matters more than it sounds.
Paul Nutt, a professor at Ohio State, spent decades tracking how organisations actually make strategic decisions — not how they say they make them, how they really do. What he found should make every boardroom uncomfortable.

Most decisions get framed as a "whether or not" question. Should we buy this company, or not. Should we launch this, or not. A straight binary, most often against the status quo. In his research, fewer than three in ten decision-makers ever considered more than one real alternative.

The outcomes split sharply along that line. Binary decisions — one option weighed against doing nothing — failed more than half the time. Decisions that introduced a genuine third path succeeded roughly two-thirds of the time.
That's not a small difference. That's the gap between a coin toss and a strategy.

Why does a third option change the maths so completely? Two reasons, both about human nature more than strategy. A single option invites the team to defend it. Everyone's energy goes into proving the one idea on the table will work, because there's nothing to compare it against. A third option forces actual comparison — attributes against attributes, not conviction against doubt.

And a single option, weighed against "do nothing," often becomes a political fight disguised as analysis. Two camps, one winner. A third path gives the room somewhere else to look. People stop defending positions and start evaluating criteria.

This is dolphin thinking, in practice. Sharks fight for the kill. Carps follow the current. Dolphins play with the problem until a third way surfaces — one that wasn't visible from either original position.

The next time you're staring down a "yes or no," resist it. Not because yes-or-no is always wrong. But check first.

What's the third option you haven't let yourself consider yet?

I am , Father of Brand DNA

09/11/2026

Cutting costs is easy.

Knowing what not to cut is where leadership gets harder.

A client once asked me how deep they should cut.

My answer wasn’t a percentage.

It was a question:

What creates real value for the customer?

Because the first things to go are often the things customers never see.

Internal complexity. Extra steps. Duplicate processes. Layers that no longer serve the work.

The better question is not:

“What can we remove?”

It’s:

“What would we protect even if it made no financial sense?”

That answer usually tells you where the real value lives.

What’s one thing in your business you would refuse to cut?

09/10/2026

Years ago, in a meeting room in Hong Kong, a CEO stopped his own strategists mid-presentation.

The deck was good. The team was sharp. Everyone was nodding along, building momentum toward a recommendation. Then he held up his hand and asked one question: "Before we go any further — what problem are we actually solving here?"

Silence. Then a slightly different conversation started, and by the end of it, the entire direction of the project had changed. Not because the original work was wrong. Because nobody had actually checked the question underneath it.

I've sat in hundreds of strategy rooms since. The pattern repeats more often than you'd expect from people this capable: enormous effort spent answering a question, very little spent interrogating whether it's the right one.

Critical thinking is excellent at evaluating answers. It has almost nothing to say about which question deserves asking in the first place. That's a different muscle, and most organisations have quietly let it atrophy.

Three questions I keep returning to, with clients and on my own work:
What would our customers genuinely miss if we disappeared tomorrow? Not what they'd notice. Miss.

What do we want people to say about us that they're not saying yet? The gap between current and desired reputation usually reveals more than any positioning workshop.

What are we doing because it's right, and what are we doing because everyone else is doing it? Uncomfortable, every time.

None of these are clever questions. That's rather the point. The value isn't in sophistication. It's in being willing to sit in the silence after asking them instead of rushing to fill it.

The CEO in Hong Kong didn't have a better answer than his team. He just refused to let the meeting move past a question nobody had actually asked.

What question has your business been answering for years without anyone checking if it's the right one?

I am , Father of Brand DNA

09/09/2026

Revenue was down, the board was nervous, and the instinct in the room was the obvious one: trim costs, simplify the offer, discount to keep volume moving.

Nobody in that room was being reckless. But sensible and right aren’t always the same word. Going through it line by line, the cuts on the table weren’t operational - they were brand decisions wearing an operational disguise.

Reduce ingredient quality slightly. Quietly shrink service response time. Each defensible alone. Together, a brand quietly deciding to mean less, at exactly the moment customers were watching closest.

Across thirty years and several recessions, the pattern repeats: businesses cut what customers can see before they cut what customers can’t. Marketing goes before the management layer that approved it. Product quality erodes before head office overhead does.

The harder, better question isn’t what can we cut. It’s what would it mean to add, here, when everyone expects us to subtract.

If your budget had to shrink by 20% tomorrow, what’s the one thing you’d protect even if it made no financial sense on paper?


- Peter, Father of Brand DNA

09/08/2026

A member of the Lighthouse told me recently she'd started positioning herself as the fast option — a full brand identity system delivered in a week.

I asked her one question before anything else: are you charging three or four times your normal rate for that?

She wasn't.

Here's the trap, and it catches capable people more often than careless ones. Nobody escapes the impossible triangle. Good, quick, cheap — pick any two. You cannot have all three.

If you're compressing weeks of strategic work into days, something has to give. Charge substantially more for the compression. Take on far fewer clients at a time. Or quietly let the quality thin. Most people don't choose any of these on purpose. They just absorb the compression, project by project, until the business is running at a pace it was never priced for.

The deeper problem sits one layer under the pricing question, and it's a strange, almost backwards one: the better and faster you get at solving a problem, the less most clients think it's worth.

We've enabled a mindset that pays for time rather than outcome — so visible hours become a stand-in for value, and that stand-in punishes exactly the expertise that lets you go fast.

Thirty years of pattern recognition is what lets an experienced strategist see in an afternoon what would take someone else a month. Charge for the afternoon, priced like an afternoon, and you've discounted the thirty years to nothing.

If a client is asking for your fastest, cheapest, best work simultaneously, that's not a brief. That's a test of whether you know your own value.

Which point of the triangle have you been giving away?

I am , Father of Brand DNA

08/18/2026

08/01/2026

A brand without a signal is just noise in a crowded ocean.

Sat down with John Davidson of the Leverage Podcast last week - the full conversation covers building iconic brands, the messy reality of small ones, and why differentiation is brutal for realtors.

This clip's one moment of many I'd want you to sit with. Full episode: https://youtu.be/J2WPfJpMqVw


I am Peter Wilken 🐬 - Father of Brand DNA

08/01/2026

Are you asking the wrong question about AI?
Everyone's asking how to compete with it.
The better question: how do you stay unmistakably you?
Your experience. Your relationships. Your way of seeing things - no model touches those.
The human edge is real. Are you using it, or quietly giving it away?

Watch out for more in The View from the Lighthouse newsletter - link in bio.

07/28/2026

A hundred-year-old railway just waved back at us.
We were on the Thompson River near Kamloops, chasing rainbow trout with my son Jack and Captain Ron Hall — when a Canadian Pacific train appeared on the far bank. We waved. The engineer waved back. Tooted, for good measure.
Small moment. Big signal.
This is what I mean when I talk about The Human Edge. AI can analyse, predict, even mimic empathy. What it can't do is choose to wave back from a moving train because a stranger in a boat waved first.
Lived experience. The pull of nature. The instinct to connect.
None of it goes out of fashion, whatever the technology does next.
Where's your version of this river?

06/05/2026

Most brands focus on growing their products.

Great brands focus on growing what they mean to people.

Vaseline is a powerful example.

For over 150 years, the product has remained largely unchanged, yet the brand continues to stay relevant across generations.

That doesn't happen because of constant reinvention.

It happens because people trust what the brand stands for.

Over time, Vaseline came to represent care, protection, and reliability. Those meanings allowed the brand to remain useful long after competitors came and went.

That's what strong branding looks like.

Not changing who you are every few years.

Becoming more valuable by consistently delivering on the same promise.

Learn more with the Ultimate Lighthouse Brand Strategy Starter Kit:

https://www.peterwilken.com/ultimate-lighthouse-brand-strategy-starter-kit

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I am Peter Wilken 🐬
Father of Brand DNA