The average brand barely exists
Many businesses fear the same thing when they are measured: "we are probably just average." We have tested that fear on 351 Danish brands, discipline by discipline. It does not hold. The typical brand sits in the middle of the field in only about one in four of its sections, and nine in ten brands deviate markedly from the field in at least one place.
The myth of the middle
When we measure a brand on our 13 measured disciplines and compare it with the field, you might expect most to cluster in the middle. They do not. Only 36 of 351 brands sit in the middle of the field in half or more of their disciplines. The typical brand is not average. It is uneven: strong in some places, weak in others, and only rarely mostly in the middle.
And most important: 90 percent of all brands have at least one discipline in which they deviate markedly from the field, upwards or downwards. In other words, almost all of them have edges. Few know where those edges are.
The edges are the strategy
That changes what a brand measurement is for. The task is not to discover WHETHER you stand out; almost everyone does, somewhere. The task is to find out WHERE, and whether the edges are in the right places: a marked strength in a discipline customers do not care about is wasted distinctiveness, and a marked weakness in a discipline the category competes on is an open flank.
The ten percent who actually sit mostly in the middle have, paradoxically, the hardest task: they must create an edge from nothing. Everyone else "merely" has to move their efforts to where the edges already are, or ought to be.
What this means for your brand
Do not ask "how do we do overall?" The average across 13 measured disciplines smooths out exactly what you need. Ask instead: where are our two or three marked deviations, and were they chosen or accidental? A strength you have chosen and tend is a position. A strength nobody has noticed is a coincidence that can vanish with the next reorganisation.
How we measured (method)
The figures are based on 351 brands analysed in brandvju as of October 2026, all measured with the same method. "The middle of the field" and "marked deviation" are defined from the field's own spread per discipline (the same band used in our reports), so that a deviation means the same in all disciplines.