FEHR: Clarity, Taste, Strategy

Based on Sophia Marie Fehr's public method. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Sophia Marie Fehr.

When to use

Use this skill when a team has attractive creative work but an unclear brand promise, a positioning statement that staff cannot explain, competing audience assumptions, or a strategy meeting that produces discussion without decisions. It also supports product development, hospitality concepts, channel briefs, and leadership sparring where brand choices must translate into everyday behavior.

The deliverable is a concise decision brief: the decision and its authority, three diagnostic answers, a supported brand core, chosen audience, one-sentence position, creative criteria, delivery requirements, and next actions. Adapt its length to the assignment. For a narrow creative review, evaluate the supplied positioning and recommend changes within the requested scope. For a full strategy assignment, complete the whole brief.

Read references/method.md first. Its evidence labels distinguish Fehr's public principles, a third-party account of her work, and this package's practical adaptations. The recurring questions are paraphrased from the supplied LinkedIn post's three publicly accessible images. They are one verified installment of a recurring format, not a claim that every installment uses the same questions. Consult references/sources.md for provenance before attributing a claim.

Procedure

1. Frame the decision. Read method: Intake and evidence. Identify the requested output, business tension, available evidence, constraints, and decision deadline. Separate observations from assumptions. Ask only for missing inputs that affect the recommendation; use clearly marked hypotheses when useful work can proceed.
2. Establish decision authority. Apply the first diagnostic in method: Three meeting questions. Identify who can approve the specific choice today and the limits of that mandate. If authority is absent, produce a recommendation and identify the unresolved decision rather than recording fictional agreement.
3. Test internal clarity. Apply the second diagnostic in method: Three meeting questions. Ask whether a new employee could explain the brand's position in one sentence. Diagnose ambiguity in the position before polishing communications. Mark an unperformed employee test as pending.
4. Choose the customer horizon. Apply the third diagnostic in method: Three meeting questions. Distinguish the customer served today from the customer the organization wants to attract. State which one guides this decision and what a transition would require.
5. Find the lived core. Follow method: Core before expression. Extract repeatable strengths, customer benefits, and credible behaviors from the supplied material. Identify what matters and what can be omitted. Avoid turning a desired future attribute into a present fact.
6. Make positioning a choice. Use method: Position and exclusions. Write one plain sentence connecting audience, promise, and credible distinction. State the alternative audience, offer, or behavior being deprioritized. If no distinctive evidence exists, recommend discovery or product improvement.
7. Define taste in context. Use method: Taste as selection. Translate the position into concrete creative criteria for imagery, language, collaborations, materials, or space. Explain each choice's relationship to the audience and promise. Identify familiar category codes that would make the work interchangeable.
8. Connect promise to delivery. Apply method: Strategy as continuity. Specify what the product, service, team, and channels must do to support the position. Identify fragile promises that depend on one leader's presence and repair those dependencies before claiming consistency.
9. Compare and edit. Use method: Decision rules and edge cases and worked examples. Compare plausible options against clarity, distinctiveness, and deliverability. Remove additions that weaken the promise. Keep commercial or ethical tensions visible when relevant to the brief.
10. Write the decision brief. Fill templates/output-template.md. Lead with the recommendation and status, explain the supporting choices, and assign proportionate actions with owners and review points. Include uncertainties and what evidence would change the recommendation.
11. Review before handoff. Run checklists/review-checklist.md. Repair failed checks and report any unresolved dependency. Do not imply Fehr reviewed the work, invent business results, or treat a strategy recommendation as permission to publish or contact people.

Files in this skill

• SLUG.txt: Package identifier for naming and discovery.
• SKILL.md: Entry point, use cases, and eleven-step workflow.
• references/method.md: Principles, paraphrased meeting questions, decision rules, and attribution boundaries.
• references/sources.md: Nine fetched public sources, contributions, and research limitations.
• examples/worked-examples.md: Two invented illustrations showing weak drafts, improved briefs, and applied rules.
• templates/output-template.md: Deliverable structure with field-by-field instructions.
• checklists/review-checklist.md: Pass/fail quality gates and common failures with fixes.