Then you obviously have zero understanding of the Ferrari brand and its history

Roughly 5% of your buyers are in the market right now. The other 95% aren't shopping and can't be nagged into it (John Dawes, Ehrenberg-Bass). So when your capture funnel "explodes," relax. You and every competitor are speed-running the same tiny pool, and the flatline is already booked. That was never growth. johndawes.info/the-955-rule/

The instinct that helps a founder find a product is the same one that kills the brand. Both run on chasing what's working this week. But brand only forms when you repeat one thing until the market believes it, and that repetition is unbearable to anyone who can already feel the next trend coming. Reposition three times a year and nobody gets the chance to remember you.

"Brand problem" is usually what people say when they're avoiding a positioning decision. I've had this exact conversation at three-person startups and at companies doing nine figures. It lands the same way every time, which after many years of building these functions is the part I trust more than any single case. A founder told me a few years back that his growth had stalled because his brand wasn't strong enough. He wanted a refresh and a campaign to get the name out there. The site was clean, the logo was fine. Brand was never the issue, and it took about four minutes to show him why. I asked him to describe who the product was for in one sentence, without using the word "everyone." He couldn't. Three tries, each contradicting the last. That's the actual brand problem, and it's almost always the one underneath. Nobody inside the company agreed on who they were selling to, so every asset pulled in a slightly different direction and none of it held. So we didn't run a campaign. We picked one customer and wrote a single sentence about what the product did for them. Then cut everything from the site and the deck that didn't serve it. It felt like giving ground. Half the team was sure we were shrinking the market. [what actually happened, with real numbers and timeframe]. Inbound got better because people could finally tell whether the thing was for them. Here's why a few-year-old story still matters. The tooling looks nothing like it did then. The conversation is word for word the same. AI is very good at the production work now, churning out assets and workflows that used to eat a quarter. What it can't do is decide who you're for. That call still takes someone who has sat in the room and made it before, and got it wrong a few times. Give it a clear position to work from and it earns its keep. The trouble is most companies hand it the same muddle they've always had, so now they just get more of it, faster and cheaper. The hard part was never the making. It was knowing what to make and who for, and that hasn't gotten any less scarce.

It’s not about channel, it’s about brand and creativity…

If AI is the foundation, as you say, then there is zero use case for Webflow.

🤷🏻‍♂️

Spent years building attribution models. Most of it was theater. Someone catches your billboard at lunch, scrolls past your post that night. Two days later they click a Google ad and convert. The dashboard credits Google for the whole thing. The models are a directional read. They aren't truth. The hours you'd waste asking them to settle arguments they can't settle are better spent on the brand work that makes someone search for you unprompted.

The Burger King Mandalorian campaign is a moulded helmet. Your Whopper ships inside cardboard shaped like Mando's skull, in 70 markets ahead of the May 22 film. Meanwhile the trade press is debating whether the right Meta creative variant count is 200 a month or 2,000. One of these is going home with people.

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Holly Humberstone’s “Beauty Pageant” is a catchy song… It only works so well because it’s lifted straight from The Beatles “Hey Jude”

If your company's brand values include "innovative" and "customer-centric," congratulations. You've described every company on earth. And therefore none of them. Brand is the opinion you hold that makes competitors uncomfortable. If nobody disagrees with your positioning, you don't have any.

Ahrefs studied 150M keywords. 45.7% of Google searches by volume are branded. Separate study of 75K brands: branded web mentions correlated with AI Overview visibility at 0.664. Backlinks sat at 0.10. Your brand work shows up in search data before it shows up anywhere else. If you’re running brand and SEO as separate teams with separate KPIs, you’re measuring the same thing twice in two rooms.

"Replaced my marketing team with AI" vs "AI will never replace humans." Both misreading the data. Marketing roles up 14% YoY. AI adoption 91%. Only 6% fully embedded. A Stanford study found early-career sales and marketing roles down ~20%. The effect shrinks with seniority. A mid-market marketing team needs 1,100 decisions per week. They have capacity for maybe 300. AI handles that gap and it should. But the 300 that actually matter require positioning judgment, competitive context, and calls made with incomplete information. You can't wire that into a workflow because the context shifts weekly and depends on signals that aren't in any system. The teams struggling now aren't ignoring AI. They automated everything without knowing which decisions were worth protecting.

There's a type of competitor that never leads. They watch. They wait. Then they produce a slightly worse version of whatever you did last month. It'd be flattering if it weren't so boring. Original thinking leaves fingerprints. Copies don't. Your audience can tell even when you think they can't.