Best practice is a comfort blanket.
Best practice sounds professional and safe. Strip it back, though, and it only means one thing: someone else has already done it. In 18 years of brand strategy, from Jung von Matt to Mother in London to Scholz & Friends, I have watched the same pattern play out. Brands that stick to best practice rarely get things wrong. They also rarely shape their category.
Follow the same playbook and sooner or later you look the same
Best practice standardises. When everyone optimises for the same benchmarks, you don't get an edge, you get sameness. Best practice answers the question ‘What works?’ Next practice asks ‘What works next, and why should we be the first to do it?’
Optimisation reacts. Anticipation leads.
The difference is where you look
Best practice looks back, at case studies and industry averages. Next practice looks ahead: at cultural shifts, new narratives and tensions in the audience that hardly anyone is picking up yet. That is exactly why we built our own intelligence at Forderland. Not to count faster what has been, but to see sooner what is coming.
Why now
AI makes best practice available to everyone: the same benchmarks, the same analyses, the same optimisations. Yesterday's edge becomes today's baseline. The advantage moves to those who ask: ‘What can we see that others can't see yet?’
That is next practice. And it is a new strategic ambition: to jump further, to find new paths, and to do not merely the obvious next thing but what truly makes an impact.
