I didn’t expect this project

I didn’t expect this project to become less about products and more about assumptions. The brief was to work on positioning within the sports nutrition space, which initially pointed towards familiar territory: ingredients, benefits, and competitor differentiation. But quite early in the work, that framing started to feel too narrow for what was actually going on in the category. Most brands are already clear on a functional level. People understand protein, creatine, recovery, performance. There isn’t much confusion there. The more interesting question became what those products sit inside, not what they contain. Training is a repeated behaviour, not a one-time decision. And over time, that repetition starts to shape identity in a way that individual product claims don’t fully capture. That shifted the work away from product messaging and towards something more structural: how meaning is created through use, not description. I put the full breakdown together here: https://1drv.ms/b/c/a88697ce8a50923a/IQDvWXdNo1aRR5cDO0pDJtnNARyhanwYCriAuItT0eX52Vw?e=mgq5wA