Lateral thinking, engineered for brand strategy.

Oblique Brand Strategies is a digital instrument for brand strategists, marketers, and founders who sense that the obvious answer is usually the wrong one. It reimagines Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's legendary Oblique Strategies — a deck of creative constraints designed to break creative blocks through lateral thinking — as a structured toolkit for building sharper, more distinctive brands.

The original deck offered short, poetic prompts meant to disrupt stuck thinking in the studio. Here, each of the 129 provocations is translated into a concrete brand-strategy application, organised across four sequential phases: positioning, narrative, differentiation, and execution. Use the Oracle to shuffle a single strategy when you are stuck, browse the full matrix to study an entire phase, and save the cards that reframe how you see the market in front of you.

It is built for the people responsible for how a brand shows up in the world — strategists shaping positioning, writers finding the narrative, designers drawing the line between sameness and difference, and operators turning intent into execution. It is a tool for the moments when a brief feels too safe, a category feels too crowded, or a team needs a productive jolt sideways.

Oblique Brand Strategies is built and maintained by Born Good — a studio working at the intersection of brand, behaviour, and technology. The framework is offered freely as a working method, not a fixed doctrine: reorder it, argue with it, and let it steer you toward the strategy you would not have reached on your own.