The Three-Body Problem of Brand Strategy

Why Smart People Keep Making the Same Expensive Mistake

I'll tell you something nobody wants to hear.

In 1887, King Oscar II of Sweden put up a prize for solving the three-body problem. You know the type - royalty with too much time and money, thinking mathematics might make the universe less messy. The problem was simple enough on paper: predict how three celestial bodies would move when they're all pulling on each other with gravity.

Henri Poincaré took a crack at it. The kind of man who could hold an entire mathematical universe in his head while having breakfast.

He proved it couldn't be done.

Not "difficult" in the way climbing Everest is difficult. Impossible in the way turning water into wine without being divine is impossible. Add one more body to a two-body system and mathematical certainty just...collapses. The system follows rules - Newton's laws don't suddenly stop working - but you can't predict where anything will end up. Deterministic chaos, they call it now.

Which is a fancy way of saying: the universe plays by rules but doesn't give a damn about your spreadsheets.

I think about Poincaré whenever a founder tells me they're going to "figure out the branding themselves."

The Confidence of Competence

Here's what happens.

You build something. A business, usually. Sometimes a good one. You understand your product the way a watchmaker understands gears - intimately, completely. You've learned your market through the expensive education of early mistakes. You know what customers want because you've asked them, and more importantly, you've watched what they actually do when they think nobody's looking.

Two bodies. You and the market. Solvable.

Then something shifts.

Maybe you get traction. Maybe competition notices you exist. Maybe your category stops being a curiosity and becomes a battlefield. Maybe investors start using words like "positioning" and "brand equity" with that particular tone that suggests money depends on having good answers.

A third body enters the system.

Most founders don't notice it happening. They're too busy spinning the first two plates to see the third one wobbling into frame. By the time they realize something's changed, they're already in chaos.

I've watched this for fifteen years now. The pattern never changes, only the faces.

The AI Seduction

There's a particular kind of founder - and I say this with something approaching affection - who believes competence is transferable. They built the business, didn't they? Taught themselves coding or supply chain management or food chemistry or whatever technical dark art their industry demands. Surely brand strategy can't be that different.

Then ChatGPT comes along and whispers the sweetest lie: You can do this yourself. Faster. Cheaper. Better, even, because who knows your business like you do?

It's irresistible, really. Like being offered a map to buried treasure when you've been digging with a spoon.

Last year I was lucky to meet this founder through a common friend - very sharp, built a beverage company from nothing - who spent six weeks developing his brand strategy with AI tools. Had beautiful decks. Positioning statements that sounded like they came from a top notch consultancy. A visual identity system that would make a design student weep with envy.

He launched it with the confidence of someone who's done the math.

The market yawned.

Three months later he called. "I don't understand what went wrong," he said. "Everything made sense on paper."

Of course it did. AI is extraordinarily good at making sense on paper. It is less so at sensing what matters off paper - the cultural undercurrents, the unspoken category rules, the people relationships and the contradictions you've learned to ignore because they're inconvenient.

Here's what he'd done, though he didn't realize it: he'd used AI to optimize a two-body problem (product-market fit) while ignoring the third body entirely (what his brand means in culture). AI made him very efficient at solving the wrong equation.

I see this constantly now. Founders moving faster than I could shout Go!, ever toward destinations that don't exist.

The Pattern That Never Changes

I could write this timeline from memory at this point. Meet a founder every few weeks who's following it beat for beat.

Month One: "We're going to figure this out ourselves. We know our business better than anyone. Besides, how hard can branding be?"

They're smart people. Built something from nothing. Convinced themselves that competence is transferable, that business sense equals brand sense.

Month Two: Dive deep into DIY mode. AI tools humming. Decks multiplying. Everyone's excited because of “progress”.

Month Three: Launch the new positioning. Internal team loves it. They built it together, fought for it, believe in it.

Month Five: Dawning realization that market response is... underwhelming. Conversion rates haven't moved. Differentiation hasn't materialized.

"Maybe we need better execution," they think. More design polish. Bigger media budget. Influencer partnerships.

Month Eight: The honest reckoning. The strategy was wrong. Not wrong in the sense of badly executed - wrong in the sense of solving the wrong problem.

Month Twelve: They call someone like us.

"Can you help us figure out what went wrong?"

We can. But it costs three to five times what doing it right the first time would have cost. Plus you’ve lost a year of market momentum. You don’t step into the same river twice..things have changed. Plus you’ve trained yourr team to think brand strategy is something you iterate toward through failure, rather than navigate toward through expertise.

The pattern never varies. Only the scale of the wreckage.

The Third Body

What brand actually is?

It's not your logo. Not your color palette. Not your Instagram aesthetic or your mission statement or that expensive video your nephew shot.

It's the answer to a question nobody asks directly: "What does this thing mean?”

And meaning, unlike market positioning or product features, doesn't sit still. It shifts with cultural currents. It bends around competitive gravity. It warps under the weight of your own contradictions.

This is the third body. And the moment it enters your system, prediction becomes impossible.

You can know your intent - what you want the brand to mean. You can measure your actions - what you're actually doing. But you cannot reliably predict what meaning will emerge from the interaction of intent, action, and cultural interpretation.

It's Poincaré's problem all over again. Three bodies in mutual influence, none of them standing still.

The Inside-Out Problem

Maybe there is a reason astronomers put their telescopes on mountains and in orbit. You can't map a solar system from inside it.

Founders are always inside it.

They know what they intended when they chose that name, designed that package, wrote that tagline. They remember the ten meetings it took to get everyone aligned. They've internalized the logic so completely they can't imagine how it might look to someone encountering it fresh.

Another relatable tale of a client who spent eight months developing what they called a "revolutionary" positioning. Internal team loved it. Board approved it. They'd done customer research, competitive analysis, the whole rigorous dance.

When they showed it to me, I couldn't tell them apart from their three main competitors.

"But the strategy is completely different," they insisted. And they were right, in a way. The internal logic was sound. The differentiation existed in the spreadsheet.

It just didn't exist in culture.

That's what happens when you navigate from inside the gravitational field. You feel the forces differently than someone outside. What seems like a dramatic shift to you looks like a minor orbit adjustment to everyone else.

AI doesn't solve this. If anything, it makes it worse. AI will happily generate brilliant-sounding strategy based on your inside-out perspective, because you're the one feeding it context. Garbage in, gospel out.

The Chaos Compounds

Let's say, for argument's sake, that you somehow navigate the three-body problem. Found some stable configuration where market positioning, business model, and cultural meaning all align.

Congratulations. Now you have to execute it.

Welcome to the six-body problem.

Because now you've added:

• Creative expression (how does strategic intent become visual reality?)

• Execution constraints (what's actually possible in the given time, budget, capability?)

• Market response (how do real humans react versus how you predicted they'd react?)

Each new body multiplies the chaos exponentially.

I have seen founders do this thing where they treat each phase as separate:

1. Figure out strategy (internally, over six weeks)

2. Hand off to designer (marketplace freelancer, lowest bid)

3. Execute production (whoever can deliver fastest)

4. Launch (whenever things are "ready enough")

Then they're shocked when the final result bears no resemblance to the strategic intent they started with.

It's like trying to navigate rapids by making decisions at the top, middle, and bottom of the waterfall separately. By the time you're at the bottom, the river's changed and your top-of-waterfall strategy is quaint history.

The system is dynamic. It demands continuous navigation, not sequential handoffs.

But that requires something most founders don't have: the ability to hold the entire chaotic system in view while making real-time adjustments.

Also, it requires not being inside the gravitational field.

The Cost Nobody Admits

Founders are good at math. It's practically required.

So they do this calculation:

• DIY + AI tools: ₹5 lakhs, 8 weeks

• Strategic brand partner: ₹25 lakhs, 12 weeks

• Conclusion: DIY is five times cheaper and faster

The math is correct. The calculation is incomplete.

What they don't factor:

Scenario A - The DIY Path:

• Initial cost: ₹5 lakhs (team time + tools)

• Launch: Month 2

• Market response: meh (15% conversion improvement, no real differentiation)

• Growing doubt: Month 6

• Acceptance of failure: Month 8

• Hiring strategic partner to fix it: ₹35 lakhs (fixing costs more than building)

• Relaunch: Month 14

Total visible cost: ₹40 lakhs and fourteen months.

But that's not the real cost.

The real cost is opportunity. Twelve months of wrong positioning means twelve months of:

• Revenue you didn't capture (Few crores, depending on scale)

• Competitive territory you didn't claim (now occupied by someone else)

• Team morale eroded by the failure cycle

• Market confusion about who you are

Total real cost: More crores than you dare to be honest about.

Scenario B - Strategic Partner First:

• Partner cost: ₹25 lakhs

• Launch: Month 3

• Market response: clear differentiation, 45% conversion improvement

• Continuous optimization (no repositioning needed)

Total cost: ₹25 lakhs and three months. Opportunity value: ₹5-8 crores captured over the same period.

The DIY path costs ten to twenty times more when you count what matters.

But founders only see the ₹5 lakhs versus ₹25 lakhs comparison, because opportunity cost doesn't show up on the balance sheet until it's too late to recover it.

I've had this conversation more times than I would like. The math always works out the same way. The founders who've been through the DIY cycle before immediately get it. The ones who haven't think I'm trying to sell them something unnecessary.

Six months later, the second group becomes the first group.

The AI Acceleration Paradox

I'm not trying to sound like a Luddite.

AI is extraordinary at execution once direction is clear. Spectacular, really. It can generate variations, optimize copy, test approaches, produce assets at a speed that would have seemed like science fiction five years ago.

What AI cannot do - what it is fundamentally unsuited to do - is figure out which direction matters.

Because that requires something AI doesn't have: the ability to sense what's happening in culture before it shows up in data. Feeling isn’t a skill AI could acquire even remotely.

Brand strategy isn't about analyzing what worked. It's about feeling where the current is moving before the river changes. It's pattern recognition at the level of human meaning-making, which is messy and contradictory and often irrational.

AI sees patterns in what happened. Humans sense patterns in what's happening.

There's a reason prophets and data analysts are different jobs.

What AI does brilliantly is to make you faster.

Problem is, it makes you equally fast whether you're moving toward something valuable or away from it.

It's an acceleration machine. Wonderful if you know where you're going. Catastrophic if you don't.

The founders who understand this use AI as a force multiplier for strategic clarity. The founders who don't use it as a substitute for strategic thinking.

You can tell which is which by the wreckage.

The Integration Question

From a little that I understand of physics to a lot of experience in navigating chaos , when you're trying to predict a chaotic system - you can't solve it, but you can simulate it. Run the model, watch the patterns, learn to navigate rather than predict.

Thats how I've seen strategy work both from my own personal experience and watching expert navigators do it.

You don't solve the three-body problem through analysis. You navigate it through continuous sensing and response.

Which means - and this is the part most agencies get wrong - you cannot separate strategy from execution.

The moment you hand off from strategy team to creative team to production team, you've fragmented one chaotic system into three disconnected linear processes.

Strategy gets "finalized" and locked. Creative interprets it (which always means changing it, because pure translation is impossible). Production adapts it to constraints (which means changing it again).

By the time it reaches market, the thing bears the same relationship to the original strategic intent that a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy bears to the original document.

Technically derived from it. Practically unrecognizable.

This is why Narrativ.Design doesn't hand off. We navigate the whole system - from strategic conception through execution to market deployment - as one continuous dynamic adjustment.

Not because we're territorial about process. Because the physics demands it.

You cannot navigate a chaotic system through sequential decisions. You navigate it through continuous sensing of all forces simultaneously.

The Geographic Multiplication

About scaling brand work across geographies.

It's not just "adapt the strategy for local market." That's the two-body thinking.

Each geography adds new bodies to the system:

• Different cultural gravity

• Different competitive forces

• Different execution constraints

• Different production realities

• Different retail dynamics

Vietnam to SEA isn't translation. It's navigating a whole solar system with three-body problems that need to maintain coherence with each other while adapting to local forces.

Do that wrong and you get:

• Brand fragmentation (looks like two different companies)

• Strategic drift (positioning shifts in translation)

• Execution inconsistency (quality varies by market)

..momentum lost (sequential launches instead of coordinated).

Physics would suggest that you build synchronized execution that maintains brand integrity while adapting to local forces.

You can't do that with disconnected vendors in each market. The system fragments.

You can do it with integrated partnership that treats the whole thing as one coherent chaotic system.

And that's not marketing speak.

The Lagrange Point

In physics, Lagrange points are these miraculous positions where a small object can maintain stable orbit relative to two larger bodies.

In brand strategy, the Lagrange point is that moment when:

• Market positioning feels differentiated and true

• Cultural meaning aligns with business model

• Creative expression captures strategic intent

• Team alignment crystallizes around something real

• Execution path becomes clear

You know it when you find it. There's a rightness to it. Everything clicks.

The problem is these moments are temporary.

Market forces shift. Cultural currents change. Competitive dynamics evolve. The Lagrange point moves.

The skill isn't just finding it - though that's hard enough. The skill is recognizing when you've found it and moving fast to lock it in before the forces shift.

Founders doing this themselves typically:

• Don't recognize the moment when it arrives (too close to see it clearly)

• Can't move fast enough to execute before it shifts (too many sequential steps)

• Second-guess it because they lack external validation (no confidence to commit)

By the time they've convinced themselves, redesigned everything, and launched, the Lagrange point has moved. They're executing yesterday's answer to yesterday's configuration of forces.

This is why speed of response matters. And why integration matters. And why external perspective matters.

Not because founders are incapable. Because navigating chaos requires seeing the whole system while being outside its gravitational pull, and you can't be both inside and outside simultaneously.

Physics is unforgiving about these things.

DIY Works

To be fair, there are times when doing it yourself makes perfect sense:

• You're genuinely solving a two-body problem. Early stage, no competition, optimizing known variables. Product-market fit, not brand-market-culture fit.

• You have no meaningful competition yet. Market forces are minimal. Differentiation isn't the game, existence is.

• Timeline pressure is minimal. You can afford six months of iteration and correction.

• Stakes are low. Wrong answer doesn't kill the business.

In those cases? DIY away. Learn through doing. Make mistakes cheaply.

But if you're in competitive markets, needing differentiation at scale, repositioning an established brand, expanding geographically, or racing against a market window - you're in three-body territory.

And three-body problems don't get easier through practice. They get easier through expertise.

The question is whether you want to spend eighteen months learning chaos navigation yourself, or work with someone who's done it a hundred times.

Most founders choose the first path. Expensive tuition in the school of hard lessons.

As a founder myself, I’ve incurred that expensive tuition on many aspects of business myself. Guilty as charged!

The smart ones - and by smart I mean the ones who've already paid that tuition once - choose the second.

True! AI won't solve your Branding and doing it yourself might destroy it.

Goodluck Sherlock!

Poincaré never solved the three-body problem. Neither has anyone since.

What we learned instead is that some problems aren't meant to be solved. They're meant to be navigated.

The universe plays by rules but doesn't care about your predictions. Brand strategy works the same way. Market forces, business ambitions, cultural meaning - all following laws, none of them predictable.

You can fight that reality. Insist that with enough analysis, enough AI tools, enough internal workshops, you'll crack the code.

Or you can accept that chaos requires navigation, not solution.

We don't solve your three-body problem. We navigate it with you - through market forces, business ambitions, and cultural truth - until we find the rare stable configuration where your brand can thrive.

Then we execute it without compromise. Across geographies. At scale. As one coherent system.

And chaos doesn't forgive amateur navigation.