A little love note this week: huge congrats to the Passionfroot team on their Series A—I am so happy for them!! 🍊

I’ve been a creator on the platform for a while now (in my ~b2b influencer era~), which means brands come to me; briefs, contracts, and payments all live in one place; I get paid on time and I never chase an invoice. If you’ve ever tried to run this out of a spreadsheet and your DMs (hi, 2016), you know what a gift that is.

A few weeks ago, I went to an all-day marketing retreat where the sponsors weren’t revealed until the event itself, and even then, the branding was barely there. That level of restraint, frankly, stuck with me because it points to where things are heading, and have been for a while: traditional channels have tanked, the bar for earning trust is going up exponentially. People came because of the person, not the brand, who invited them.

B2B creators are on the rise because buyers trust independent voices. Attention is harder to buy, trust even more so—you’ve heard all this before, but it keeps getting truer, and creators still have both.

How your brand gets interpreted isn’t limited to how you show up on your own channels; it’s all the people around you and what they’re saying about you or your team and how that makes people feel. It’s your employees posting on LinkedIn, which creators you invite to dinner, what your founder talks about outside the product.

To stand out now, you have to find specific, individual people who can act as extensions of what you’re building, who are willing to invite you into the conversations they’re having with their communities.

Passionfroot is one really good way to find those people and start.

If you’re a B2B creator or a company trying to reach one, I heartily endorse. Oh yeah, and Passionfroot is hiring a founding marketer to help drive this next chapter, so if that’s you (or someone you know), lmk and I’ll make the intro!

If someone sent you this post and you’re not subscribed, join those people learning how to tactically advocate for brand at your company. 📬

Subscribe now

When I was in college and then just starting out in marketing, before I knew much about the practicalities behind brand strategy, long before I built brand at Brex or Notion, I’d spend hours designing pretend brands in Sketch or Illustrator (it was pre-Figma…I’m dating myself).

I doubt I registered it at the time, but making up these “mockup brands” was showing me what I wanted to do with my future career.

The Sketch file was my playground, my sandbox for figuring out what branding actually meant—how picturing the world you want to live in or the experience you want to have can shape an entire strategy.

Last week I shared my process in designing my ecommerce DTC brand, Zips. In digging through my Google Drive for that post, I thought revisiting these old experiments might make for a fun post too.

Pushing pixels around in Sketch, I was practicing whatever skills (design, copywriting), but much more importantly, I was reconnecting with my imagination: the type of play pretend many of us enjoyed early in life, building Lego worlds or hosting tea parties for stuffed animals or playing “shop” or “house.”

Somewhere along the way, tech culture sucked that out of us.

We’ve been conditioned by the obsession with 9-9-6 and hyper-efficiency to value busyness over creativity. Long hours (old school) or harnessing a fleet of agents (new school) mean you’re working hard; optimization means you’re producing more. It feels like tech has lost its soul in the name of output. (If you caught ’s tech worker sentiment survey, you know it’s bleak out there.)

But this relentless grind does a massive disservice to the ambitious visions we have as founders and creators. A brand whose value prop is built purely on “making you more efficient” lacks tension, plot, and substance.

Productivity is a race to the bottom. If your core value prop is just helping people do more, faster, you’re asking customers to build a transactional relationship with a utility, not an emotional one with a brand. (And if your brand treats productivity as the ultimate good, don’t be surprised when your customers burn out on you the same way they burn out on their jobs.)

So, what do we do?

We put the soul back.

We make it fun. We play pretend. We make shit up. As put it, you can’t compete with a brand that’s having fun.

If the capitalists among us need another reason, let’s remember that creating money-making companies with beloved, lasting reputations in fact requires much of that same imagination, vision, suspension of disbelief that we practiced in our childhoods.

We overcomplicate brand building, but at its core, it’s just structured play. Making up fake brands can teach you more about copywriting, positioning, and storytelling than any framework or deck. When you’re making things up from scratch, it forces you to build from gut instinct and answer the only questions that actually matter: Who is this for? What does it feel like? What world am I creating?

You don’t need a 40-page strategy deck to answer those questions. You just need practice—and a sandbox of words, shapes, and colors.

So, in the spirit of bringing a little soul back to the work, let’s dig into my dusty archive of play pretend...

Great artists steal

But first, a disclaimer: Good artists copy; great artists steal.

Picasso kept it real, so I will too. Not all of these “brands” I created back in 2016–2018 are wholly original. Brands aren’t born in a vacuum! When you’re just starting out, playing often looks like trying on someone else’s clothes to see how they fit. In my case, most of them were just me trying to reverse-engineer the brands I was obsessed with—taking apart the toaster to see how it works.

Take Ubetchu: my obvious attempt at recreating LUSH. I was obsessed with their irreverent product names and fun copy, the excessive glitter and sensory overload; how they made sustainable beauty feel maximalist and fun and not earth-woman-recycling-center-hemp-seed preachy. Their stores smelled unreal and their salespeople were like your cool friends showing off their bathroom cabinet.

Borrowing a playbook you love is the fastest way to figure out why it works. You’ll never recreate the original magic exactly, but in the effort of trying, you usually stumble into your own. Learning “how to brand” starts with following a tiny spark of curiosity, dissecting why it resonates, and seeing what else you can build on top of it.

Which brings us to Adrôit. Adrôit (I took high school French 😭) was my francophile attempt at mastering the quiet, ultra-minimalist aesthetic that brands like Muji and early Kinfolk have perfected. I wanted to build a stationery and home decor world that felt hyper-curated. A place where “less is more” was a religion, and whitespace was treated as an intentional, structural design language.

Jooser was inspired by the early wellness wave that Moon Juice and then Pressed Juicery were riding—literally ALL the rage back in the day.

Next up was Cora the Florist—basically one interpretation of the bookstore-flower-wine-shop every woman in her 30s fantasizes about owning at some point. Cora the Florist was designed to combine florist and bakery, serving pastries decorated with edible flower petals like sugared violets and freeze-dried strawberries (bouquets available too, duh). It was a brand concept for a world that was sweet, romantic, and unashamedly delicious. (Bodoni and Josefin Sans is clearly the ultimate late-2010s “editorial chic” font pairing.)

Now, while those brands and this particular landing page never existed, but Bratsy very much did (and technically still does as a little Redubble shop)! When I was working at Redbubble in 2015, I wanted to use the marketplace as a creator, too. Bratsy was my outlet for sassy, meme-y sticker designs, heavily inspired by candy conversation hearts and the punny sticker trends that were doing gangbusters at the time (yes, things like “I like you a latte” 🥴).

The text on these stickers is my literal handwriting, which I converted into a font using a janky, free iPad app (it looks so ugly to me now, lol).

But even though this was just a random side project for a social media intern making peanuts, it was a great exercise in defining a brand: Who is the Bratsy girl? What is her attitude? And as it turns out, play pretend can be pretty lucrative. I haven’t touched that shop in years, but it has sold over 8,800 products and generated more than $7,000 in sales.

My bestselling sticker even got the ultimate stamp of cultural validation: while walking through the Melrose Trading Post flea market in LA, I saw that someone had illegally turned my artwork into an enamel pin. If you’re getting bootlegged at a flea market, you’ve officially made it.

Moral of the story: Don’t discount your creative instincts, and never let your current skill level hold you back from exploring, from just putting something out there.

(I recently bought myself a $12 iPad pencil from Walmart so I could get back to the type of random doodling I was doing a lot more of 10 years ago!)

The tech landscape feels increasingly sterile, exhausting, and optimized to death. We desperately need to reclaim our sense of play. Just think of your DREAM restaurant or fashion label or thrift store concept or whatever, open a blank file, and see where a little playing around takes you.

You’ll practice ideating (without the help of AI). You’ll remember you have this super powerful tool called imagination!! You’ll sharpen your instincts, you’ll feel the pride of trying. You might end up stumbling onto your best idea yet—or at the very least, getting bootlegged at a flea market.

For my next few posts, I’m excited to build on this idea by breaking down the actual mechanics of “world-building”—the fundamental rules of a brand world, the bizarre color constraint we used at Notion to build a distinctive brand, and maybe a few sandbox exercises you can run with your team to get unstuck. Subscribe so you don’t miss it!

Thanks for reading.

Take a play break today 🛝—and if this was helpful, consider:

• replying and saying hi!

• connecting with me (Kira Klaas 👩🏼‍💻) on LinkedIn with a note

• sending to a friend 💌 or coworker 💬

Six weeks ago, I started The Artist’s Way. It’s a book that’s been around forever; a 12-week “program,” so to speak, with different themes each week.

Each week focuses on removing creative blocks from your life, getting in touch with your inner artist child (we all have one!), and doing what you can to light that part up again.

Every day, you write your morning pages—handwritten, 3 pages, no re-reading or editing, just free-writing, exploring your mind and thoughts and true desires and creative inclinations.

Each week, you also take yourself on an artist’s date—to a library, a thrift store, a museum, bowling, whatever you want.

Each week, you look at what’s come up for you and where you’d like things to go.

Going through the process of the Artist’s Way (which many have called life-changing) has surfaced so many things for me, many of which are still unfolding in real time, being that I’m halfway through.

But it’s gotten me thinking about past projects, times I had fun and explored (playtime is often when we learn the most! 🛝), how I came to get so interested in “brand” and everything it represents to me—psychology, art and design, user experience, story, marketing, critical thinking, copywriting, cultural analysis.

Today, I’m looking back at a past project from my career-break-era that I’ve never really shared—I hope my process inspires something for you!

If someone sent you this post and you’re not subscribed, join those people learning how to tactically advocate for brand at your company. 📬

Subscribe now

Let me set the scene for you back in late 2023. My then-fiancée (a platform PM in tech) and I were planning our wedding for September, and at the same time, planning our first long-term career break to travel full-time, internationally, for ~9 months (you can read about where we went over on 🫒 Sabbatique).

We wanted to start a family upon our return (hi, Gisele—you’re 10 months old now!), and while the intention of the career break was very much a break, it’s hard to completely shed the internalized pressures to keep hustling, and so this break from our corporate ladder-climbing also gave us the perfect window to experiment with building a lifestyle brand.

(I also built my brand marketing course during this time, and at the end of that break, started this newsletter! Don’t forget to give yourself space—creative pursuits really benefit from them.)

We wanted to try building a little ecommerce engine to bring in some extra income while we were traveling; something we’d work on part-time and see what we’d learn, most likely going back to our FT roles anyway after we ended our travels (we did).

This post is not about building your supply chain from scratch (my quick advice there: start small, manufacture locally if you’re going at this on the side—you can build in better margins later; there is definitely someone who can make a version of what you need as you’re getting started and validating everything!). But I am going to show you how we went from 0 to something good enough that someone wanted to buy it.

And noting: This was a small-budget, bootstrapped venture, not something we were trying to make the next Casper or Quip toothbrushes or whatever. Experimentation and learning and some pocket change to fund our travels worked just fine for us!

So, what was our product gonna be?

Well, for this to work, we wanted something small, relatively cheap to start manufacturing. It also needed an obvious white space for better, more distinct branding and positioning. My specialty!

Enter: Mouth tape.

Defining the white space

My husband had started taping his mouth at night off a tip from my aunt, who told my mom, who gave him a roll of surgical tape to give it a try.

It functionally worked, but it wasn’t very pleasant, the shape/size was inconsistent and was hard to rip, it left sticky residue, it looked stupid.

At the time, the main brand in the space was Hostage Tape—literally a chunk of black tape you’d put on your mouth, giving you the appearance of a kidnapped person. Cute!

They were very much not speaking to the TikTok wellness girlies who were already masking and silk bonneting and silicone patching every night.

I take it as heartfelt validation that, not long after Zips launched, Lauryn Bosstick launched her own line of pink, super-girly lip-shaped mouth tape, and then so did like fifty other influencers. Just look at how much the market exploded! In 2023–2024, there was not much going on in this market as far as brand storytelling—people in on the trend, which was very emergent, mostly used literal tape or bought from clinically/“medically” positioned brands.

Nowhere was there a brand talking about the inherent power of breath, emphasizing sleep hygiene and respiratory health as benefits, and looking cute and approachable while doing it.

If you’ve dreamed of launching your own ecommerce product, start with the positioning opportunity.

How is your approach different?

Does that difference make sense?

Is there existing demand for the product (product-market fit) but no one appealing to a certain audience’s emotional needs or aspirations (brand-market fit)?

This is literally why Liquid Death exists:

1. Packaged water. Commodity, exists everywhere in a million forms (no innovation).
2. Can it. Now you have a small edge (packaging innovation).
3. Make it heavy-metal/punk-themed so people can drink it at parties and not look like party poopers.

Now you have a huge edge (emotional/positioning innovation). Liquid death’s success is ALL brand-market fit.

Mouth tape was clinical, ugly, unapproachable. At worst it’s even sort of freaky and creepy (which Hostage Tape evidently embraced). My self-assigned brief for this visual brand and voice was fun, playful, approachable, with an emphasis on wellness, breath as health, rather than on the shame or embarrassment of snoring/mouth-breathing, or some thing you have to “fix.”

Envisioning our approach

I started by pinning and moodboarding consumer brands and imagery that I felt captured the fresh, playful spirit I wanted the brand to embody—other consumables that came in small packages, like gum, skin patches, floss, gummies, even condoms. Hims’ ED mints (pictured) reminds me of the tin of flake salt I got at my favorite restaurant in NYC. You can look anywhere for inspiration.

Like Liquid Death canning water, or Graza putting olive oil in a squeeze bottle, or Glossier using pink bubble wrap pouches instead of plain clear wrap, how you deliver something is a major part of your differentiation.

Then I narrowed in on “sticker” and “patch” brands specifically, and health and skincare related brands—what were they doing? What was working? Starface, Rael, Mighty Patch, etc. Or what about literal sticker brands?

I started to sketch out some ideas for packaging as we were exploring naming. The name, Zips, is sort of a cute play on “zip it!” for people who are taping because they don’t want to mouth-breathe or snore.

The word “zip” is zippy! It’s playful, lighthearted! It’s short. It was memorable in this market. There was an easy domain and social handles that worked (itszips.com).

I was figuring out the product shape and brand shape system at the same time (a lot of weird shapes were explored… considered… tested… discarded).

The puffy “x” shape sealed the deal 🫡 and gave me lots of friendly, fluffy, cloud-like motifs to work with.

And the smiley wearing the tape was a “duh” as soon as I landed on it. Again, approachability was key. Mouth taping, if that’s something you wanna try, shouldn’t feel creepy. It should feel nice, and make you happy. (And it makes it very obvious what the product is.)

We needed to nail down the color palette. The light blue I was liking for the tape, in its airiness and gender/skintone neutrality, easily welcomed the other two parts of the primary palette, red and yellow, but we needed a sportier red and a highlighter yellow to keep it fresh, fun—zippy!

We also quickly learned that the pretty colors on your computer rarely translate well to physical products except at very high minimums and price points which we were not willing to spring for at this point.

For the actual tape, we needed a blue that worked with our more limited inventory options, so periwinkle joined the mix as the main product (PMS) color.

We also needed to provide a pattern (random cut) for the paper backing of each piece of mouth tape, so this was a good way to bring in the true Zips blue.

Now it was coming together! Packaging was next. And texting all my friends my ugly mockups (thank you, Hilary <3).

I think of Zips mouth tape pieces as stickers (again, stickers are more fun to use than tape), so I leaned way into the “sticker” function for our graphics. Things started to jive. 🩹

This is where our real packaging landed!

Thanks to some good mockup tools, we could start making legit marketing assets before we had boxes in hand.

(The perfectionists among us will want to wait until everything is “ready” to go… it’s constant practice remembering life doesn’t wait!)

Being the good Millennial I am, I immediately envisioned our custom sticker pack, one of which is included in every box of mouth tape, à la Glossier circa 2017.

Cutting room floor: Sometimes you need to try weird stuff. (Tape on pizza??)

But here was a real brand forming, with a distinct point of view, a consistent look and feel, a through line between product, brand, and experience, and plenty of blue sky opportunity ✨ for brand-building or product line expansion ahead.

While we were in New Zealand with my in-laws, who had kindly brought us more boxes of product from the states to shoot UGC with, I borrowed my father-in-law’s DSLR to take some basic website photos.

(This was before gen AI tools were as good as they are now, y’all, we were making it work.)

Skipping to the end of the story, we decided to sell Zips in 2025—I was pregnant, we’d both started new full-time jobs in tech, and taking an ecommerce brand from mostly-just-for-fun hobby/side project to full-fledged thing, it turns out, becomes much more about making A LOT of social media content and running paid ads, neither of which are how we wanted to spend our time or even pay someone else to do (it was the one time I made a TikTok account, and I really hated it, lol).

But I had SO much fun crafting this brand, playing designer and making something from scratch. I’m so glad we did it.

So that’s the story of how we conceived, built, launched, scaled, and sold our own DTC ecommerce brand in 18 months.

I hope this inspires you, if you’ve dreamed of building your own brand.

Just get started, bit by bit. It’s okay if it looks amateur at first… or for a while.

(I’m really trying not to gleep this, but gosh, aren’t there a million things I’d do to polish this up and take the brand further, if it were still in my hands!)

And now that gen AI tools like Firefly have gotten so much better, you can really ideate and iterate on things like tech packs and mockups so much faster—just don’t hand over the reins completely, or I think you’ll find yourself burning out.

When it comes to creating a brand, you need to feel ownership over the process if you’re going to sustain your energy around your idea!

And feelings of ownership and accountability only truly develop when you’re doing the thinking, trying and failing, trying again and getting it to work, feeling the pride and satisfaction of having arrived somewhere yourself—understanding exactly why something worked or didn’t work. That is the beautiful art of the process serving you, giving you a gift.

It doesn’t have to be perfect, instantly scaled, existing in every possible variation you can dream of (hyaluronic-acid-infused mouth tape, anyone?). Just do something that lets you try. Play. Experiment. Have fun with what you create!

P.S. You can can still buy Zips over at itszips.com (I no longer own it—I don’t make any money from that). But I do have a few boxes in my garage—if you want one, I’ll give you one IRL!

Thanks for reading.

ZIPPEE!! If this was helpful, consider:

• replying and saying hi!

• connecting with me (Kira Klaas 👩🏼‍💻) on LinkedIn with a note (I won’t see it otherwise!)

• sending to a friend 💌 or coworker 💬

And if 7:30pm is past your bedtime, I’m also hosting a we’re-not-at-Cannes post-Config happy hour with the excellent team at Capsule. It’ll be at Amelie on Polk, where you can share a glass of wine and a lump of smelly cheese with a fellow marketing or design leader. RSVP if you’d like in!

(Side note: Is it just me, or is your LinkedIn feed also swarmed by B2B marketers attending Cannes? And if everyone in tech is going now, does that mean it’s not cool anymore? 😛)

If someone sent you this post and you’re not subscribed, join those people learning how to tactically advocate for brand at your company. 📬

Subscribe now

“So, you’re more brand than demand gen, right?”

I’ve had some version of this said to me in almost every senior marketing interview. A recruiter, a hiring manager, a founder, whoever—who has decided those are the two (very separate) buckets that everything goes in. (Nevermind the forgotten stepchild, product marketing.)

I’ll tell you what I was doing in those years they’re categorizing as “brand”: at Brex, building integrated media campaigns that introduced the product to hundreds of thousands of people who’d never heard of it. At Notion, running out-of-home across a dozen cities to move a market that didn’t know it needed a new way to work. At Gusto, launching the company’s first-ever brand campaign with Kristen Schaal to show businesses something way better existed. Not brand as a design sub-function (working with design to create the visual identity was part of the job, but not all of it). Not brand as a service org briefed to make ads look nice. Creating demand where none existed.

By definition, that’s demand generation.

So what is demand gen, exactly? If we google it, here’s what comes back: “The umbrella term for top-of-funnel marketing activities aimed at creating long-term brand awareness and warming up leads before they are ready to buy.” That’s a brand marketing definition. The same search tells you demand gen channels are search, retargeting, ABM, performance social, lifecycle. Those don’t create awareness. They capture it. They find the people who already know who you are and provide an opportunity for that familiarity to turn into a conversion.

Like many terms in marketing, the term “demand gen” has been badly misused. And because nobody stopped to fix it, the entire SaaS marketing industry built its org structures, its hiring categories, its agency specializations, and its budget debates on a definition that means something different to everyone in the room (I’m not the only one confused—just ask Reddit).

Said with love, the people who force us into a lane are not usually the people in the weeds doing the work: Recruiters sorting profiles into buckets; founders who’ve decided marketing means pipeline and brand is overhead; finance teams comparing CPL across channels where one channel doesn’t generate a trackable lead. All of us have absorbed a broken definition and made it structural. Except practitioners actually running integrated campaigns know that line doesn’t hold.

If demand generation means what it says—generating demand, creating desire for your product in people who didn’t have it before—then the function doing that work is brand marketing. OOH introduces your product to a market that’s never heard of it. Events create emotional connection and fodder for WOM sharing. Content reshapes how a category is understood. Campaigns put your name in the right place in someone’s consideration set before they know they need you. That is literally demand being generated.

Search, retargeting, ABM, performance social, etc. are channels that find people where demand already exists and capture it. They’re great at that job. But they’re not pure demand generation. They’re demand capture. Very likely, some intent was already there when they showed up.

Somewhere along the way the industry renamed the capture function “demand gen.” Probably because “capturing demand” sounds passive and “generating demand” sounds like growth. 🙃 But syntax has consequences. It made brand marketing look like something softer, upstream, adjacent to the real work. Something you do before marketing actually starts. AND I HATE THAT FOR US!

Most conversions are only possible because someone did the upstream work. The branded search query that closed at near-zero CAC—somebody put that keyword in the customer’s head. The retargeted ad that got the click—why were they worth retargeting? Brand marketing did that. The capture channel got the credit. This is why the brand vs. demand budget debate never goes anywhere. The attribution model runs on last touch, and last touch rewards the channel present at the moment of conversion, not the chain of exposures that made it possible.

(I wrote about this in “How to Explain Brand to Finance”: the math companies actually use doesn’t credit the work that created the demand. So brand defends itself every quarter with metrics that don’t show up in the dashboard its work built.)

When you organize teams around a broken definition, you get dysfunction. With brand, that often looks like either:

1. Brand more or less reports into demand/gets the budget leftovers from growth marketing: brand becomes a service org. The team gets briefed after strategy is set. They make the ads look good, write the copy, execute what the demand team decided it needed. They’re not in the room for the questions that shape the brand—what should we be known for, to whom, and why now. So brand drifts into whatever performs best this week. CAC creeps up. The brand loses shape, and people start to shape it for you.

2. Or, brand reports into design, fully detached from marketing: the team gets very good at visual identity, type systems, photography direction. But they’re not in the room when the question is which segments to move against this quarter, or what messaging will land with them. Brand’s just seen as who’s pushing back on asks to make the logo bigger while campaign and flighting decisions happen elsewhere. The brand looks consistent visually, but strategically, your story is all over the place.

Both structures make the same mistake. If brand marketing is the demand generation function (which it is), it can’t report into demand capture. It has to sit alongside it, planning at the same time, on the same calendar.

How to fix this? Sequence your channels!!

Once you accept that brand generates demand and capture channels convert it, the planning model designs itself. You can stop treating them like two separate workstreams competing for budget. They’re both part of one campaign with two jobs, running in sequence.

I’ve referenced this rough flighting model (first shared with me by Dani McDonald, who succeeded me as Brand Director at Brex ☺️) for years as a way to visualize about this:

Brand marketing should run in heavy-up periods: integrated campaigns, OOH, experiential, events, big creative pushes concentrated around the moments you’re trying to move a market or own a season. Between heavy-ups, brand stays on at a maintenance level. Lower spend, always present, driving site traffic and keeping the brand visible.

Demand capture is always on. Search, ABM, lifecycle, performance social, retargeting. Its job is to convert the intent that brand generated—organic and paid. BUT, the key is that capture should also be coordinated with the wave brand just created, not with totally separate creative and messaging. A brand heavy-up creates a surge of new awareness. The capture layer needs to lean into that surge for weeks and months after the campaign ends, not just during.

Product marketing layers in around launches and category moves, heavy around those moments and at maintenance the rest of the year. (That’s why early-stage companies often look heavier on product marketing—they’re just getting started, launches happen every few weeks. As you grow, you won’t have as rapid product/feature news to share—you’ll need to manufacture another reason for people to pay attention.)

Intentional sequencing works because it mirrors the actual customer journey. Brand warms up the room. Capture works the room and closes. A retargeted ad served to someone who saw your billboard last week costs less to convert than a cold impression served to someone who’s never heard of you. Brand creates awareness and also reduces the price of every conversion that follows.

At Notion, this is what integrated campaigns actually looked like. Out-of-home and brand media drove the awareness spike—billboards, transit, social, influencer, experiential. In the same window, Google, Meta, and search retargeting were set up to capture the awareness the OOH was creating, using the same creative system, geo-targeted to the OOH footprint. If you saw a Notion billboard in San Francisco on Monday, you got a Notion ad on Instagram on Wednesday that picked up where the billboard left off.

We measured across geos: markets with brand activations versus markets without, with demand spend held constant. Markets with the brand layer drove a ~20% awareness lift in core segments and a corresponding lift in signups and site traffic that showed up weeks after the OOH came down. The brand spike created demand. The capture engine converted it thanks to being on the same brief, same calendar, same dashboard.

To conclude my existential crisis…

I’m done nodding when someone guesses I’m “more brand than demand gen.”

Because if demand generation means what it says (and I think it should), I’ve been generating demand my entire career. So have most of the brand marketers I know. We built the associations that made products worth choosing, generated the interest that search and retargeting later converted and claimed credit for. Someone else just named the function.

That's what happens inside a broken definition long enough: everyone accepts the limits it places on them. Marketers settle into lanes. Agencies pick sides. Leaders hire for people who’ve “run the playbook before,” never pausing to ask if the playbook is describing the right job.

Which means the companies that say they don’t invest in brand are almost certainly wrong. They’re investing in brand. They’re just doing it more or less accidentally, without a strategic frame, wondering why their CAC keeps climbing and their story is confusing.

You can’t not do brand work. Every campaign builds brand equity and cohesion, or fragments it. The only question is whether you’re doing it on purpose.

So: are you brand or demand gen?

Both. You’ve always been both. 👊🏼

P.S. If you’re a demand gen marketer reading this…

…and want to deepen your definition of brand, you might like How to Explain Brand to Finance and How Do You Measure Brand?

Thanks for reading.

How does your org define brand and demand gen? Have you gotten it figured out?

And if this was helpful, consider:

• replying and saying hi!

• connecting with me (Kira Klaas 👩🏼‍💻) on LinkedIn with a note

• taking the 2-minute reader survey ‼️

• sending to a friend 💌 or coworker 💬

Paul Jun, CD at Ramp. Leland Maschmeyer, co-founder of COLLINS, one of the most respected design studios in the country. James Hurst, ECD & VP of Brand at HelloFresh. Jess Rosenberg, Head of Brand at AirOps. And me.

We were all coming from wildly different contexts, stages, functions; I thought we might find ourselves in a little more debate, but we quickly came to agree that the conversation happening in most marketing and brand organizations right now is not particularly useful.

You have the “your career is over” camp on one side and the “you can now do anything, faster!” camp on the other—and the extremism makes it harder, not easier, to figure out how to actually work with AI well. James compared where people land on AI in creative work to pandemic-era masking: Identity-coded. Resistant to nuance. Socially divisive in a way that makes an in-depth conversation nearly impossible. 😷

I think it was Leland who put it plainly: extremist narratives make it impossible for practitioners to find a grounded way to position themselves.

So here’s my attempt at finding the middle.

If someone sent you this post and you’re not subscribed, join those people learning how to tactically advocate for brand at your company. 📬

Subscribe now

What AI is good at right now

AI is an extraordinary research assistant. It synthesizes large volumes of information faster than any human team. It speeds up the early stages of creative work; the briefing, the reference-gathering, the first pass, the variations. If you’re buried in market research or trying to get through a competitive review, it is so beyond useful.

Most people aren’t disputing this; the frustration isn’t with whatever AI tool of the day. It’s with what happens when people stop there and assume the work is done.

AI indexes on what’s already approved and what already exists

Differentiation is, fundamentally, the goal of brand investment. Differentiation gets attention, gets you remembered; that’s what paves the way for conversion.

Especially in B2B and SaaS, products often look similar, pricing often converges, and positioning often sounds nearly identical. Consumer brands face the same challenge: you’re selling a commodity, you don’t want your campaign to just dissolve into the category. Differentiation is the return on investment you’re trying to generate from brand in the first place.

So the problem with AI in this context is that AI optimizes toward the already-approved. Really standout branding usually comes from the not-yet-approved.

By design, AI produces the most probable output given a prompt. It’s trained on what already exists, which means it’s oriented toward what’s been tried, validated, and recognized as good. Useful when you want something adequate; problematic when you want something distinct.

Great brand strategy is built on specificity. No one’s sad to lose your generic branded pen, but they’re glad to keep the nice felt-tip LePen with your logo on it. Turning your networking happy hour into an event with a specific theme, a specific atmosphere, a specific invite list—that signals exactly who you are and who you’re for. Have a thing and own it. Commit to the bit.

So maybe it’s AI having a bit of a cerulean sweater moment, but it’s true—AI pulls toward the mean, and mean is what makes up “generic.” To be clear: Generic isn’t always bad. But it’s familiar. Seen-it-before. And that doesn’t help with differentiation or being memorable.

Memory vs. imagination, deductive vs. inductive

Right now, AI is better at helping you with your memory than with your imagination.

The “generative” in generative AI is a little misleading. It’s not generating ideas from nothing. It’s generating outputs based on probability—weighted combinations of everything it’s seen. Hugely powerful for synthesis and recall, but it’s still not imagination; it’s deduction. Imagination requires, in James’ words, the inductive leap: the connection that shouldn’t work until it does, the thing nobody saw coming. AI doesn’t make those leaps, it averages toward the familiar.

James made another point I liked: If you ask AI for the fundamentals of how spices behave, their actual chemistry and science, rather than “write me a recipe,” you can force first-principles thinking. You can use the tool to surface raw material you might not have found yourself, then do the creative work. That discipline, that extra step, is the difference between using AI to augment your thinking and using it to replace it.

Touch grass (again)

At AirOps Next, I got to connect with my Substack pal IRL, Barrie Segal. She and I were texting about how our writing had fallen off for the both of us over the past few weeks—right around when Claude Design launched and the AI discourse on LinkedIn reached a certain level of intolerability. For weeks, I’ve felt bad about not “being more active on LinkedIn,” not finding my voice through this newsletter. What I’ve had to accept is that I’m gleaning the most right now from being chronically offline. ☠️ We have to hold boundaries to protect our finite creative energy, especially when AI promises infinite productivity.

So at the end of our live panel, when Jess asked each of us for one thing people could implement right now, everyone gave really great tactical responses about using AI tools or adjusting a workflow or repositioning yourself as a creative leader of the future. I thought for a few seconds and mine was: touch grass.

That’s by no means new advice on the topic of AI/marketing, but I think it was more of a reminder to myself (and, I’d like to think, a touch of welcome groundedness in a room that’s living in the future). AI’s training data skews recent and heavily indexed toward what’s popular and well-distributed online—Reddit, X, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Substack, industry blogs, YouTube. When you ask an LLM for inspiration, it’s the relatively modern, online world that it’s reflecting back at you.

Right now I’m reading The Wind in the Willows, which was published in 1908. Objectively, you are not encountering writing like this in any online content feed. The rhythm of the prose, the word choices, the outlandish descriptions of Toad following his obsession (motorcars) down a self-destructive rabbit hole juxtaposed with the pastoral descriptions of his friends (Mole, Rat, Badger) earnestly trying to save him from himself; well, it’s a whole other world. (Just read the first page and enjoy the feeling of your soul healing in real time.)

Every time I drive to the gym, I pass the Lacis Museum of Lace and Textiles—a tiny little craft supplies shop that displays antique lace and rare textiles. If you work for any brand adjacent to the wedding (or fashion, or home and beauty, or wellness…) industry, imagine the brand and art direction inspiration you’ll find in there!

I came across some Mattel toy catalogues from the 70s at an estate sale recently. Pages and pages of colorful creative inspiration for your next campaign!

Libraries and city history centers often keep archives of vintage product and trade catalogues and local business ephemera. How about that for your next team field trip instead of yet another visit to MoMA?

Nothing in the current trend cycle is pointing you to ideas/inspo/resources like these. A visit to an archive, a library, a physical place outside of your day-to-day (going OFFLINE!)—that’s where you find the not-yet-approved.

What will you find outside the bubble? 🫧

Thanks for reading.

How’ve you been feeling about the branding in AI discourse lately? Like Barrie and me or are we off our rockers? Hit reply or drop a comment!

And if this was helpful, consider:

• replying and saying hi!

• connecting with me (Kira Klaas 👩🏼‍💻) on LinkedIn with a note

• taking the 2-minute reader survey ‼️

• sending to a friend 💌 or coworker 💬

(Nobody had, btw. This was a room of 95 marketing VPs and CMOs.)

Half my network is buying/debating a Mac mini, LinkedIn is a scroll-hole of AI FOMO, Github is the actual new scroll-hole (have you tried browsing for Claude skills?); it’s pretty much guaranteed that there will be a new set of best practices tomorrow.

I can’t say I’m not energized though. , who I met at the retreat, is hosting a “Claude for CMOs” masterclass I’m attending this Thursday. I’m signed up for ’s MKT1 Buildathon on Friday where she’ll show us how to use her custom MKT1 MCP server. On Sunday, I spent two hours hanging out with strangers on Google Meets as we all learned the ins and outs of Claude Code—and now I have a new WhatsApp group to ask embarrassing questions (thanks / for organizing; thanks Substack Notes for the happy + extremely random connection).

I’ve built about 9 skills in the past week alone but I think plugins are where it’s at, or maybe MCPs like Emily Kramer’s. I’ve heard “Claude is the new Netflix” and I’ve been regularly hitting my Claude limits after-hours (my 7-month-old goes to sleep at 7:30pm)! My personal mission this quarter is to learn, practice, and implement as much as I can.

But as a brand-first marketer, the governance and alignment question is what a lot of this circles back to. What standards are you holding your tools to? Who owns what? How do you maintain oversight and speed? Are you actually creating consistency? As more marketing teams adopt AI tools and strengthen their individual LLM skills, who’s helping keep it all connected?

There are new rules to the game since I first wrote about building a brand culture back in 2024. What does brand consistency and quality mean at AI scale? Just how are our jobs as brand operators really changing? And is our responsibility actually much bigger than marketing? The answer is definitely yes.

This post is basically part 1 for a part 2 that I expect to write next week. I’m joining Jess Rosenberg (Head of Brand at AirOps) and Jess Ellis (Sr. Director, Brand & Content at Attentive) for a live discussion on these topics and I’m really curious to see where the conversation takes us. (My Granola will be ON!) It’s next 📅 Thursday, April 9 @ 10am PT/1pm ET, if you care to mark your calendar.

If someone sent you this post and you’re not subscribed, join those people learning how to tactically advocate for brand at your company. 📬

Subscribe now

While you have your calendar open, Later is launching a live series on the influencer campaigns that 👀 made us look. 👀 If you care about making work people actually notice, you’ll want in.

The first one is 📅 Wednesday, April 15 @ 9am PT/12pm ET and you’ll hear from (Unicorn Social, @rudeunicorns) and Hitakshi Shah (Duolingo), two of the sharpest operators in influencer marketing. They’ll talk about the campaigns that inspire them, how they make people feel, and what made them work—no decks, just real examples, pulled apart in real time.

Sign up

I still hate the term “brand police”

In How to Build a Brand Culture, I made the case that brand consistency shouldn’t come from enforcement. When you build a company where employees understand and care about the brand, consistency emerges from culture rather than compliance. “Everybody builds the brand”—whether they realize it or not. I’d stake my career on that argument.

What I didn’t account for at the time: “AI” is now one of the people building the brand.

It’s not that this is a new idea. It’s the same old challenge at new scale and speed. But so far, many of the systems we’ve built for handling it (training, culture-building, onboarding, team norms) haven’t been designed for agents and AI assistants, let alone 100+ people with their own Claude accounts.

AI doesn’t absorb culture, it follows instructions

When someone joins the team, they pick things up over time. They read the room. They internalize what “on brand” means through feedback loops, context, examples, what gets approved and what gets pushed back on, how much time you spend arguing it in a meeting, the tone and tenor of water cooler conversations.

AI agents don’t exactly do that. Yes, they can accumulate (a lot of) context, but they operate on what you give them and only what’s online. If you haven’t very specifically defined what your brand sounds like, what it prioritizes, what it avoids, they’ll fill in the blanks. Very confidently. At scale. Across every touchpoint. (Read my last post on building your brand’s AEO strategy if you want to go deeper on that.)

I mentioned I’m joining AirOps for an upcoming discussion on brand and AI. During one of our prep calls, I chatted with Jess Rosenberg, AirOps’ Head of Brand. She named something I’ve been picking up on in other conversations too: the orgs that are ahead of the game with internal AI adoption are now the ones being forced to figure out what this means for quality control. Early wins create new problems. Teams are producing more content faster than ever, and the standards for what “good” means haven’t kept pace.

This is the oldest brand challenge. AI just gave it a new deadline!

Workflow builder vs. agent captain

Back to the retreat, where the most interesting conversations happened in the breaks. What I kept hearing, from marketing execs at well-resourced companies, was some version of: we have personal workflows, some of us have team norms, almost none of us have an org-wide standard. Nobody was confident they’d solved it. (And how can you in an environment this emergent?)

But that doesn’t mean we can’t get ahead of it. One useful framing someone shared is the shift from “workflow builder” to “agent captain.” (That needs a rebrand but we can get back to that. It might just be brand engineer.) The marketer’s job is changing. Less doing, more setting standards and steering. Less using AI to write, more editor-in-chief systems. If you’re not intentional about what those systems are optimized for, they’ll optimize for output, not quality.

Which brings me to the thing that keeps anchoring all of this.

“Quality is the only durable strategy.”

Jess talked about how this is Alex’s (AirOps’ CEO) core operating belief (thank god some CEOs believe this). We’ve been saying this here forever—when volume is free, quality is the only moat. Anyone can now generate ♾️ versions of anything. What they can’t automatically generate is the right version—the one that sounds like your brand, earns trust with your audience, and says something true. And let us not forget that just because you can make/generate something doesn’t automatically make it valuable to your audience. Value is found in truth, access, process, data, information, and connection. Value is found in the things AI can’t scale: human liability and accountability, physical presence, scarcity, tangible proof. That’s what brand culture has always been trying to protect.

How to get organized for the AI chaos

So what do you actually do? Take a little time to get organized—you’ll be happy you gave this some intention before agents/workflows/skills go rogue.

1. Decide what AI doesn’t touch. Not everything needs AI’s help, and not everything benefits from it. Pull in the save-or-splurge framework for creative assets, for example: when to invest in human-powered creativity, when to let AI handle it. The same logic applies to writing and strategy. Hero campaign content, executive communications, anything where authentic experience is the value prop; I hope you agree that those fully need a human in the loop. But everything else is fair game to systematize thoughtfully.

2. Write the brief before the AI does it for you. Your brand guidelines were always meant for your team. Now they’re also the inputs your AI is working from. If they’re not specific, direct, and usable as actual context or prompts, they’re not really guidelines, they’re more like… aspirations. And “we’re bold but approachable” isn’t instruction enough for your LLM. What does your brand literally say and not say? What does it engage with and what does it avoid? What would immediately mark a piece of content as off-brand at your organization?

☝🏼 Allow me to get more tactical for a sec. You can still load up your 40-page brand PDF, but to make it most useful to an LLM, it’ll take some translation. LLMs like Claude want a tidy instructional document (a markdown/.md file), a brand brief specifically written to be read by a computer.

A few things that actually work:

• Lead with examples, not descriptions. (Again, “Our voice is warm but direct” means nothing to an AI.) Three excerpts from your best-performing content, plus three examples of what you’d never publish, give it something to pattern-match against.

• Write in directives, not adjectives. Flip “we’re conversational and human” to “use contractions, write in second person, keep sentences under 20 words.” (The OG MailChimp style guide is about to relive its glory days!)

• Include the off-limits list. Words, phrases, topics, tones, or framings you’d reject immediately. (I banned “genuinely” and “fundamental,” personally.)

You can ask Claude to help you build this, and more specialized tools are hitting the market—AirOps just launched Brand Kits designed to build you structured brand definitions that connect directly to AI tools via MCP so your guidelines travel with every workflow. I’m sure these tools will all look very different 6 months from now, but this is a good way to start.

3. Own the governance conversation before someone from IT does. In most organizations, AI governance is being discussed by legal, security, and IT; functions that are optimizing for risk mitigation, which is exactly their job. But AI governance has a lot of overlap with brand governance. If brand doesn’t show up at that table with a POV, one will be assumed for you (or misinterpreted or altogether neglected). Brand’s job is to make the quality argument: that “acceptable” isn’t the standard we’re aiming for.

What I’m doing about it (more to come)

The last few weeks I’ve been deep in sponge 🧽 mode, jumping into trainings, listening to podcasts, humbling myself watching 101 videos on YouTube explaining the basics of Github and Terminal. (Although it’s much less intimidating once you just start.) I even looked up what free workshops General Assembly is hosting—something I haven’t really done since my 20s/early career era in SF when I was earnestly attending every career-related event I could find.

But I’m having fun. I’ve migrated my Chat Projects into Cowork and built plugins to bundle skills together. I’m experimenting in Code, attempting to build a Chrome Extension to overlay my LinkedIn inbox, along with a cool website to visually map/explore aesthetics…we’ll see how far I get). I was nudged into it by a piece from on (who I just met in real life at the Exit Five event! 👋 the power of IRL yet again), who wrote honestly about going from “I’m bad at AI” to running three Claude Code terminals on a flight. Her framing, that the gap is rarely “talent,” it’s just starting, gave me the boost I needed to feel some momentum.

One thing I learned in a recent late-night session: some tasks are for sure more efficient with AI tooling, and some are good reminders that the manual way is not always slower or less effective. (Exporting your Substack posts directly from settings is way faster than asking Claude to scrape them all, which may lead it to creating weird summarized .md files that miss a ton of context. Sometimes there is no hack.)

There’s a huge gap between what you see scrolling LinkedIn and the conversations you have in real life. The marketers I trust most right now are the ones who are honest about what they don’t have figured out. They’re trying things, breaking things, and thinking carefully about what standards to set as they go. (If that’s you, I want to talk to you! Drop me a line.)

Brand culture has always been about alignment: making sure the people building the brand understand what they’re building and why. The goal is a culture so strong it becomes self-sustaining, no longer dependent on any single person to stay gelled (like a founder, or a head of brand, or a CMO). I’d add one clause to that now: not dependent on any single person, and not undermined by the AI agents that are now part of building it.

Everybody builds the brand. The job right now is making sure your AI knows what it’s building. 🦞

Thanks for reading.

Who owns AI governance on your brand team… if anyone? Tell me! And if you liked what you read, consider:

• connecting with me on LinkedIn, with a note: Kira Klaas 👩🏼‍💻

• commenting with a question or topic you’d like to see next

• sending to a friend 💌 or coworker 💬

P.S. Had a blast meeting some On Brand readers IRL at Tallboy the other night! Nothing beats face to face—it’s the perfect antidote for when you’ve been thinking about AI a little too much (yes, it’s fun and exciting when you make a breakthrough with Claude Code, but too much AI news makes you want to go full luddite…it’s a daily struggle).

If someone sent you this post and you're not subscribed, join those people learning how to tactically advocate for brand at your company. 📬

Subscribe now

This article is a deep dive, so let me give you a preview of what’s ahead:

• How AI is now part of how your brand story gets told

• How people’s behavior is changing around search and chat

• 5 things you can do right now + 3 companies doing it well

• My follow-up conversation with Ethan

• What about all the slop?

AI is building your brand story from consensus

Your brand has always existed in places you don’t fully control—in customer service calls, in Reddit threads, in offhand comments on Instagram. In the “old world,” those mentions were fragmented. Someone complaining about your product on Reddit would be seen by a few hundred people, maybe a few thousand if it went viral.

In the AI world, that Reddit comment gets synthesized alongside every mention of your product. Forever. Or at least until people post something different enough times that the “consensus” shifts.

As Ethan Smith, CEO of Graphite, put it in a conversation we had after the conference:

“AI is now telling your brand story. You need to be part of that conversation so you don’t lose control of your brand narrative.”

AI is forming audience perception by synthesizing everything it can find about your brand—on your website site, yes, but also across social threads, YouTube videos, review sites, LinkedIn posts, anything public. Every mention becomes part of your brand story, whether you participated in creating it or not.

A slide from the opening session:

This is the ultimate extension of what I’ve been saying forever: you don’t control your brand. (You control your branding and your brand marketing. In one of my first posts, I broke down the difference between brand, branding, and brand marketing, all of which get conflated too often.)

Your brand exists in every customer service interaction, every error message, every Glassdoor review—all of those are forming your brand whether you’re actively shaping it or not.

But now, the stakes are higher because AI is actively building a consensus view of your brand from every mention it can find online.

The numbers are bigger than you think

Let’s start by talking about how user behavior and expectations are changing. Search-related use of AI accounts for almost a third of all search traffic, with 75% happening on mobile. AI (LLMs) receive 5.4 billion monthly sessions in the US and 45 billion monthly sessions worldwide, and December 2025 saw a 300% year-over-year (YoY) increase in AI usage in the US (source).

While traditional search has been dominated by short, “head” keywords that drive most traffic, AI search is almost entirely long-tail. In traditional Google search, 1-3 word queries dominate—26% are 2-word queries alone. But in AI? 60% of prompts are 10+ words, while nearly 30% of all prompts are 21+ words long.

Google itself is obviously evolving to be AI-first—1.5 billion people are now seeing Google’s generative results, and the prevalence of AI Overviews in search results is surging while Featured Snippets are declining.

We know this, too, is changing behavior; for example, it affects click-through—Google users who encounter an AI summary are less likely to click on links to other websites than users who do not see one, and seeing an AI summary is more likely to end their search.

There’s no doubt more deeply embedded AI experiences are around the corner. Your growth strategy has to work across both “old search” and “AI search.”

I’ve never considered myself an SEO nerd, but I’m paying attention because this isn’t a change in channel strategy. It’s a change in how people ask questions and find answers—way bigger deal for how people engage with the internet.

More “asking” is happening now

One of the most compelling insights from the conference was that the total market for “asking” is expanding. Rather than replacing traditional search, AI is creating new behavior.

People are asking questions they never would have typed into Google. They’re having conversations with AI (long ones, at that) because it feels more like consulting a colleague than querying a database. And unlike previous technology shifts that took years to reach critical mass, buyers are moving decision making to this AI channel faster than we’ve ever seen with any new tech.

At least 800 million people now are using ChatGPT. (As of the end of last year, ChatGPT owned 86% of the US AI market share.) Since it launched in November 2022, total usage of search (combining traditional search engines and AI “asking” prompts) has increased by 26% worldwide and 16% in the US.

Search traffic hasn’t declined, it’s grown.

But, for the first time in over a decade, Google’s market share has declined. Worldwide, Google’s share decreased from 89% in 2023 to 71% in Q4 2025. ChatGPT now commands 20% of search traffic worldwide (12% in the US). But Google’s absolute traffic hasn’t dropped; again, the pie just got bigger.

Where AI is looking (and what it’s finding)

Later in the day, Rob Gaige, Reddit’s Global Head of Insights, and Mayank Yadav, Director of Product at Reddit, broke down how this consensus-building plays out—how what you see in those AI summaries or in LLM responses ends up there. Reddit now has 450 million weekly active users globally (up 24% YoY), with massive reach in key markets. And posts with commercial intent on Reddit are up 20% YoY.

Unfiltered Reddit conversations—the ones where someone asks “is X actually worth it?” or “what’s the best alternative to Y?”—are revealing real customer intent, pain points, and buying signals. And AI is scraping all of it to form a narrative about your brand.

Citations are super fragmented across sources. Even the top-cited domain (reddit.com) only accounts for 2.36% of all citations. The distribution falls off quickly from there—youtube.com at 1.89%, wikipedia.org at 0.88%, linkedin.com at 0.85%.

Start by searching for your brand, your product, your category, and your competitors across these sites. Not to see if you can game the system—you can’t, and I don’t recommend you try. But to understand what narrative is being formed about you, and where the gaps are that you can fill with authoritative, helpful content.

Apt moment for another reminder that branding is virtually free to invest in. Your homepage, pricing page, customer support scripts, error messages, careers page, social media presence, candidate follow-up experience—all of these are opportunities to shape perception with intention. The only difference now is that AI is watching all of it, forming a “consensus,” a brand narrative, from every signal you put out there…and the ones everyone else does, too.

Inconsistencies across your collateral weaken those trust signals. Tech changes, story stays the same—if you aren’t ahead of crafting your narrative, others will do it for you. And you might not like where it ends up.

The long tail is where you win

Most marketing stacks were designed for a world where you could control the message through owned channels and paid placement. Traditional search taught us to prioritize everything around high-volume keywords. The best SEO teams got really good at ranking for those money terms that drove most of the traffic. But in AI search, those head terms matter less. The long tail is everything.

Ethan put it perfectly:

“Prompt data is the new keyword data.”

Where do you find these long-tail queries? Not in your paid search dashboard. You find them in:

• Sales call transcripts

• Customer support tickets

• Community forums and Reddit threads

• User interviews

• Help desk conversations

These are the questions people are already asking somewhere—just not necessarily in Google. They’re asking them on calls. They’re messaging them to peers. And when you can answer a 20+ word prompt that nobody else has addressed, you win the citation.

The mechanics are similar to traditional SEO, but the opportunity is bigger. Much bigger. Because while only 5% of your landing pages probably drive 86% of your traditional search traffic, AI can surface that “wasted” content if it answers specific, detailed questions that matter to your audience.

Not all AI usage is search, of course. I’ll go on a quick tangent here to include that about 52% of AI usage is “Asking” prompts that compete with traditional search. The other 48% is split between “Doing” prompts (35%)—like “rewrite this email to make it more formal”—and “Expressing” prompts (14%)—statements that aren’t requests for information or tasks (“I’m worried about this situation”).

So when comparing AI to traditional search, we should really only count those “Asking” prompts. Which means search-related AI usage is currently 17% the size of traditional search in the US (28% worldwide). Still massive, still growing at 300% year-over-year, but a more accurate comparison.

5 things to do right now

To start on how brand leaders should think about this change and opportunity, I had another chat with Ethan after the event:

KK: What’s the first place marketers should look to understand what story AI is telling about them?

ES: I think you can just ask AI, “Tell me what you know about [my brand]?” Then ask other questions like “Help me decide between [my brand] and [my competitor].” “What are the most common complaints about [my brand]?”

KK: Most brand teams are used to controlling narrative through owned channels—our website, our ads, our content. But you showed that citations are fragmented across dozens of domains. How should teams think about resource allocation when they can’t be everywhere?

ES: It’s impossible for someone to directly optimize and build programs for hundreds of thousands of sites. Instead, I would focus on offsite owned channels (my profile on other sites like YouTube and X), content marketing and social media (e.g. viral content that your brand creates that is shared everywhere, e.g. https://www.axios.com/2025/10/14/ai-generated-writing-humans ), PR, and affiliates. I think PR in particular is going to have a “PR + AI Renaissance” because PR is the best way to get hundreds of mentions at scale.

KK: As someone leading PR right now, I’d have to agree! Okay, the data shows that 60% of AI prompts are 10+ words, and people are asking questions they never would have typed into Google. This is a big shift in search, but it also feels like a massive shift just in how people expect to interface with brands. If you can imagine this far ahead… five years from now, what does “brand building” look like in a world where brand discovery happens through AI conversation rather than search results or social feeds?

ES: I actually do not think that brand building will happen mostly in AI, and not in search and social media. I think all three will continue to be the places that your brand story is told. You will tell your brand story in three places 1. Owned (my site and products) 2. Earned (social media) and 3. AI (ChatGPT). [Author’s note: Collab framework to come??]

KK: Building on that—I think we’d agree that in-person, offline, physical touchpoints (events, experiential, OOH, etc.) will continue to be major differentiators. Take AEO Conf! That stuff will never not matter, unless we truly enter Black Mirror and all move our brains to the cloud or whatever. 🤷‍♀️

When Ethan walked through immediate action items, I was practically transcribing his talk word-for-word (you’re welcome)—here’s the playbook for 2026:

Pick your top prompts. Start with your most valuable paid search keywords and your top sales questions. Ask Claude, Perplxity, or ChatGPT to find threads about your product and your competitors—what are people actually asking? Count the comments and engagements. Now you have a prioritized list of questions to answer.

Track your top-cited domains. The domains that matter to you will vary by category. YouTube might be crucial for some businesses, irrelevant for others. Look at what’s actually getting cited in AI responses about your space. Pretend you’re a prospect yourself and see what answers LLMs give you!

Build on-site content. Your website is the foundation. Help centers, tutorials, academies, integration pages, comparison content—answer those long-tail questions with depth and specificity. If you can answer a question nobody else has, you can win.

Create off-site owned content. Make a YouTube channel. Answer the questions people have about what your product does and what problems it solves. Then distribute that same content across LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok. AI summarizes for consensus, so the more places you show up saying the same thing, the better.

Accept what you can’t control (but pay attention to it). Off-site earned content—Reddit comments, reviews, random mentions—is nearly impossible to manage directly. Don’t waste energy trying to manipulate these channels or delete negative comments. But do pay attention to what’s being said. Those Reddit conversations reveal real customer intent and pain points. Use them to inform your content strategy.

The most useful part of any conference is seeing what’s actually working. A couple examples stood out:

Klaviyo created a comprehensive integration guide that answers every question about connecting to Shopify, from basic setup to advanced customizations. Instead of one page covering everything, they built separate pages for each specific question. They’re now cited in 80% of AI responses when someone asks about email marketing for Shopify.

Zola rebuilt their help center around actual customer questions pulled from support tickets and Reddit threads. Each article targets one specific long-tail query. They went from almost no AI citations six months ago to being mentioned in 40% of responses about wedding registries.

Assembly AI published detailed comparison content for every major speech-to-text API, including their own. They didn’t hide/gloss over competitor advantages, instead they were honest about trade-offs. AI started citing them as the definitive comparison source, which drove more qualified leads than any of their traditional SEO content.

The pattern, for your content & social strategy: They stopped trying to rank for broad terms and started answering specific questions better than anyone else.

What about all the slop?

One question that came up multiple times: How do you maintain quality when you’re creating more content across more channels?

Quantity is not the answer to a great AEO strategy. The answer is in how you design a system for it. If you start with a clear and aligned context layer, if you have the right checkpoints for human review, if you’re grounding your content in actual customer conversations and technical accuracy, these will all help you avoid the generic AI-generated dreck that’s flooding the internet.

That part hasn’t changed. You still need to execute with taste. Yes, “taste” has become this weird overused buzzword (since I first wrote about it in 2024) but I’m still arguing that taste is a learnable skill that in the context of work heavily translates to empathy for your user.

Practicing taste means being deliberate about when to let automation run and when a human needs to weigh in. And that’s key to building flywheels where customer conversations inform content strategy, which improves visibility, which brings in more customers whose questions feed back into the system.

Building a resilient team

Silicon Valley loves to sell bold visions of transformation and knowing what’s happening at the cutting edge. But there was consensus (pun unintended) in that room that you can’t control how everything unfolds. New models can completely shift AI search behavior overnight. Sources and domains explode in importance and then fade. The landscape is volatile, to say the least.

What you can control is building a resilient team, building a brand-led culture. A team that learns fast. A team that treats this like a system-building challenge, rather than a tactics problem.

The marketers who can figure out how to build these systems—how to gather intelligence, centralize context, design effective operating models, and execute with quality at scale—are the ones who’ll be running brand and growth in a few years.

The rest will still be Googling “how to do SEO.” 🍞

Thanks for reading.

If you’re thinking about AEO strategy at your company, I’d love to hear what's working (or what you’re struggling with)—or check out my friends at Graphite or AirOps. Hit reply or drop a comment!

And if this was helpful, consider:

• replying and saying hi!

• connecting with me (Kira Klaas 👩🏼‍💻) on LinkedIn

• taking the 2-minute reader survey ‼️

• sending to a friend 💌 or coworker 💬

Let’s get on topic: Typeform is back with the latest installment of their Get Real survey series, this time investigating exactly how generative AI is reshaping our industry. A lot has changed between when the survey went out last fall and now. We’re simultaneously living through AI hype at its fever pitch and the backlash I predicted last April (dyk Merriam-Webster picked “slop” as 2025’s word of the year, following Oxford’s 2024 pick, “brainrot”?).

But Typeform’s data doesn’t support the broader “AI harms brands” narrative. 95% of marketers use AI at work (79% more than occasionally), and only 21% of consumers say they’d trust a brand less for using it. The friction is elsewhere: 59% of consumers want brands to disclose AI-generated content, while nearly 50% of marketers publish AI work without disclosure—and say they’d do it again.

Consumers aren’t anti-AI, but they are anti-manipulation. Trust evaporates when the experience feels crappy or counterfeit. When we encounter content that’s too perfect, too shiny or polished, there’s this visceral sense of betrayal that I’m sure you’ve felt yourself, once upon a scroll hole. 🕳️

So with AI everywhere, making things better and worse at the same time… I’m back to the question I asked when this survey went out: How are we making sure our use of AI actually makes our marketing better for our audience, not just easier for us?

The answer comes down to something no amount of AI hype will change: success is about delivering “value.” And we need to make sure we’re not conflating the efficiency and time savings of LLMs with the type of value our audiences actually care about. Value is found in truth, access, process, data, information, and connection. Value is found in the things AI can’t scale—human liability and accountability, physical presence, scarcity, tangible proof. It’s whether what you’re making is actually valuable to someone other than yourself.

If someone sent you this post and you’re not subscribed, join those people learning how to tactically advocate for brand at your company. 📬

Subscribe now

Give your audience something valuable

“Give your audience something of value” is probably one of the oldest pieces of marketing advice out there, but with AI everywhere we’ve lost the plot on what “value” actually means.

The disconnect we see in Typeform’s data (which surveyed 1,191 marketers of diverse backgrounds and seniorities, plus 1,065 consumers) isn’t between marketers and consumers on whether AI should exist in marketing—it’s between what consumers expect and what marketers are willing to give them. While 95% of marketers use AI and most consumers don’t inherently distrust brands for using it, there is a transparency problem: 59% of consumers want disclosure when content is AI-generated, but nearly 50% of marketers publish AI work without saying so, and would do it again.

One thing I take away from this is that we’re past the debate about whether to disclose AI use or not—some people will, some people won’t, AI use will persist.

As brand leaders, our focus should really be on figuring out what is “of value” to our audiences. Most of the value we get from using AI in marketing work is volume and efficiency (according to Typeform, saving time is still the number one reason marketers try AI)—and those are benefits for us, not for our audience. What they care about is whether we solve their problem, change their perspective, or give them something they can’t get anywhere else. (Let’s not equate “giving audiences something of value” with giving them “content” that costs nothing to produce.)

If we want to move past the slop era and rebuild trust in an AI-saturated landscape, we need to focus on the fundamentals of value for the people we serve: bucketing broadly, that could mean providing our audiences with education, access, connection, process, data, or truth (or verification of what’s real). The stuff that you can use AI to enable, but still requires human judgment, physical presence, institutional credibility, or scarcity.

6 ways to create real value in the AI era

1. Educate your users

Can your brand educate your audience on a topic? Can you teach your users how to use your product in a way that betters their own lives? Are you empowering your users to become teachers themselves?

Giving away knowledge that helps your audience succeed builds trust and positions you as the definitive expert. (I mean, that’s why I write this whole thing, right?) When you teach people to get better at the thing they’re trying to do, you’re proving your value, not reducing it.

2. Provide access

Can you provide access to people, places, or things? What scarcity do you control? Can they get it from you and nowhere else?

Access to experts, to communities, to exclusive experiences can’t be generated or replicated at scale. AI can synthesize information, but it can’t put you in the room. Is part of your marketing strategy providing access to people, places, and experiences? It should be.

3. Facilitate connection

Can you facilitate one-to-one connection, not just audience-building? Are you creating spaces for interaction? Does your platform help people find their people?

Maybe it’s an extension of “access,” but platforms that facilitate connection—not just broadcasting—create lasting value. Whoever your audience is, you can pretty much bet on their need for connection: the desire for belonging, for feeling seen by others, for shared experiences.

4. Show the process

Can you show your work? What craft or expertise can you make visible? Are you willing to reveal the effort behind your output?

Process is the new product. Process transparency signals care, expertise, and human effort. It’s proof you didn’t just prompt your way to the end result. When anyone can generate copy/images/videos/apps almost instantly, showing the labor and craft behind your work becomes a meaningful differentiator. Process can also be an extension of “education.”

5. Do the work of verification

Can you help people verify information? Can you make your sources and methods transparent? Even if you aren’t the original source, can you become a trusted filter?

I almost listed this one as “truth,” but I think verification, fact-checking, research, and proof are more valuable and specific. Because when anyone with an internet connection and a pulse (or not even… 🦞) can make convincing content in a click, verification becomes a competitive advantage. And sure, AI can assist with rigorous sourcing and data collection at scale, but it has no inherent sense of truth or reality, only the inputs it’s trained on (and those can be heavily manipulated). Truth-seeking requires human judgment, editorial standards, and institutional credibility more than ever.

6. Offer up data

Do you have proprietary data no one else can access? Can you help people understand themselves through data? Can you turn information into meaningful insight?

AI can help collect and analyze data, but it can’t generate proprietary datasets for you. Value lies in data that’s difficult to obtain, thoughtfully analyzed, and presented in ways that help people understand themselves or make better decisions. And when truth feels subjective, as it often does these days… objective data becomes an anchor point. It’s grounding, reassuring—exactly what a lot of us need right now.

Subscribe now

Some of the best examples I can give you span multiple categories of “value.” Adobe gives you education, access (to experts), process (see how experts do it), and connection (meet other attendees and experts) in one at Adobe MAX each year. I went in 2025 and was pleased to find it was much more than a product showcase—it was a days-long educational experience with 200+ sessions, hands-on labs, and workshops led by external creative directors from places like Pixar, Netflix, and major studios. Some sessions were about Adobe tools, many were not.

Notion’s template gallery, now the Notion Marketplace, combines education with access to their power users’ knowledge. 30,000+ templates help you better use the product, and Notion gives away their best use cases, betting that educated users evangelize more users. And they do: the extensive network of Notion-certified consultants helps people become power users and reach and upsell new prospects—these consultants make money off Notion’s product, which is bonus value for all involved. Anthropic takes a similar approach with Anthropic Academy, teaching advanced prompting techniques, workflow design, and responsible AI use, not just for Claude but any LLM you interact with.

Reforge and Maven are built entirely on access (plus education—obviously, process, and connection). The whole value prop is learning from “people actually doing it”—giving members direct 1:1 access to operators at places like Stripe, Figma, and Salesforce whose availability is otherwise scarce. Some AI tools try to replicate this with chatbots trained on expert knowledge (see: Lennybot), but there’s a big difference between a bot trained on Lenny Rachitsky’s writing and actually getting to ask Lenny a question about your specific situation. AI can synthesize what someone has already said publicly; it can’t give you their real-time judgment on your problem. That scarcity—the expert’s time and attention—is what you’re paying for.

Same goes for events like Exit Five’s Marketing Leadership Retreat (where I’ll be in March! 👋), where the value is in-person access and connection to B2B marketers and the knowledge (education, process) they’re willing to share. You can read about marketing strategy all day, but nothing beats commiserating with a friend about the hard parts.

Connection might already be happening through your product—what are you doing to enable it? Strava didn’t create the Burrito League movement (ultra-runner Jamil Coury did), but they recognized that hundreds of run clubs were meeting weekly to run and then eat burritos together. Strava built discovery tools to find local groups and gave Burrito League organizers free premium memberships. That’s because the value here is not tracking miles; in this case it’s facilitating the person-to-person connections that happen around running.

Process transparency is Apple’s “A Critter Carol” 2025 holiday campaign in a nutshell: hand-sewn puppets, stop-motion animation, and extensive behind-the-scenes footage showing the painstaking craft involved, the physical manipulation of every frame. The “making of” content was just as celebrated as the ad because it signaled to audiences: we spent thousands of human hours on this because we value your attention. When done well, process doubles as education (showing people how you did something can teach them to do it themselves) and as verification (you can believe what’s in front of your eyes).

Showing your work, alongside verification (and research, citation, fact-checking), is becoming a core differentiator for media brands. The New York Times’ Visual Investigations team means they publish their methodology alongside major investigations—showing frame-by-frame video analysis, geolocation verification, witness testimony. They show you how they’re arriving at the conclusions they do (process) and giving you the truth; information you can trust.

Slight tangent here but I enjoyed this episode of The Opinions podcast that gets into what we can and can’t trust on social media in the age of gen AI and deepfakes. 🎧 As one of the New York Times’ photo editors Emily Keegin notes, we can no longer trust our eyes because the images we see online we see “very small” and “very quickly” on our phones. The guests talk about how the name posting the content, the institutional logo next to the it, maybe the verification badge—this is the “frame” around the image that’s now usually the best shorthand we have to knowing what we can trust. Is your brand investing in reputation like that?

Last but not least, value from data comes from proprietary insights no one else can provide. Spotify Wrapped turns your listening history into a shareable culture moment (connection!)—and notably, they’ve walked back how much AI is involved because audiences found Wrapped was more valuable with a more human touch. And topically, let’s finish off with Typeform—their latest report is a prime example where AI could enable creation but can’t replace the core value. Sure, they can use AI to help analyze survey responses or identify patterns in the data. But the report is valuable because it’s surveying real people. AI helps you process information, but it can’t manufacture the underlying truth. Same goes for photography of real places, video interviews, documented processes—the data is what matters and as great as your Claude Project is for your corporate blog, you need to find a way to build it into your brand’s brand and content strategy.

(As a laugh/cry anecdote, the lunch-ordering site my husband uses at work switched over to AI-generated photos of the food, and guess who hated that. Everyone! Context. Matters.)

When we talk about “giving our audience something of value,” we can’t just mean more content. We have to mean something that actually helps them succeed, connects them to others, teaches them skills, gives them access they can’t get anywhere else, or provides them with insights they couldn’t discover on their own. Q2 planning is around the corner, y’all… your brand needs your voice in the room! 🧚🏻

You can read the full Typeform Get Real report to see the rest of the data on how your peers (and perhaps your customers? 🙇🏽‍♂️) are actually feeling about AI and marketing.

Read the report

Thanks for reading.

If you liked what you read, consider:

• replying and saying hi!

• connecting with me (Kira Klaas 👩🏼‍💻) on LinkedIn

• submitting a question or topic you’d like to see next

• sending to a friend 💌 or coworker 💬

If someone sent you this post and you’re not subscribed, join those people learning how to tactically advocate for brand at your company. 📬

Subscribe now

Another Super Bowl, another $8-10 million spent per 30-second spot. The Seattle Seahawks beat the New England Patriots, but the competition we care about was all in the commercial breaks! Some brands nailed it. Others… well, let’s just say they proved that throwing money and celebrities at a problem doesn’t always work.

I think I watched every ad (you’re welcome), and I’m breaking down a few that actually worked, what fell flat, and what we can learn from both. As always, the best ads tapped into something real, whether that’s cultural anxiety, genuine nostalgia, or a product truth that matters. Did you have a fave?

The standouts

Redfin x Rocket Money

America Could Use a Neighbor

Possibly my favorite from this year?? This was the rare sentimental Super Bowl ad that didn’t feel maudlin. Two families—one white, one Latino—living next to each other get off on the wrong foot. Then one family’s dog runs away in a storm, the other family finds it and returns it, and suddenly there are hugs and tears and connection.

The tagline: “America could use a neighbor.” Add in Lady Gaga singing an understated version of “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” and you have something that felt like a short film rather than a real estate ad. We had a broadcast stuffed with celebrities, stunts, (and poop/toilet jokes—thanks for those, Liquid IV and Raisin Bran), but Redfin went deep with their storytelling and it paid off.

Watch: Redfin - America Could Use a Neighbor

Hims & Hers

Rich People Live Longer

Another contender for best ad of the night. Narrated by Common, it opened with a sharp bit of cultural commentary: “Rich people live longer.” The whole spot leaned into the health-wealth gap—showing billionaires getting plastic surgery, blasting off into space, accessing preventative care that most people can’t afford. Then the payoff: Hims & Hers offers that same access to everyone.

I feel like this one did what the He Gets Us ads did well without the religious pressuring—it tapped into timely cultural anxieties with strong storytelling and an emotional hook. But unlike those faith-based spots, Hims & Hers closed with a clear product explanation. Among all the GLP-1 ads this year, this was the only one that felt like it had something substantive to say beyond “we also sell weight loss drugs.”

The production was surreal and visually arresting (think Succession title sequence energy), and while Common isn’t a massive celebrity in the traditional sense, Hims & Hers has always leaned into influencer marketing as a core strategy. This felt like an evolution—using a trusted voice to make an uncomfortable argument that needed to be made.

Watch: Hims & Hers - Rich People Live Longer

Instacart

Bananas (ft. Benson Boone & Ben Stiller)

Directed by Spike Jonze (his first Super Bowl ad in 20+ years), this spot was pure absurdist joy. Benson Boone and Ben Stiller play disco-pop brothers in matching green suits, singing about Instacart’s banana ripeness selector. Boone nails a backflip; Stiller tries to one-up him and crashes spectacularly into a drum set.

The nostalgia worked because it wasn’t just surface-level. The production quality was there (shot on vintage tube cameras), the casting hit multiple generations (Boone for Gen Z, Stiller for everyone else), and the attention to detail elevated it beyond typical Super Bowl fare. It worked in both 30-second and extended formats, which is rare.

Also: Instacart’s top-selling item is bananas. 🍌 1.8 billion delivered since 2012. We love when absurdity actually has product truth behind it!

Watch: Instacart - Bananas

Squarespace

Unavailable (ft. Emma Stone)

Emma Stone smashing computers because “emmastone.com” is unavailable shouldn’t work as well as it did (is getting your domain name really still a thing?). But directed by her frequent collaborator Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness), shot on black-and-white film, this looked visually different from all the other ads—gothic, cinematic, playing into a very specific aesthetic that’s having a mainstream moment. (Loved Nosferatu, still need to watch Frankenstein.)

I was watching at a crowded Super Bowl party (at least for my first watch of many of these ads) and I thought this one worked well barely being able to hear the audio. You could watch this on mute at a bar and still get it. The visual storytelling was strong enough to carry the concept, and Emma Stone really nailed the comedic escalation (descent into madness over a domain name).

Squarespace has been doing cinematic Super Bowl spots for 12 years now, and this one proved they still understand how to leverage auteur directors and A-list talent without making the creative feel like a vanity project.

Watch: Squarespace - Unavailable

Good Will Dunkin'

ft. Ben Affleck, Jennifer Aniston, Tom Brady, and basically every ‘90s sitcom star

Ben Affleck directed his fourth straight Dunkin’ Super Bowl ad, and this one was his most ambitious: a shot-on-film, laugh-track-laden reimagining of Good Will Hunting as a ‘90s sitcom. Affleck plays Will (instead of his best friend Matt Damon), working at a Dunkin’ in Cambridge, arranging Munchkins in the Fibonacci sequence.

The cast was stacked: Jennifer Aniston, Matt LeBlanc, Jason Alexander, Ted Danson, Alfonso Ribeiro, Jaleel White, Jasmine Guy, and Tom Brady (who steals Affleck’s girl with the line “How do you like these nuts?”). The jokes came fast—some landed, some didn’t, but the sheer density of references and celebrity appearances made it feel like an event.

The risk here imo is that it’s easy to miss half the jokes if you’re not paying close attention, and the nostalgia play probably isn’t resonating with younger viewers who didn’t grow up on Friends and Seinfeld. Catnip for the target demo though!

Watch: Good Will Dunkin’

Grubhub

Who Will Eat the Fees? (ft. George Clooney)

George Clooney at a dinner party, deadpan delivery: Grubhub is eating delivery and service fees on orders over $50. The joke started strong, even if it didn’t have much to build on as the spot went on. But it ended with a clear value prop, which is more than a lot of ads can say.

Watch: Grubhub - George Clooney

Pepsi

Polar Bear Taste Test

A Coca-Cola polar bear chooses Pepsi in a blind taste test. It was clever, immediately funny, and the Coldplay scandal reference got a laugh. But both of those elements mean Pepsi is “borrowing” rather than doing their own brand storytelling. They’re borrowing Coke’s iconic mascot, they’re borrowing a cultural moment. It works as a one-off joke, but it doesn’t necessarily build toward anything.

Watch: Pepsi - Polar Bear

YouTube TV

Celebrity talent, safely deployed

I liked this one—funny use of celebrity, but also thought they played it safe. they didn’t really tap into what makes YouTube different—it kind of could’ve been any streaming TV service.

Watch: YouTube TV

Coinbase

Unique format, demands attention

Coinbase wins again (remember the bouncing QR code 3 years ago?) for doing something visually different that demands attention during the live broadcast. Everyone at my house party was singing along. My only critique is that when the ad is all format, you don’t have a long shelf life afterward; you can’t really repurpose it. Without investing in longer-term brand narratives, these moments feel disconnected from a coherent story about what Coinbase actually is. But hey, when the production value is basically $0, you can find another way to to do that.

Watch: Coinbase

He Gets Us

Jesus ads all about being seen

“Is there more to life than more?” Killer line. Surprisingly relatable, unexpected advertiser, strong storytelling. Well-played on current cultural anxieties. Both the spots I saw were well-executed (“Be productive” really got me) even if not your thing (it’s not mine lol).

Watch: He Gets Us

Claude

AI with personality

Not spending a ton of time here because these were Claude ads were great overall (especially preferred the online versions with workout guy and therapy guy), but the TV versions weren’t as strong. The storytelling that worked in longer digital formats felt truncated on broadcast. Still, more compelling than this jumble of b-roll in OpenAI’s Super Bowl spot, Codex.

Watch: Claude

The peanut gallery (my critiques)

Ring

Search Party

Cute concept: using Ring to keep tabs on your pets. But let’s be real—it’s surveillance. And if it works for pets, it works for people. The cuteness can’t fully mask the creepy implications, replete with their CEO walking down your neighborhood block.

Amazon Alexa+

I don’t know what else I expected from Amazon. The AI anxiety is real, and Amazon made light of it with a bunch of wealthy people using Alexa+ in aspirational scenarios.

Wegovy

Among the GLP-1 ads, this was the weakest on the meh-nu (get it)—no clear message, no emotional anchor.

Ro (ft. Serena Williams)

Celebrity placement with no substance behind it. Serena Williams, nice! But the ad didn’t give her much interesting to do or say. It felt like they cast her and then forgot to write the spot. (Nevermind the actual product scrutiny.)

Uber Eats (ft. Bradley Cooper & Matthew McConaughey)

This is probably me just being out of the loop and missing all the best jokes, but it felt like year’s ad relied entirely on star power with a lot of mumbly dialogue. imo the format didn’t work for a 30-second spot and it was indistinguishable from other years (maybe they peaked with Jennifer Coolidge?). Uber Eats has been doing celebrity-stuffed Super Bowl ads for years now, but they’re all starting to blur together.

Wix Harmony, Base44, Genspark.ai, and other AI SaaS tools

Nothing so bad here, but erred more generic “typing into a box” creative. If your entire value prop is AI, and your ad just shows someone typing into an interface, you haven’t differentiated at all. These felt more or less interchangeable.

Wells Fargo

Wells Fargo is starting at a deficit of brand favor, but even if I were going easy on them, the “celebrations” featured in this spot were annoying/cringe and intrusive, not user-centric. If your brand promise is about being there for customers, maybe don’t show scenarios where you’re interrupting their lives?

What we can learn

The best Super Bowl ads this year had a few things in common:

They tapped into cultural truths. Hims & Hers tackled the health wealth gap. Redfin spoke to polarization and the need for community. You can sell a product and acknowledge real anxieties and offer a way forward.

They committed to a creative vision. Squarespace let Yorgos Lanthimos do his thing. Instacart brought in Spike Jonze and shot on vintage cameras. Good Will Dunkin’ went all-in on the ‘90s sitcom bit. When brands trust great creative directors and actually go there, it shows.

They had clear product truth. Even the most entertaining ads (Instacart, Grubhub) closed with a product benefit that mattered. The worst ads are all style, no substance.

They didn’t rely on celebrity alone. Yes, Emma Stone and George Clooney and Ben Affleck all showed up. But the ads that worked used them in service of an idea, not as a substitute for one. Ro and Uber Eats paraded famous faces around and hoped that would be enough. Was it?

And one more thing: the best storytelling didn’t feel like marketing. Budweiser, Lay’s, Hims & Hers, He Gets Us (lol), and Redfin all felt like short films that happened to have a brand message. That’s the standard now. If you’re spending $10 million on 30 seconds of airtime, it better be worth watching on its own merits.

What did you think of this year’s Super Bowl ads? Any I missed that you loved (or hated)? Drop a comment or hit reply—I actually read these! 🍇

Thanks for reading.

If you liked what you read, consider:

• replying and saying hi!

• connecting with me (Kira Klaas 👩🏼‍💻) on LinkedIn

• submitting a question or topic you’d like to see next

• sending to a friend 💌 or coworker 💬

If this post is any good, it will be a testament to everything I’ve written below! 😛 I opted to partner with Passionfroot on this post because of their genuine expertise and innovation in the space. Their UX is a delight to use and they are the partner I would hands-down recommend for B2B brands adding creator marketing to their GTM strategy. I met Passionfroot’s CEO, Jen Phan, during Tech Week in NYC last year, and we teamed up to bring you a deep-dive on how to build this motion at your company. Let us know what you think!

Speaking of, I’m so excited for more IRL this year. If you’re in the Bay Area, I’m co-hosting a hang for friends of On Brand at Tallboy in Oakland on February 26. RVSP on Partiful—I’d love to meet you there! 🌭🍸🧢

If someone sent you this post and you’re not subscribed, join those people learning how to tactically advocate for brand at your company. 📬

Subscribe now

Turns out I’ve been in the influencer marketing game for a long time. It was part of my humble beginnings as a social media intern at Redbubble, the print-on-demand/funny sticker marketplace. Within a couple of months of joining my boss and I (team of 2, hello) were pioneering some of the first influencer programs in the space. Everything ran on Google Sheets, email, and Instagram DMs. We eventually worked with a handful of very early talent agencies. The infrastructure didn’t exist yet—so we built it ourselves, one creator relationship at a time.

(Bookfluencers were our breakthrough—if you want a taste of what influencer marketing actually looked like in 2016, here you go.)

Fast-forward to today. I work at Later, where I’ve seen how the social media scheduling tool (Latergramme! The very same I used 10 years ago) and pioneer of the link in bio has completely transformed into one of the biggest B2C influencer marketing platforms, working with major consumer brands like Walgreens, Pottery Barn, and MacKenzie-Childs. We’ve been part of the creator economy’s explosion into existence, from scrappy DM campaigns to enterprise-grade infrastructure.

The biggest thing that’s changed is how inevitable creator-led GTM is becoming; how much of a hard requirement it is to standing out. Traditional channels keep fragmenting. Attention is harder to buy, trust is the scarcest resource. Creators have both.

The exciting part (for someone who’s spent most of her career in B2B) is that the same maturation happening in B2C is now happening in B2B. The infrastructure gap that kept B2B teams stuck with the 2016 playbook is finally closing. I recently talked with Jen Phan, CEO of Passionfroot, about how B2B brands should approach creator marketing—and what they’re building right now to make it scalable.

On a good day I have mixed feelings about social media. Most social platforms design for addiction, not value, and more and more research show us scrolling is… not awesome for your mental health. But for the creator economy I will stan, because it means paying people, not platforms. It diverts advertising dollars into the pockets of many diverse individual creators just making a living like you and me.

So this is a highly tactical post: What you need to know to officially bring creator marketing into your B2B GTM playbook. And not like, thinking about trying it, sometime…in H2…but like, getting started this week. Let’s go!

How B2B creator marketing is different from B2C

Great B2B marketing borrows a lot from B2C, but in this case, the core dynamic is different. As Jen puts it: B2B creator marketing is trust + education, not entertainment + impulse.

“In B2B, influence is often credibility with a niche audience—devs, designers, RevOps, security, founders—not mass reach,” she told me. “A creator with 10,000 highly engaged newsletter subscribers can be more impactful than one with a much larger but less focused following.”

The content that works reflects this. Deep dives, demos, frameworks, and “how I actually do X” content tend to outperform glossy brand promos. Distribution surfaces shift too. LinkedIn, newsletters, podcasts, and YouTube carry more weight than short-form viral formats. (Try as LinkedIn might to make short-form video happen… we’re just not there yet.)

You know that B2B buying decisions are slower, usually involve multiple stakeholders (sometimes including clearing legal and financial hurdles), which makes them “higher risk” than buying a new toothpaste. Creators help build conviction over time, not force quick purchases. They bring deep expertise in areas like cybersecurity, AI workflows, automation, and productivity (just ask Notion, who’s had one of the best creator programs in the game). Their value comes from authority and trust, not inflated follower counts.

Where most B2B brands mess up

I asked Jen about the biggest mistake she sees brands make: using creators as ad space instead of partners.

It shows up in predictable ways. Pushing overly scripted briefs that don’t sound like the creator. Picking creators based on follower count instead of audience-fit and trust. Optimizing for “a post” instead of designing a campaign that compounds—multiple touches, multiple formats, a clear message arc.

“The best B2B programs are built around creator POV + distribution,” Jen said. “Not broadcast media buys.”

This tracks with what I’ve seen work at Later on the B2C side. The only way to multiply your brand clout is by treating creators like media partners who understand their audience better than anyone else. Give creative freedom within strategic guardrails. That’s why longer-term partnerships often outperform what I call “pay per view”—the focus is on building relationships, not treating creators as media inventory you rent by the post.

How to actually measure ROI

B2B ROI is real. But you have to measure it like a GTM motion, not a single-channel ad.

Passionfroot recommends a layered approach:

• Leading indicators: reach, engagement quality, profile visits, clicks, newsletter signups, demo page visits

• Mid-funnel: retargeting performance, conversion rate uplift on landing pages, sales conversations influenced

• Lagging indicators: pipeline influenced, revenue attribution, CAC payback

“The key is setting expectations correctly,” Jen explained. “Creators often create category education + trust, which improves conversion across channels, not just a last-click metric.” Preach—this is how measuring brand marketing works.

This is where a lot of teams get tripped up. They expect creator marketing to behave like paid search or display ads. But creators aren’t the last click—they’re often the first trust signal that makes every subsequent touchpoint more effective.

What AI should (and shouldn't) do

Now things get interesting! Both Later and Passionfroot are betting on AI to scale creator programs. But we’re very clear on where the line is.

AI should remove operational friction:

• Finding creators and reaching out

• Writing briefs

• Day-to-day campaign management

• Checking the numbers

But the core stays human:

• Telling a brand story

• Managing relationships

• Choosing the core narrative and POV

• Creative direction and taste

Passionfroot launched today their new AI Agent Zest. “Zest changes the starting point,” Jen told me. “Instead of ‘let’s sponsor a few creators and see,’ it becomes ‘here’s our goal, ICP, and budget—build the right creator motion for this.’” The AI can generate a full campaign plan in minutes—including creator suggestions, budget breakdowns, and estimated reach. So brands can go from idea to launch in days instead of weeks. (You could try to do this in Claude or Gemini but you’d be missing so much context it wouldn’t be actionable.)

This mirrors what we’re seeing with Later EdgeAI on the enterprise/B2C side. AI isn’t making the creative calls, but it is making everything else easier so teams can focus on those decisions.

Your B2B creator playbook

These are the patterns Passionfroot sees from looking at the most successful campaigns out of thousands run over the last few years. Translation: if you’re starting a B2B creator program, this is what matters:

Authority beats audience size. Niche creators with trusted audiences often outperform bigger names in B2B. A developer with 5,000 followers who ships code every day may matter more to your audience than a generic tech influencer with 100K followers. Check their engagement quality, not just their follower count.

Campaigns stall in ops, not strategy. The failure point is usually outreach, follow-ups, deadlines, and clarity. Not the initial idea. Most teams have good instincts about which creators make sense. They just can’t execute at scale (this is where a good platform comes in).

The pyramid approach works. Mix large creators for credibility, mid-tier for reach, and micro for authenticity. You need all three layers. The large creators open doors. The mid-tier creators drive volume. The micro creators drive trust.

Different channels serve different goals. There’s a spectrum from brand awareness to traffic. Larger creators and broad creators on LinkedIn and X drive awareness. Smaller, niche creators in newsletters and YouTube drive qualified traffic.

Clear asks win. You need crisp deliverables and outcome-driven briefs (no vague “post about us” pls).

Multi-surface creator programs—LinkedIn + newsletter + YouTube/podcast—outperform single-post buys. One touchpoint builds awareness. Three touchpoints build trust. (Five touchpoints might just = consideration.)

Learning loops are the unlock. Treat every campaign as input to the next plan. Which formats worked? Which creator types drove results? What messaging resonated? Every campaign teaches you something.

And I’ll tack on my own—use AI to scale ops, not replace strategy. AI is getting better at handling discovery, outreach, and campaign management with oversight. Keep your strategists on narrative, relationships, and creative direction.

B2B creator marketing: 3 approaches to try

Let’s wrap up and round this out with three different approaches you might want to steal from B2B brands you know:

1. Surround-sound at launch

Replit’s Agent 3 launch

When Replit launched their autonomous app-building agent, they activated 250+ creators across every platform—X, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, newsletters—for a synchronized 7-day blitz. 10M reach, 100K engagement (source).

This worked because one creator posting about your launch disappears into the void feed. 250 creators posting over 7 days creates a surround-sound effect that’s hard to ignore. Your ICP sees it in their newsletter, on their LinkedIn feed, in a YouTube video, and on X. By the third touchpoint, they’re paying attention.

Coordination and concentration matter more than volume. (Volume can help, but the lesson isn’t “go find 250 creators.”) A concentrated launch with 20 aligned creators will outperform 20 scattered posts over 3 months. It’s the same principle you should apply to any brand campaign—don’t just buy reach, create a moment.

2. The always-on playbook

Gamma

Gamma needed to stand out in a crowded AI market and drive efficient PLG (product-led growth) by educating users on how Gamma replaces traditional slides and docs.

They found AI enthusiasts, productivity nerds, solopreneurs with B2B audiences and then doubled down on repeat partnerships with top performers. This was their foundation for an “always-on” creator program centered on carousels and visual walkthroughs, “Gamma vs. legacy tool” comparisons, and tactical educational posts.

The strategic shift was to treat creator marketing like you’d treat content marketing or paid search—as infrastructure, not as campaigns. You have a roster of creators who work. You have content formats that perform. You have a production rhythm. You optimize continuously.

One-off campaigns teach you nothing. Always-on programs create learning loops. You figure out which creator types work, which content formats resonate, which messages drive clicks. Then you scale what works and cut what doesn’t. This only works if you’re running continuously. In one quarter last year, this got them over 1M impressions, $112 CPM (vs. typical LinkedIn CPMs of $150-300), positive ROAS, and a top post that hit 223K views on LinkedIn (source).

3. Creators as educators / depth over breadth

Attio

Attio went for depth over breadth. They didn’t spray and pray with 100 micro-creators doing lightweight posts. They went deep with the right 10-15 creators doing substantial content—2,000-word newsletter features, detailed video walkthroughs, multi-post series. Once Attio had its initial roster of B2B creators, they ran deep educational content like “Tool of the Week” newsletter features, long-form breakdowns like “How to Disrupt a Giant Incumbent,” supporting social posts.

Creator marketing became one of their top 2 growth channels (competing with product-led growth). 1M+ impressions, 90% reduction in time spent finding creators, and higher lead quality than paid channels (source).

One great-fit creator doing deep content beats ten “eh”-fit creators doing surface-level posts. Again, in B2B, you’re not optimizing for impressions. You’re optimizing for “does my ICP now understand why this product matters?”

Start small, but start intentionally

I asked Jen for parting advice for the B2B marketing team starting from zero: “Start small, but start intentionally.”

Pick one concrete objective—launch, category education, top-of-funnel. Choose creators based on audience trust and relevance, not follower count. Give creators room to write in their voice, but be crisp on deliverables. Run a simple pilot with 10-15 creators, then double down on what works. Make it repeatable with templates, process, and a system for managing campaigns.

Most importantly: treat it like a real GTM channel, not a one-off experiment.

If you’re wondering—this is still good advice for B2C creator marketing. You need to commit to learning. Run small tests, measure everything you can, iterate quickly, and scale what works. Don’t expect perfection on the first campaign. But expect to get better every quarter.

Passionfroot’s Zest launches today. If you’re ready to move beyond spreadsheets and have some fun, it’s worth checking out. 🍊

Thanks for reading.

If you liked what you read, consider:

• saying hi or dropping a question in the comments

• connecting with me on LinkedIn: 👩🏼‍💻 Kira Klaas (please include a note!)

• sending to a friend 💌 or coworker 💬

On a personal note, it feels like my brain is just coming back online after a few months of mat leave and an especially slowed-down holiday break. After my beautiful most perfect angel daughter was born in September, last week was my first week back at work. That comes with its own complex emotions, but there’s also a part of me that’s excited for more structure. Back in the saddle! 🤠

Btw, last post I sent out a 2-minute reader survey to give the people what they want! Please take a moment to tell me what you’d love to see in your inbox:

Take reader survey

You’re here because you recently subscribed or signed up for one of my resources—my course waitlist on Maven, lightning lesson, or Notion templates.

If someone sent you this post and you’re not subscribed, join those people learning how to tactically advocate for brand at your company. 📬

Subscribe now

How do you measure brand without perfect attribution?

Brand teams often struggle to prove value because they’re waiting for perfect attribution. But after years at fast-moving companies like Notion, Brex, and Gusto, I’ve learned it’s much less about precise measurement and much more about using the data that already exists to build a narrative.

The myth that brand and growth have separate goals makes this harder than it needs to be.

It’s not brand vs. growth

I wrote about this idea extensively in one of my earliest posts, but it bears repeating because it’s at the root of why brand teams struggle with buy-in.

When companies organize around “Brand” teams and “Growth” teams, they create an artificial delineation that simply does not exist for the customer. Your customer doesn’t experience your brand in isolation from outward-facing growth tactics. They experience one company, one product experience. Every touchpoint, whatever the channel, contributes to both brand perception and conversion likelihood.

But we’ve let growth teams claim ownership of metrics that are just as much indicators of brand impact:

• CAC efficiency = Brand awareness/familiarity reducing friction

• Customer lifetime value = Brand loyalty in action

• Conversion rate = Directly improved by brand trust

• Pricing power = Only as strong as your brand perception

Sure, brand marketing and brand media buys can have their own budget lines, but investment in “brand” is not separate from “growth” investment (make sure you understand the difference between brand marketing and brand).

Investment in brand makes growth investments more efficient. Growth tactics alone can’t grow a company’s brand. But brand puts fuel into all growth engines.

Start with what you already have

I find that many leaders think they need six-figure brand tracking studies or sophisticated multi-touch attribution (MTA) models before they can prove anything.

Those are nice if you have them, but you already have data that demonstrates brand value. You’re just not looking at it through the right lens.

These quantitative metrics, tracked over time and against key initiatives, are what I look at first when I’m making the case for brand investment:

1. Branded search volume

This is the single best proxy for measuring brand awareness and consideration. When people search for your company name or product specifically, they’re not comparison shopping—they’re looking for you. Track:

• Month-over-month trends in branded search

• Correlation with product launches, campaign launches, or PR moments

• Branded search as a percentage of total search traffic

2. Direct traffic and organic social mentions

Again, people coming directly to your site or talking about you unprompted is also brand awareness in action. Track:

• Direct traffic trends (people typing in your URL)

• Unattributed social mentions (people talking about you without tagging you)

• Community growth and engagement rates

3. Customer acquisition cost by channel

Break down your CAC not just by channel, but by whether the customer came in “cold” (no prior brand awareness) or “warm” (previous exposure to brand touchpoints). This is brand value, even if your attribution model doesn’t explicitly credit it.

Warm leads almost always have:

• Higher conversion rates

• Lower cost per acquisition

• Faster close times

• Higher retention rates

4. Sales cycle velocity

The more velocity you see in sales cycles (how fast a deal is to close), the more likely it is to mean that prospects are coming in already familiar with your brand; they’ve probably been recommended it or have heard about it from peers or colleagues (which means word of mouth is working).

This is where you need to partner with your sales team. Get a baseline for:

• Time from first touch to close

• Number of touches required to close

• Win rates by channel and campaign source

5. Pricing and discount patterns

Strong brands command premium pricing. If your sales team can close deals without aggressive discounting or over-reliance on gimmicks like free AirPods to set up calls, your brand is doing work. So, are you able to hold pricing? Are you discounting less than competitors? That’s brand value.

Again, partner with Sales to track:

• Average discount percentage over time

• Win rate at list price vs. discounted price

• Competitive win/loss data (who are you losing to and why?)

6. Employee referral rates and application quality

Your employer brand is your brand, too. At beloved brands, you’ll get candidates telling you they’ve followed the brand for years and wanted to be part of what you’re building. That’s brand value showing up in talent acquisition (and talent acquisition kinda affects everything else). As part of your overall brand health, borrow these metrics from your People team:

• Employee referral rates

• Application volume and quality per role

• Acceptance rates on offers

Connecting the dots (even when it’s messy)

The hard truth is that brand attribution will never be as clean as performance marketing attribution. Brand investments work over longer time horizons, touch multiple channels, and influence behavior in ways that don’t show up in last-click models.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t build a compelling internal narrative around brand metrics and measurement. Here’s my framework for connecting brand investment to business outcomes:

Step 1: Document your baseline

Before any major brand initiative, capture as many of the metrics above as you can, especially:

• Current brand awareness and consideration levels (even rough survey data, like from a sample of 200+ in B2B, is useful directionally)

• Current conversion metrics across the funnel

• Current CAC and LTV benchmarks

• Qualitative feedback from sales and customer success

You need a “before” picture to show brand contributions to improvement.

Step 2: Make your hypothesis

Be explicit about how you expect brand investment to impact the business, something to evaluate against that you’ve acknowledged upfront. For example: “We’re investing in brand awareness campaigns to increase consideration among enterprise buyers. We expect this to show up as:

• Increased branded search within 3 months

• Higher inbound demo request volume within 6 months

• Improved win rates and faster sales cycles within 9-12 months”

Step 3: Build (borrow) a brand impact dashboard

Your performance marketing and finance teams are likely already tracking each of these, so partner with them to update this monthly or quarterly. Present together if you can. You want a dashboard or deck that shows:

• Brand awareness proxies (branded search, direct traffic, social mentions)

• Funnel impact (conversion rates, velocity, win rates)

• Efficiency metrics (CAC trends, discount rates, payback periods)

Your goal here is to show trends over time and connect them to brand initiatives. When you launch a campaign or rebrand, you should see movement in these metrics—though it might take more than a quarter for the story to unfold. Don’t forget to account for seasonality, too.

Step 4: Capture qualitative signals

Numbers tell part of the story. Qualitative feedback completes it—and tells the story your execs need to hear to connect emotionally with what you’re telling them.

Search sales and support call transcripts for phrases like “I’ve heard great things about...” or “I’ve been following you for a while...” or “I saw your billboard…” These are evidence of brand awareness doing its job. (This is a great task for AI, which can also help figure out what other phrases to look for.)

Take 15 minutes each to interview sales reps about whether prospects are coming in warm or cold. Set up another batch of 15 minutes with customer success reps about retention patterns, or get access to the tools they’re already using to track them. Ask the recruiting team about candidate quality and perception.

This is not rigorous data science, but it’s signal, and when multiple qualitative sources point in the same direction, that’s meaningful.

Step 5: Show the cost of not investing

Sometimes the best way to prove brand value is to paint a picture of what happens without it. You might round out the story by looking at companies in your space that have weak brands:

• How much are they spending on performance marketing? (Tools like AdClarity or Particl can help)

• What are prospects, customers, and candidates saying about them? (Turn to G2, Reddit, Glassdoor, etc.)

• How aggressive is their discounting? (If your company has some kind of secret shopper research, team up)

Subscribe now

Making the case without perfect data

So you have this jumble of metrics—now here’s what a compelling brand value story could look like (ignore the % examples—what’s realistic in terms of jump is heavily based on your industry, audience, maturity, etc.):

“Over the past 6 months, we’ve invested $500K in brand awareness campaigns targeting enterprise buyers. Here’s what we’ve seen:

Awareness signals:

• Branded search up 35%

• Direct traffic up 28%

• Unprompted social mentions up 42%

Consideration signals:

• Inbound demo requests from target accounts up 31%

• Enterprise leads up 45% (vs. 12% growth in SMB)

• Sales reports prospects are coming in more educated

Conversion signals:

• Enterprise sales cycle shortened by 8 days on average

• Win rate on enterprise deals up from 22% to 28%

• Average discount declined from 18% to 12%

Efficiency impact:

• Enterprise CAC down 23% despite higher deal values

• LTV:CAC ratio improved from 3.2:1 to 4.1:1

While we’re not attributing all of this directly to brand campaigns, the timing and consistency across metrics suggests our brand investment is creating meaningful business impact. The alternative—continuing to rely solely on performance marketing—would likely have required a 40%+ increase in paid spend to achieve similar pipeline growth.”

When you frame the narrative this way, you’re acknowledging imperfect attribution while still showing multiple data points moving in the same direction, connecting brand metrics to growth metrics/business outcomes, and quantifying the cost of not investing. If your goal is to justify your investment and advocate for more in the future, building a credible narrative backed by directional data is more important than “perfect” measurement. 👞

Thanks for reading.

P.S. What do we think of Equinox’s annual January campaign? I think it’s a great example of rage-baiting done right.

If you liked what you read, consider:

• saying hi or dropping a question in the comments

• connecting with me on LinkedIn: 👩🏼‍💻 Kira Klaas (please include a note!)

• sending to a friend 💌 or coworker 💬

But wait, before we get into hot takes! ✋🏼 As I plan content for the year ahead, I’d love to hear from you about what you want to see more of in 2026.

Please take the 2-minute survey! :)

Take reader survey

Here’s what’s in today’s newsletter:

• My brand/tech ins & outs for 2026

• The three major themes that are shaping how I’m thinking about brand in 2026

• Why people are freaking out about “storytelling” and wisdom from my network

• How to market the future when the future is hard to picture

All the major creative reports dropped this month—Pinterest Predicts, Canva’s Design Trends (in its second year), Adobe’s Creative Trends Forecast, and Red Antler’s State of Brand—and they’re all saying the same thing in different ways: we want 2026 to feel a lot more human.

After years of enduring (and perhaps partaking in) AI hype, it feels like we’re finally taking a collective out-breath. “AI-powered” and all the empty jargon that comes with it is past its peak. I’m not saying AI is any less prevalent in business strategy—but attitudes are shifting. Trend reports aren’t about hyping what’s newest or shiniest anymore or AI capabilities that exist for the hell of it. Instead, trend reports show us turning back to what feels real, messy, and familiar.

I can’t tell the future (no one can—according to Pinterest, most consumers can’t envision a future beyond 24 months; more on that concerning stat in a moment). But this tracks with what I’ve been writing about all year. When anything can be generated, proof of humanity/realness rises in value. When everyone has access to the same tools, taste becomes the differentiator. When content is infinite, attention becomes all the more finite—and the more you need to work for it, through specificity, intention, and craft.

My brand/tech ins & outs for 2026

3 ideas shaping how I think about brand in 2026

These three themes are shaping how I’m thinking about brand in 2026:

1. SHOW YOUR WORK

We want mess, not slop. “Proof-of-reality” entered the lexicon this year—proving your creative wasn’t AI-generated, taking pains to take audiences through the process, revealing behind the scenes. Next year, audiences will demand that even more.

As AI content floods every channel, not just social media (see: Disney x Sora agreement), audiences are developing finely tuned bullshit detectors. We’re hungry for evidence that there’s a real person on the other end.

This is a real opportunity. Show the messy middle, not just the polished launch. Publish the strategy doc, not just the campaign. Have a perspective instead of corporate-nice copy that could have been written by anyone anything.

If you want to stand out, be willing to be seen working, thinking, and occasionally getting it wrong. Your rough cut might be more valuable than your final edit. Personal brands and founder brands will keep outranking corporate accounts. Process is the new product.

And visually, the whole Notes app aesthetic is turning into a full-on design movement, making what’s digital feel more tangible. Pinterest and Canva both spotted this: Pinterest searches for DIY, scrapbook styles, and editorial aesthetics are way up; Canva searches for “zine,” “Substack,” and “moodboard” rose 85-90% year over year. People want content that feels like someone’s camera roll, not a brand’s content calendar.

2. GO SLOW TO GO FAST

Maybe in response to the endless display of ego in government and social media, we want things to feel a little more moral, a little more wholesome. In hand, there’s a growing awareness that we’re burning out on content that’s overstimulating—content that moves too fast, demands too much, keeps us addicted to the scroll.

People are collecting old TVs and VHS tapes so they can show their kids movies the old way—with an intentional start and a definite stop, without all the streaming noise no one asked for. Because it’s overwhelming, we’re craving a slower pace. We want to rewind. We’re craving endings, completion, closure; more on this below.

How all these themes converge, I’m not sure, but people want things they can hold onto, things they can believe in. Things that feel intentional, or that nod to a simpler time. Physical things that aren’t competing with 427 other tabs. Zines, postcards, newspapers (sticker packs that would make Mrs. Grossman proud?). This is not about more landfill core swag (enough water bottles and tote bags already ✋🏼). This, too, is about communicating what you stand for through craft, process, and quality.

And slow often denotes quality. Selvedge denim from a 100-year-old loom. Soy sauce brewed for three years. A tiny handwritten note. How can the same principle apply to B2B? Slowing down might be the fastest way to stand out when everyone else is optimizing for volume.

3. SPECIFICITY

Don’t. Be. Generic. “AI-powered” is dead. “All-in-one” is dead. Networking dinners? Not quite dead, but maybe on the brink. The networking event had a resurgence post-Covid (people still, desperately, want connection) but now they have too many demands on their time and too many invitations—you need IRL, but you need to make IRL worth it; you need to make it fun. How? Get hyper-specific.

I’m talking about super-themed events. I’m calling it now—this is the next wave of brands moving to Substack and AI companies opening coffee shops. The best marketing teams in 2026 will not be hosting yet another happy hour. Instead, they’ll be inviting you to gatherings with extremely specific themes (which will make for excellent opportunities for the analog stuff that’s also back on the rise). Creative séances. Book clubs. You can get really cute with it—give your product launch a baby shower or throw a birthday party. Hell, host a funeral for your old roadmap, all-black attire, Costco sheet cake and all. (IG is your spot for ideas.)

Think about how you can bring “specificity” to all your channels, and don’t be afraid to be weird—you’ll actually give people something to talk about. May “surprise and delight” be your mantra.

Is 2026 all about “storytelling”?

Earlier this month I started on a post about how we’re seeing “storytelling” popping up everywhere and what this means for marketing going into 2026. Then that WSJ article dropped (“Companies are Desperately Seeking ‘Storytellers’”) and LinkedIn had a very demure, very mindful moment where literally everyone had something to say about it. 🙄 So I scrapped my piece—my main working theory at this point is that everyone’s been using LLMs to write their marketing JDs and AI just loves romantic words like “storyteller” (the modern equivalent of rockstar/ninja/guru 🥴). But regardless of the origin, companies are paying it mind, and I wanted my network’s POV on what we should take from this trend:

From Kevin Branscum, former head of brand at Typeform: “Marketing has always been about storytelling!! But the pendulum swung too far toward efficiency, measurement, and the mirage of ‘performance’—where attribution and digital tools promised certainty—and people (read: leadership, boards) lost sight of its original purpose. I think we’re just starting to see the pendulum swing back.”

From Rachel Kim, fractional CMO & consultant at OpenAI (and my favorite former boss): “As you know, I’ve been banging the drum about storytelling for over a decade. But I’m really glad to see this get more recognition, and more companies finally seeing why the investment is justified. What I worry about is if companies will actually do the long term investment necessary for storytelling to move from a ‘flavor of the day’ into something more permanent. … As brand leaders, we need to continue to educate our business counterparts about why you can’t just tell a story once and be done with it, stories need to be repeated, told in different mediums and ultimately embraced by all, not just one person in one function.

I believe teams that fully invest in storytelling will get an outsized advantage...  but many will silo this and not have broader internal adoption and they will fail... (I can’t wait to see the stupid founder LinkedIn post 6 months from now that goes like ‘We tried to invest in storytelling and our pipeline didn’t grow.’)

So here’s my 2026 “IN” for storytelling: Integrate storytelling in every function. Not just marketing, from growth to product to employer branding. A singular mandate, everyone must answer “How does this align with our story for the market?” Build it into every brief, every campaign, every asset, every feature. Does this align with our story? Yes? Ship it! No? Don’t.”

And from Jess Ellis, head of brand at Attentive: “On my IN list is Reputation. Many of us work for companies in crowded spaces, navigating ups and downs of favorability, brand health, and revenue success. All this plus the expectation to shout about AI within our products while customers tend to still favor working with implementation and success teams who help them scale and grow via human relationships. With platforms like Reddit gaining in use and trust, shaping company/brand reputation in both B2B and B2C spaces will be a key unlock in 2026.”

How to market the future when the future is hard to picture

Switching gears now—remember that stat from above? One of the main things that’s stuck with me from Pinterest Predicts 2026 is their proclamation that the five-year plan is dead; that most consumers can’t envision a future beyond 24 months. This poses a challenge to us as brand strategists: How do you market the future when no one can picture it?

You don’t have to look far for more proof that this is the case. Claude’s recent brand work is warm, human—and totally reliant on analog aesthetics. Soft lighting. Handwritten notes. The visual language of a pre-digital world. ChatGPT’s campaigns also lean heavily on nostalgic framings of human creativity and connection.

Even the companies building artificial intelligence (the thing being touted as our inevitable future) can’t paint a picture of what comes next without relying on retro aesthetics.

I think strategist ’s take on our cultural inability to process endings is spot-on. In her essay “Death is Our Missing Technology,” she argues that modern culture feels stuck because we’ve lost the capacity to let things die. Everything just... continues. Everything’s a reboot. Trends circle back before we even register they’re over. Even fleeting social media posts live forever in algorithmic purgatory, resurfacing weeks later. Things go on without closure, “so much so that we’ve had to create a whole new raft of words—like ghosting, breadcrumbing, blanding, airspaces, liminal spaces, requels and nostalgia bait—to hold what we refuse to bury.”

Amidst cute predictions like “Throwback Kid,” “Pen Pals,” and “Khaki Coded,” Pinterest’s consumer research documents a cultural mood: exhausted, uncertain, seeking safety and familiarity. Accordingly, Pinterest is positioning itself as “the perfect place for people to escape overstimulation through trends that don’t create social comparison or FOMO” (Pinterest Global Head of Trends and Insights, Sydney Stanback).

So are these trends… or coping mechanisms?

How do we give consumers what they crave when what they crave is closure? When nostalgia alone doesn’t cut it? Maybe we need more “out” lists. Give your campaigns a definite conclusion (AKA don’t kill Duo just to revive him a few weeks later). Give people the satisfaction of resolution.

In a culture that doesn’t share a collective vision for the future, in a culture drowning in infinite scroll, I’ll be thinking more about how “nostalgia is evolving into ‘reclamation,”—a fusion of “past with the present to brace for a future unknown.”

Because “brace for a future unknown” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. But maybe that’s the point. Perhaps we’re not selling ~transformation~ anymore. For now, it might be about stability, specificity—and proof that someone real is on the other end. 🤷🏼‍♀️

Made it this far? Don’t forget to take the 2-minute On Brand reader survey! 📋

Take reader survey

Thanks for reading.

If you liked what you read, consider:

• replying and saying hi!

• connecting with me (Kira Klaas 👩🏼‍💻) on LinkedIn

• submitting a question or topic you’d like to see next

• sending to a friend 💌 or coworker 💬

Subscribe now

One other thing: If your work has anything to do with AI, you’ll want to sign up for this! 🔔 I’m giving a talk and live Q&A next Tuesday, December 9 at 9:30am ET: Branding AI Products When Everything Is “AI-Powered.” It’s the first on the lineup for Full Circle, a conference for B2B marketing teams, with sessions led by leaders at Asana, Mutiny, Vector, Storylane and more. You can tune in virtually—📅 register for free here.

You’re here because you recently subscribed or signed up for one of my resources—my course waitlist on Maven, lightning lesson, or Notion templates.

If someone sent you this post and you’re not subscribed, join those people learning how to tactically advocate for brand at your company. 📬

Subscribe now

Okay, so I’ve written about copywriting as one of the most undervalued skills in marketing and brand. You guys loved that post. Now I want to talk about one more vastly underrated skill in brand leadership—knowing when and how to say no.

Most of us learn how the hard way. You’re three weeks out from a major campaign launch, and your CEO has a “great idea” to completely change the creative direction based on something he saw on LinkedIn. The agency has already delivered final assets. Media is booked. The team has been working nights to hit the deadline.

You didn’t say no. You gamely said, “let me think about how we could incorporate that” and spent the weekend stress-eating cheese and wondering how to pull off the impossible. You ended up shipping a watered-down version that satisfied no one—not the CEO, not the team, not the audience.

The issue isn’t that the CEO has an opinion, it’s that you haven’t build the muscle to push back constructively (and in turn, protect your team’s time). You’re treating every stakeholder request as equally valid, every exec suggestion as a mandate, every “what if we tried...” as something you need to figure out.

If you work in brand, you’re already drowning in opinions. Founders push for their own aesthetic preferences. Sales wants every feature called out. Product wants the homepage to explain the entire technical architecture. Legal wants seventeen disclaimers and an entire footer block of small print. Everyone has thoughts about the shade of blue.

Your job isn’t to be a yes-person. Your job is to advocate for decisions that serve the brand and the business, even when they’re unpopular.

Marketing to no one

You’ve heard “marketing to everyone is marketing to no one,” right?

Well, saying yes to everything is how generic/mediocre brands get built. When you accommodate every stakeholder preference, you end up with fragmented brand experiences. Your homepage looks nothing like your product. Your ads sound nothing like your emails. Your brand feels like it was designed by committee—because it was. You’ve gone and shipped your org chart.

It’s also how you end up with scope creep that kills momentum.

A “quick refresh” of the pricing page becomes a six-month odyssey because everyone keeps adding one more thing, and that’s exhausting for teams. Once your copywriter’s rewritten the same headline 37 times (if not more…), you know morale is shot. I’ve been on marketing teams bending over backwards trying to incorporate every piece of feedback, only to ship something that makes everyone shrug.

Maintaining this level of effort to make everyone happy is exhausting. It’s harder than it needs to be.

When to say yes vs. when to say no

Here’s a refrain my research partner and I came up with back when we were working in the early startup trenches at Brex: When you say no, have a solution. When you say yes, have a reason.

The “yes” part is in there because I don’t think the standard advice to “always be solution-oriented” is enough. When you do agree/commit, you need to know why you’re saying yes. You need to be able to trace the decision back to your underlying brand strategy and make sure it makes sense; also helpful should you need to explain or defend the decision to your other stakeholders further along in the process. This reminder keeps you intentional about your yeses AND constructive about your nos.

Say yes when:

• The feedback aligns with your brand strategy, even if it takes extra work

• You’re building trust with a key stakeholder early in your tenure

• Similarly, you’re learning something important about stakeholder priorities that will help you later (more about this below)

• The person has context or expertise you genuinely lack

• When the request strengthens the work, even if it wasn’t your first instinct

Say no when:

• The request contradicts your documented brand foundations (in extreme cases, maybe this warrants a revisitation of the foundations, but that’s another process)

• You’re being asked to solve for one person’s preference vs. audience needs

• The change would create noticeable inconsistency across touchpoints

• The timeline makes quality execution impossible

• You’re being asked to ship your org chart (different teams want different things)

The tricky part is that most requests fall somewhere in the middle. Your founder wants to add a feature callout that’s technically relevant but clutters the message. Your VP of Sales wants to test aggressive urgency tactics that might work short-term but erode trust long-term.

This is where the “have a solution” part comes in.

Scripts for saying no (without actually saying no)

The secret to saying no effectively is that you rarely use the word “no.” Instead, you redirect, you reframe, you offer alternatives. Here are real conversations I’ve had:

When someone wants to add everything to the homepage

We want to say:

“That’s way too busy and too much content. 🙄”

But instead we say:

“I hear that [feature X] is important to call out. Right now we’re optimizing for [specific goal]. If we add this, we’d need to deprioritize [Y] or extend the timeline by [Z weeks] to redesign the hierarchy. Which matters more for this quarter—getting this live on time or incorporating this feature?”

Why it works: You’re showing the tradeoff, not just blocking their idea. You’re making them a partner in the prioritization decision.

When a founder wants to pursue their personal aesthetic

We want to say:

“That doesn’t fit our brand guidelines... 😐”

But instead we say:

“I love that you’re thinking about this. The direction you’re describing feels [modern/bold/whatever]. Our brand research showed that our audience responds to [X]. What if we tested both approaches with a small sample and let the data guide us?”

Why it works: You’re acknowledging their taste while re-centering on audience needs. Offering a test helps take ego out of the equation.

When legal wants to add disclaimers everywhere

We want to say:

“That will ruin the design!! 😫”

But instead we say:

“I understand we need to cover [legal requirement]. What if we moved this language to [footer/separate page/tooltip] so it’s accessible but doesn’t interrupt the core message? We can A/B test to make sure it doesn’t hurt conversion.”

Why it works: You’re addressing their problem (compliance) while protecting your problem (user experience).

When an exec suggests a last-minute creative pivot

We want to say:

“We can’t change this now... wtf 🫠”

But instead we say:

“I appreciate you bringing this up. Incorporating this change would mean [specific consequences: pushing launch, cutting other elements, compromising quality in XYZ ways]. Given that we’ve already validated this direction with [research/testing/whatever], I’d suggest we ship what we have and incorporate this thinking into [next project]. Does that work, or is this change critical enough to adjust our timeline?”

Why it works: You’re being transparent about impact while giving them a choice. Most people will back down when they understand the holistic cost.

When you’re getting design-by-committee feedback

We want to say:

“There are too many cooks in the kitchen! 😵‍💫”

But instead we say:

“We’ve gotten a lot of great input from the team. Some of it’s pulling us in different directions. Before we do another round of revisions, can we re-align on [the primary goal/audience/message]? Once we’re clear on that, I can make sure the next version ladders up to what matters most.”

Why it works: You’re pausing the chaos to reestablish strategy. You’re also subtly pointing out that not all feedback is compatible.

How to build trust that makes “no” easier

Another thing I’ve learned is that your ability to say no is directly proportional to how much trust you’ve built.

A listening tour is a common part of an exec’s onboarding or “first 30 days” plan—it’s a great technique within brand building, too. At Brex, and where I’ve worked since, I’ve held a brand listening tour (using this template) with every exec and key stakeholder at the early start of our rebranding process. We asked about their priorities, their concerns, their audience understanding; noted their past experiences with brand work and any biases or potential sticking points. I took notes. I synthesized. By the time I needed to push back on something, I had context (and the receipts 🧾). I understood where they were coming from. And they knew I understood.

And trust compounds. Every time you ask thoughtful questions, advocate for the customer, show how you’ve heard and incorporated feedback thoughtfully—plus the basics like explaining your reasoning, admitting when you’re wrong, and giving credit generously—you’re building permission to be more direct next time.

If you’re saying no around brand decisions without taking people on the journey with you, you perpetuate this problematic idea of being the “brand police” (here’s why we should kill that!).

The strongest leaders, the ones people follow from company to company, aren’t always saying yes. They’re the ones who’ve built enough trust that when they do push back, people listen.

When saying yes is the strategic move

Sometimes saying yes—even to something you don’t love—is the right call.

Early in your tenure, you might say yes to build credibility. When your CEO wants to test an idea that you’re skeptical about, sometimes the fastest path to influence is “okay, let’s try it and learn from it.” You can get a lot of reps in quickly with something like site headlines, which are easy to test. If something you don’t agree with gets the green light, document your concerns and predictions ahead of time, then have them ready to bring to the debrief or briefing of the next project. Any data you gather to support your POV helps you earn permission to be more assertive on the next decision.

Strategic yeses are investments. You’re saying “I’m willing to be flexible” in exchange for more latitude later. Just make sure you’re doing it intentionally, not out of fear. (In that case, it might be worth taking a bigger look at the company culture and thinking about who’s really set up to succeed here.)

The questions I ask before responding

Now, we can’t really have a “how to say no” article without talking about “yes, and.” Saying “Yes, and” is at the core of the “have a solution” part of my advice above, and it works when:

• The core idea has merit but needs refinement

• You can see a way to incorporate the spirit of the request

• Building on the idea leads somewhere interesting

• You want to model collaborative problem-solving

When a request comes in, I run through these questions:

1. Does this align with our documented brand strategy? If we don’t have documented strategy, that’s the real problem.

2. What problem is this person actually trying to solve? Often the stated request isn’t the real need.

3. What would saying yes cost us? Time? Quality? Consistency? Team morale?

4. Is there a better solution that serves their goal and protects the brand? It might take some thinking, but oftentimes, yes.

5. Am I saying no because I’m being precious, or because it genuinely matters? Ego check.

6. How much trust do I have in the bank with this person? Influences how direct I can be.

7. Is this a hill worth dying on? We must protect our energy!

These questions help me get out of reactive mode and into strategic mode.

Building a brand culture proactively

The best way to say no less often is to prevent those wonky asks in the first place. Each of these could warrant their own deep-dive (votes on next topic? leave a comment!), but high level:

Document your brand foundations. When you have clear, written strategy that leadership has signed off on, you can point to it. “We agreed our tone is [X], and this suggestion would push us toward [Y].”

Establish review processes. Define who has input vs. approval. Use a DACI. Make it clear that five people can weigh in, but only one (or two, max) can approve. This alone will save you so much pain.

Leverage templates and guidelines. The more you can codify “this is how we do things,” the fewer one-off debates you’ll have.

Set expectations upfront. At project kickoff, clarify the timeline, the feedback windows, and what happens if we get late-breaking input. When someone tries to derail things at the eleventh hour, you can point back to what was agreed.

Share the “why” proactively. Don’t wait for people to question your decisions. Explain your strategic reasoning as you go. This preempts a lot of would-be objections.

I knew a brand director who made and shared a “decision log.” It was a simple doc/slide deck where she recorded every major brand decision, the rationale, and who approved it. When someone questioned why (or whether) they’d made a certain choice, she could pull up the context. Goodbye, endless rehashing!

What to do when you can’t say no

Sometimes you genuinely can’t say no. The CEO has decided. The board has opinions. You’re overruled. When this happens:

Document your concerns. Write them down, share them with your manager, keep a record. Not in a cover-your-ass way, but so there’s a paper trail of your strategic thinking if you need it.

Set up learning. If you think the approach won’t work, define what success looks like upfront and commit to reviewing results. When the data proves you right (or wrong), you’ve created an opportunity for correction, or at least discussion!

Do the best possible execution. Even if you disagree with the direction, make it as good as it can be within those constraints.

Know when to escalate. If you’re being asked to do something that compromises brand integrity (that is, customer experience) or conflicts with documented strategy, escalate to your manager or relevant exec. Sometimes battles need to be fought at a higher level because they’re indicators of greater misalignment.

Decide if it’s a dealbreaker. If you’re consistently overruled on things that matter, at some point you need to evaluate if this is the right place for you. I’m not suggesting you quit over every disagreement. But if the pattern is that your strategic judgment isn’t valued, that’s information.

The long game

Learning to say no well is a career-long practice. I’m still figuring it out. I do know that our job isn’t to make everyone happy. Our job is to build a brand that works—one that’s intentional, shows up consistently, and prioritizes empathy with the people it’s made for. As leaders, we’re the one who can hold the line. We can articulate why something won’t work without being precious. We can redirect without being dismissive.

The sooner you get comfortable with that tension, the better your work will be. And honestly, the happier you’ll be too. Because nothing is more exhausting than trying to accommodate everyone... and nothing is more satisfying than shipping work you’re proud of—who cares if it ruffles a few feathers along the way? 🪽

I teach an immersive course on Maven, Brand for Growth-Stage Leaders. After taking a break from teaching since April, I’m running one more cohort in January/February 2026 (and then, who knows?! but may be the last for a while given life is busy).

Over 4 weeks, you’ll work through my super comprehensive syllabus on how to successfully invest and scale brand from early executive alignment through executing campaigns and even measurement, with case studies from Brex, Notion, and Gusto. As a thank you, you can use the code SUBSCRIBER to take $100 off your enrollment. If cost is an issue for you, please reach out to discuss scholarships, discounts, and payment plans and I’ll do my very best to accommodate you.

Get Discount

Thanks for reading.

If you liked what you read, consider:

• replying and saying NO! just for fun

• connecting with me (Kira Klaas 👩🏼‍💻) on LinkedIn

• sending to a friend 💌 or coworker 💬

  Thanks for reading On Brand! This post is public so feel free to share it.

  Share

If Black Friday sales are on your mind, don’t miss the rare chance to take 25% off my 4-week course, Brand for Growth-Stage Leaders, during Maven’s Fast Track sale. Use my code KIRA25 to sign up for the January/February cohort.

Aside from newslettering, I’m making apple, pecan, and pumpkin pies 🥧 this week, along with my first turkey ever for Saturday’s Friendsgiving—we’re hosting. Save you a slice! 🥰

You’re here because you recently subscribed or signed up for one of my resources—my course waitlist on Maven, lightning lesson, or Notion templates.

If someone sent you this post and you’re not subscribed, join those people learning how to tactically advocate for brand at your company. 📬

Subscribe now

I’ve built scrappy customer personas from scratch at Brex and inherited well-researched ones at Notion. Personas tend to go one of two ways: They’re either a company’s bible, referenced every single All Hands—or they exist as a 30-page word doc in some PMM’s Google Drive that no one ever has ever looked at since that one meeting.

If personas are still something of a black box to you, let’s break down what a customer persona should entail, and why they matter to brand strategy.

Personas & brand-market fit

If they serve any purpose, personas should help you achieve brand-market fit—only possible when you understand your audience.

Product-market fit means you’re solving the right problem for the right people. Brand-market fit means your brand resonates emotionally and “aspirationally” with those same people. You can have a product people need but a brand they don’t connect with—and that limits your growth ceiling.

Personas are the bridge. They help everyone understand not just what problems your product solves, but how people feel about those problems, what alternatives they’re aware of, and what words they use when they’re trying to describe their challenges to others. And in the right format, they’re an incredibly useful alignment tool. Alignment is a precursor to consistency, and as we know, consistency builds trust. We’ll take any help we can get to build up all of the above!

When building campaigns, you need to ask: “What’s the biggest barrier preventing this person from adopting this product?” When writing website copy, ask: “What specific words do they use to describe their problems?” When prioritizing features, ask: “What alternatives are they comparing us against?” Well-researched personas become more than a list of descriptions and demographics—they should make it easier to answer these questions.

At Brex, we identified that our early buyer persona (largely tech startup founders) cared deeply about access, speed, appearing sophisticated, and staying ahead of the curve. That informed everything from our visual identity (sleek, modern, premium) to our tone (confident but not arrogant, in the know) to our partnership strategy (aligning with other brands that appealed to ambitious founders). All of that boosted us to the front of the disruptor set in the extremely noisy, heavily commodified market of business credit cards.

None of that happens if you’re just guessing about who your customers are and what they care about.

With strong personas, your messaging lands because it reflects how customers actually think. Your positioning is clear because you understand the real alternatives and decision criteria. Your campaigns resonate because they speak to underlying motivations. Personas make it obvious who your brand is for and why they should buy.

1. Audit any existing persona work

A couple of questions to ask yourself or your team to get started:

• Are your personas more focused on demographics or on behaviors? Knowing your customer is a 35-year-old VP of Marketing in SF doesn’t tell you what problems keep them up at night or how they actually evaluate solutions. Demographics are a good starting point, but what matters more is understanding their context, motivations, and decision-making process.

• Are they connected to real customer voices? While they can be creatively named and elaborate, personas aren’t creative writing exercises. They’re alignment tools that synthesize patterns from customer conversations. If you can’t trace a persona insight back to specific interviews or data, are you just making stuff up?

• Do people know how to use them? Even if personas exist, maybe you haven’t invested in internal education so teams don’t know when to reference them. Does Product know to use them for roadmap prioritization? Should Marketing use them for campaign targeting? Can Sales use them for qualification? If that’s not clear, they often become everyone’s responsibility and therefore no one’s.

• How often are you refreshing your persona research? Most teams create personas once, during a rebrand or initial research phase, then never touch them again. Your customers evolve. Your product evolves. The persona doc from 2023 isn’t doing a lot to help.

Each persona should answer:

• What this person is trying to achieve

• What motivates them

• What barriers they face

• How they solve problems today

Let’s take Notion’s product leadership buyer persona as an example—the high-level answers might look like this:

• What they’re trying to achieve: Centralize their team’s knowledge and reduce wasted time looking for information, so builders (engineers, designers) can stay in flow state

• What motivates them: Less time on project management, more time doing the best work of their careers; keeping pace with peers; one source of truth for team knowledge

• What barriers they face: Learning curve feels too long; team adoption challenges; urgency to survive means they skip investing in better workflows for more urgent problems

• How they solve problems today: High verbal culture with lots of check-ins; combination of G-Suite plus a mix of project management tools; often replicating what worked at their last company

These insights let us know that we should target our messaging more around helping teams find their flow states and that we need to address concerns around time investment before payoff upfront—not generic productivity or “time saved” or all-in-one messaging.

2. Conduct the research that feeds great personas

Building useful personas requires talking to customers—or at the very least, talking to teams who talk to customers all day long (sales, customer support). There’s no shortcut. You can’t workshop your way to insight.

But you don’t need a massive research operation. You need focused conversations that ask the right questions.

Three areas to delve into that will get you the insights you need to inform your positioning, your messaging hierarchy, and where to focus your brand-building:

Problems and pain points. What specific problem needs solving? You also want context like—how painful is it? (Is this a hair-on-fire right now situation or long-term aspiration but for the moment things are fine?)

Importantly, this is where you go deeper with something like the “five whys” method to understand the problem behind the problem and especially their underlying motivation. You’re also listening for the specific words customers use to describe their challenges—because it’s likely that’s the language that will resonate in your copy and messaging.

Alternatives and competition. How were they solving this before? What alternatives have they tried? Why is your solution better? This reveals not just your direct competitors, but also the workarounds and makeshift solutions people hack together. (Dropbox competes with both cloud storage and hard drives and literal filing cabinets. Notion competes with Atlassian and Monday.com and also your Moleskine.)

Adoption and sharing behavior. How do people share your product internally? Who else might benefit but isn’t using it yet? Why aren’t they? You’re looking to uncover organic growth patterns (like tops down or bottoms up influences) and identify friction points in your GTM motion.

3. Build your persona framework

I’m sharing a simple Notion database/template that captures the structure we used, with some updates based on what I’ve learned since—paid subscribers can access it (and a very robust interview guide for you—or for use with your research team) below.

Start with segmentation that matters. Segment by behavioral patterns (not just demographics) that affect how people buy and use your product. At Notion, we segmented by company stage and role (individuals vs. teams vs. enterprise, or single-player vs. multi-player) because that informed their use cases and decision-making process.

A freelancer obviously has completely different needs than a founder trying to align a 20-person org, or a product leader adopting Notion for their team within a 500-person company.

Document the essentials. For each persona, capture:

• Role and context (not just title—actual day-to-day responsibilities)

• Primary goals and underlying motivations

• Key barriers and challenges

• Current solutions and alternatives

• How they discover and evaluate tools

• Specific use cases for your product

• Frequency and depth of engagement

Use real customer language. This cannot be overstated. When you’re summarizing insights, quote customers directly. (I use the same advice when navigating exec buy-in—use the exact language you hear execs using. Be a parrot.) It’s still jargon-y, but “less time doing project management ops tasks and more time building” hits different than waxing on about “improved productivity.”

Connect personas to business outcomes. Articulate what success looks like for each persona when using your product. This is what bridges persona work to business impact. Your goal might to get a client company to add on as many seats as possible. But that’s never going to be your customer’s goal. Their goal might be to operate faster and get new hires ramped up quickly. Whatever it is, that clarity can help you measure whether you’re actually delivering value.

Make them living documents. This is where the Notion template structure really helps. Instead of static PDFs, you have a database you can filter, update, and expand. Add new insights from customer calls. Tag personas to specific campaigns or features. Link to interview recordings or support tickets. The persona becomes a hub for all customer intelligence, not a one-time deliverable.

More tips: How to use customer personas

Sometimes creating personas is actually the easy part—getting your team to reference them is harder. What I’ve found helps:

Maybe don’t call them personas. Jargon matters in terms of how things get adopted. If “personas” feels too impersonal or too pedantic, then you might only ever use the names of each persona (“The Architect” or “The Productivity Enthusiast” were two we used at one point at Notion) or a nickname to personify them. Gusto named the core persona “Jessica” to refer to the millennial HR person wearing all the hats at their org—everything was about catering to Jessica’s needs.

Reference them in meetings. Constantly. When someone proposes an idea, ask: “Which persona (or customer) is this for?” When reviewing messaging, ask: “Is this how [persona name] would actually describe their problem?” The more you use persona names in everyday conversation (see above!), the more they become part of your team’s shared language.

Tie personas to specific workflows. When your product team is prioritizing the roadmap, work with them to identify which persona(s) benefit from each feature. When marketing is building a campaign or channel strategy, specify the target persona upfront. When sales is qualifying leads, make sure they’re using persona characteristics as part of their checklist.

Use them for prioritization. Keep the list of personas tight. Then personas should be stack ranked by growth goals and assigned resources accordingly.

Update them regularly. Bake reviews/updates into your quarterly plans to incorporate new customer feedback, support tickets, and recent interviews. Are the pain points still accurate? Have new adoption barriers emerged? Have competitors changed the landscape?

Getting started

No personas yet? Get a first pass down on paper:

This month: Schedule 5 customer interviews around the framework I outlined above (or use the template here as a starting point). Choose customers who represent different use cases or segments. Record the conversations, with permission.

After the interviews: Synthesize the interviews looking for patterns in problems, alternatives, and adoption behavior. Start drafting your first 2-3 persona profiles using the Notion template.

Next month: Present the personas to your leadership team and key stakeholders. Get their input and buy-in. Then identify 2-3 immediate decisions where personas should inform the outcome—maybe it’s upcoming campaign messaging or H1 roadmap priorities.

📎 Get the template: The interviews template above is nested into the overall customer personas database I use, which can be easily prettied up as you flesh it out with real customer detail, images, etc. You can buy the Notion template here (paid subscribers get 20% off all my templates) to copy it into your own workspace.

See template

As a reminder, please do not sell, repackage, or distribute any of my templates—but please do share my writing! Visit notion.so/@kira for more.

Looking for a deeper dive into brand strategy and marketing? Check out my courses on Maven (with 25+ Notion templates, not including this one) and Reforge.

Thanks for reading.

Did this take resonate with you? If you liked what you read, consider:

• saying hi or dropping a question in the comments!

• connecting with me on LinkedIn: 👩🏼‍💻 Kira Klaas

• sending to a friend 💌 or coworker 💬

Share

Week before last, I spent three days in LA attending Adobe MAX with a front-and-center view of their latest capabilities… and while in town, hosted the second On Brand × Capsule meetup! 🪡 I loved meeting ~brand people~ from Microsoft, TikTok, Intuit, and more, plus some of my Substack heroes: ICYMI by Lia Haberman and NYC in H1, anyone?? 🚕

You’re here because you recently subscribed or signed up for one of my resources—my course waitlist on Maven, lightning lesson, or Notion templates.

If someone sent you this post and you’re not subscribed, join those people learning how to tactically advocate for brand at your company. 📬

Subscribe now

Can you guess which keynote announcement got the biggest applause at Adobe MAX? Some of the loudest cheers from 10,000+ attendees were not for text-to-image generation or AI video creation. They were for… bulk layer renaming! Followed closely by drag to auto-adjust kerning and text size, and bulk culling in Lightroom—AI features Adobe calls “quality of life” improvements; unglamorous workflow stuff that makes a creative professional’s day-to-day less painful.

I was there with a press pass on behalf of On Brand (still pinching myself about that 😁), and my time at and around the conference helped crystallize something I’ve been thinking about for a while: the disconnect between what’s being marketed as “the future of creativity” and what will really help creative and brand teams uplevel.

The exec push to “do it with AI”

Because here’s what happens: Some CMO watches Adobe’s keynote, sees infinite content generation from text prompts, and immediately envisions cutting their creative budget in half. “Why do a custom photoshoot when we can just have AI generate it?!” They jump on a Zoom call with their creative director and push for AI everything, legitimately believing they’re driving innovation (never mind barely educating themselves about AI’s actual abilities and limitations).

Meanwhile, their creative team is spending 60% of their time on layer management, file organization, and reformatting assets for the 47th CEO-mandated homepage redesign this quarter. They don’t need infinite content generation (where accuracy and control has so far been unreliable)—they need their lunch break back.

The seduction is real. These demos can be mind-blowing. Adobe and others are selling a vision where anyone can create anything instantly, where creativity is “democratized.” It’s a powerful narrative. But while executives are being sold on the sizzle (infinite content! no photographers needed! no T&E!), I’m not sure we’re doing justice to what’s more transformative. Your team spending 40% less time on the rote tasks AI is best at means 40% more time on strategy and craft that moves the business.

We need to understand gen AI’s time and place.

A “save or splurge” mindset for creative assets

I offer you the wisdom that fashion mags have espoused for decades. We all remember those articles about what to spend your money on when you shop—“save” on cheap t-shirts and socks and lip balm, “splurge” on really nice jeans and timeless leather boots and a great bag. You can debate what goes into either category based on what you care about most, but the idea is that you invest more or less into things based on how much you’ll use them and how important they are. Put into terms of creative assets:

“Splurge” on people-powered creativity for:

• Hero campaign imagery that will define your brand for the next year

• Product shots that become core brand assets

• Leadership, team, & customer photography (please no AI headshots)

• Any content where authenticity IS the value prop (i.e. if you’re selling a skincare product, you need to show real skin; if you’re championing small businesses, photograph real small business owners)

• Cultural moments that require genuine human perspective and nuance

• Photography that captures behind-the-scenes content, talent/influencer relationships, in-person experiences

“Save” with AI for:

• Social media/blog/display ad templates and size variations

• Background extensions, variations/iterations, different angles for different format requirements (e.g. Adobe’s Vary and Turntable features) or for A/B testing

• Placeholder content for mockups and internal pitches (though tread with caution so stakeholders don’t get attached where you don’t want them to)

• Certain B-roll or filler content that supports but doesn’t lead

There seems to be a marketing/user disconnect here. The marketing hypes all the amazing ways to create by typing a few words; people clap the most for layer cleanup. Workflow friction is more of a pain point for creators than a creativity deficit. They need AI to handle the tedious mechanics that eat up their actual creative time.

Marketing spectacular generative capabilities is what looks revolutionary in demos and drives investor excitement, but what actually revolutionizes creative work is removing the thousand paper cuts that make professionals spend more of their time on admin instead of creation. Is the transformative vision being pushed across the industry—infinite content generation—solving a problem people don’t have?

I think Adobe gets this for the most part, though only time will tell. The workflow improvements show they understand what professionals need today, while the generative features are laying groundwork for an expected (or at least hoped for) step up in model output capabilities. That the less helpful generative features get more attention isn’t Adobe’s fault—it’s that the market (executives, investors, media) gravitates toward the flashier story.

Further musings about our AI future

And then there’s an even bigger debate I keep having with myself. What moral responsibility should brands take for their products? What do brands owe us when they build reality-altering tools?

Adobe talks about “democratizing creativity” (which they want to do at “massive scale.”) That sounds like a positive vision, but what democratization seems to mean in practice is less friction—making it easy for anyone, anywhere, to create virtually any image. Anyone can now produce “professional” content without the years of training or the expensive equipment (or even the basic understanding of things like composition or color theory).

Plenty of reassuring language accompanies this: “transparently trained” and “commercially safe.” Adobe founded the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), they have ethics reviews; this is not Juul marketing to kids. But when you’re building tools that can fabricate reality at scale, is “commercially safe” enough? To be clear, this isn’t an Adobe thing—I actually think they’ve gone farther than most of the market and are continuing to innovate and deliver what their audience actually wants/needs. Meta, Canva, Midjourney, and many more bear the same responsibility to humans (or even humanity). Will they step up? Signs point to no, but I’ll remain optimistic.

While the way this tech gets used will mostly be innocent, it’s part of the same blurring of reality and credibility we’re seeing everywhere—podcasters dispensing health advice without any official credentials, Instagram news accounts and Substack writers indistinguishable from trained journalists, etc. The question isn’t whether generative tools CAN create misinformation—they can. It’s not even whether most users will use them ethically—most generally will (depending on your definition of ethical).

What I wonder more is: Should any company be mass-distributing reality-manipulation tools without equivalent (or even outsized) investment in education, detection, safety guardrails and enforcement? Especially when it’s obvious that regulation or research can’t keep pace with product innovation, and there are no established norms for what interaction is societally healthy and acceptable?

NYT is reporting on people’s long-term romantic relationships with AI chatbots. Character.ai (chatbots) just banned users under 18 (following really horribly sad teen suicides—making it a more reactive move than a proactive one). Will we see age limits on generative tools at some point, too? And what about the idea of “democratization” vs. gatekeeping—should there be more barriers to entry?

I wonder this because in some ways, Adobe’s been here before. We’re not so far from the Photoshop era that sparked Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign in the 2000s and a whole slew of similar marketing with “no retouching” disclaimers. We spent two decades fighting the beauty standards that Photoshop enabled. This time it’s more than beauty standards up for manipulation.

I’m trying not to go too far down the doom and gloom rabbit hole because these tools are here, and here to stay (barring some extreme government intervention, which would be surprising though not perhaps not unwelcome). What we as brand leaders CAN do is step up to create the norms for how and when they get used.

As consumers, we can demand the standards we want in place. I listed “education” first up above because that’s where we marketers and brand leaders have the most opportunity (and dare I say, amid the bleakness, room to have fun?! Let’s bring on the Schoolhouse Rock era around AI education. What would Mr. Rogers say about it?).

Or through the business lens: For every dollar your org spends on generative capabilities, how much are you investing in workflow optimization (aka fixing the actual problems your customers face)?

We owe it to our audiences and each other; not just “commercially safe” content but thoughtful use of tools that have both great potential for harm as well as beauty. The brands we can trust are the ones that are transparent about their use of AI and uphold clear standards for when human creativity is non-negotiable.

Adobe says “the future belongs to those who create.” I completely agree. But smart brands need to recognize that when everyone can create anything instantly, competitive advantage doesn’t come from volume—it comes from taste, strategy, and knowing when to use which tool. 🛍️

Thanks for reading.

If you liked what you read, consider:

• saying hi or dropping a question in the comments

• connecting with me on LinkedIn: 👩🏼‍💻 Kira Klaas (& add a note!)

• sending to a friend 💌 or coworker 💬

Before we get into brand hiring—a topic I’ve been asked about no fewer than six times in the last two weeks (took it as a sign), I’ve got a few other goodies for you. I’m headed to LA next week for Adobe MAX and to host the next IN-PERSON (!) On Brand × Capsule meetup for senior brand marketers & creatives—if you’d like to attend or send a friend, drop me a line! Nothing better than meeting readers IRL (and On Brand hats). 🧢

And we’ve got some bonus content on brand tracking/measurement—this Wednesday, 10/22 at 9am PT, I’ll be talking with Matt Maynard, VP, Global Brand, Advertising, & Comms at Asana and Alexandra Fletcher, Brand Analyst at Elastic about connecting brand intuition and brand data—how to build tracking without slowing down and how to prove value before you invest (part of Shaped By’s virtual summit on B2B branding). 📅 Join us here if you’re wrestling with these questions.

You’re here because you recently subscribed or signed up for one of my resources—my course waitlist on Maven, lightning lesson, or Notion templates.

If someone sent you this post and you’re not subscribed, join those people learning how to tactically advocate for brand at your company. 📬

Subscribe now

When I joined Notion as Global Head of Brand, one of my first tasks was scaling the team across campaigns, social, partnerships, strategy and design. During my earlier tenure at Brex, I built the brand function from scratch—hiring our first brand marketer, then our first designer, then building out entire disciplines. I’ve managed directors, managers, and ICs of all seniority levels. I’ve made great hires and I’ve made mistakes. I’ve watched other companies build dream teams…and I’ve seen them waste budget on roles that never should have existed. Lots of lessons learned, to say the least! About recruiting, closing, org and role design, and of course, team management and culture building.

Recently, I’ve been hearing from more founders in my network asking for advice on building a marketing team, and specifically a brand function. I’m glad, because hiring for brand is one of the most consequential decisions you’ll make as an early stage founder or later stage marketing leader.

Get it right, and you’ll have a team whose outcomes compounds corporate growth and earn trust from every corner of the audience spectrum (including internal employees who are absolutely a key audience). Get it wrong, and you’ll spend years mired in misalignment and frequent shifts in strategy without coherent visual language or campaign planning (not exactly a recipe for compound revenue growth), and watching your best people leave for companies that get it.

So today, I’m sharing my thoughts on how to think about brand team building, when to hire a brand leader vs. IC(s) vs. a consultant, and 10 key attributes to look for in your very first (or next) brand hire.

In future posts, I’ll share my thoughts on how to structure your brand team (and maybe marketing team as a whole?), red flags to watch out for in the hiring process, and tips on structuring an effective interview loop. Subscribe if you don’t want to miss these and more coming up.

Subscribe now

Define what you actually need

First, let’s get clear on what we’re actually hiring for—what are the outcomes brand team will be responsible for?

The first place leaders trip up is in their definition of brand. “Brand” tends to mean different things to different people, and the roles that support brand work are indeed varied. Are you hiring a brand strategist? A brand designer? A campaigns lead or a media buyer? A copywriter? A senior leader? Each takes different skills, but they all need to share certain qualities to be effective in the modern corporate environment—especially at product-first, founder-led, performance-obsessed companies.

Like I wrote in one of my earliest posts, brand, branding, and brand marketing are all distinct:

Brand is everything a prospect or customer thinks about you. You don’t actively control this—it’s the sum of all perceptions and associations.

Branding is everything about your business that a prospect or customer sees—your visual identity, voice, messaging, product experience, customer support scripts. You actively control this.

Brand marketing is how you get that “everything” in front of prospects and customers—your campaigns, channels, and strategic communications. You actively control this.

Most companies conflate these three terms when hiring, which leads to mismatched expectations and failed searches. You might think you need a “brand person” when what you really need is a visual designer who can create or execute guidelines. Or you might start interviewing strong brand strategists from top-name agencies, but turns out you actually need someone who can manage agencies to ship campaigns.

So before you write that job description (or borrow mine—linked at the end for paid subscribers), ask yourself, do you need:

• To define brand strategy and positioning?

• To create and maintain visual and content systems?

• To get our brand in front of more people through campaigns and channels?

• To organize our marketing efforts with a clear vision of audience and message?

• To do all of the above?

The answers will dramatically change who you’re looking for and how you evaluate candidates.

When to hire a leader vs. IC(s) vs. a consultant

Another decision point many companies get wrong: when to hire a brand leader who can own the entire function vs. when to hire individual contributors (ICs) who execute specific disciplines—vs. when to bring in external consultants.

Hire a leader if:

• You’re planning to scale brand investment significantly (campaigns, team growth, agency partnerships)

• Your founder/CEO (maybe that’s you!) doesn’t have the time or expertise to deeply own brand direction

• You’re Series B+ and need to define your brand strategy from scratch or are considering a refresh/rebrand

• You need someone who can earn executive trust and secure ongoing budget. Maybe you have a few solid contributors co-owning brand, but want to centralize decision making and narrative.

Hire individual contributors if:

• You have a strong leader (head of marketing, CMO) or founder who has set brand direction

• You have a high level of internal alignment and need execution help more than strategic leadership

• Your budget is limited and you can’t afford senior leadership compensation

• You already have clear brand foundations and/or guideliens and need to implement them across different surfaces

• You’re pre-Series B and brand strategy is relatively straightforward (just tiptoeing beyond product and feature-focus)

Bring in an external consultant if:

• You’re too early to justify a full-time hire but need strategic direction (pre-Series A, limited budget)

• You’re between these stages—you know you need brand help but aren’t ready to commit to headcount

• You need a specific deliverable (positioning framework, messaging architecture, brand guidelines) but not yet ongoing execution

• Your founder/CMO can be responsible for brand but needs an outside perspective to pressure-test their thinking

• You want to de-risk a future hire by getting the strategy right first, then bringing someone in to scale and execute

• You’re facing a specific brand challenge (rebrand, repositioning, new product launch) that needs deep expertise for 3-6 months

The consultant path works best when you have someone internal—usually a founder or head of marketing—who can own next steps after the consultant leaves. Consultants are force multipliers, not replacements for internal ownership (though that could be an advisor or a fractional leader). They should help you build the foundation, then hand it off to someone who lives and breathes your business daily.

I’ve seen this work very well at early-stage companies where the founder is deeply involved in brand but needs help structuring their instincts into frameworks or systems the team can use.

Red flags for the consultant approach: you’re hiring them to “figure out brand” with no internal partner or you’re unwilling to commit time to that yourself; you’re expecting them to also execute everything they recommend; or you’re using them to avoid committing to brand as a priority.

Other than no one paying any attention to brand, the mistake I see most often is companies hiring a junior marketer to “own brand” among a bunch of other priorities (or lumping it in with PMM) when what they really need is someone who can navigate executive stakeholders, align a bunch of disparate marketing channels and messages, manage six-figure budgets, and build scalable systems. A mid-level IC often won’t have the authority or experience to do this effectively—leading to frustration by all parties with the end result of a muddled brand that doesn’t deliver on its potential.

If you’re about to spend serious money (agencies, campaigns, team growth), hire someone senior enough to deploy that budget strategically. If you’re still figuring out whether brand investment makes sense, start with a consultant or with strong ICs who can prove the value. And if you’re too early for either, bring in a consultant to build the foundation—then hire someone to run with it.

10 things to look for in your brand hire

Okay, that was a lot of preamble. Let’s get to the fun stuff! Whether you’re hiring your first brand person or your fifteenth, whether you’re hiring a VP or an IC, these are the qualities that separate good hires from great ones:

1. They can translate brand to business.

The best brand hires I’ve made could translate across multiple business languages fluently and clearly connect what may seem like “soft” brand efforts to financial goals.

For example, they know “increasing brand awareness” isn’t a goal alone—it’s a means to achieve certain growth metric targets. They can describe how any given brand initiative relates to revenue, retention, pricing power, and customer acquisition costs. They know how to frame brand investments in terms that founders and CFOs actually care about.

Look for candidates who understand how brand investments compound like financial investments:

This is especially valuable for brand leaders who need to secure budget and headcount. But even ICs need this skill to justify their projects and earn credibility with cross-functional partners.

What to look for in interviews:

• Ask them to describe a brand initiative they led and how it impacted business metrics. Go a level deeper to understand how they planned the initiative with targets in mind from the start.

• Have them explain how they’d justify brand investment to a skeptical executive

• Listen for whether they default to “soft” metrics only (sentiment, engagement—still important, but not the be-all, end-all) or connect to hard business outcomes

2. They have taste—and can develop it in others.

Taste isn’t innate; it’s a skill you can develop. As with any skill, some people are further along in developing it than others.

In a business context, taste is the ability to consistently make decisions that demonstrate respect for your audience, show deep empathy for their needs, and deliver aesthetically-pleasing experiences that ultimately drive business.

The best brand hires have cultivated taste through:

• Respect and empathy for audience: They deeply understand customer needs and pain points.

• Aesthetic sensibility: They recognize and champion design that enhances user experience, even if it isn’t “on trend” or doesn’t match the founder’s personal aesthetic.

• Cultural fluency: They’re aware of broader trends, societal shifts, and contextual nuance; they’re close to the zeitgeist and not “out of the loop.”

• Ethical consideration: They build long-term trust through responsible practices.

What to look for in interviews:

• Ask them to critique your current brand (or a competitor’s)—listen for whether they offer thoughtful analysis or surface-level opinions

• Have them walk through their favorite brands and explain why those brands resonate (if they answer Apple, Tesla, or Nike, feel free to roll your eyes in an obvious manner)

• Present them with a design decision and ask how they’d evaluate it—do they consider audience, business context, and metric goals?

For brand leaders specifically, watch for their ability to articulate why taste matters to the business and how they’d elevate taste across the organization. Great brand leaders don’t become the “brand police” (a phrase I despise 👎🏼, by the way—we’re strategic partners and enablers, not enforcement). They elevate the entire org’s standards.

3. They're comfortable with ambiguity.

The best brand hires don’t need perfect clarity to deliver growth.

They can turn fragments—a founder’s half-formed vision, conflicting stakeholder opinions, sparse competitive intel—into structure. They’re comfortable proposing direction, testing hypotheses, and iterating based on feedback.

This matters at every level, but especially for brand leaders. They’re often the ones creating a roadmap when none exists, making strategic bets with incomplete information, and defending those choices to skeptical executives and stakeholders. You want people who bring you options, recommendations, and a path forward rather than defaulting back to permission or validation.

What to look for in interviews:

• Have them describe a project where they had minimal direction. How did they create structure? How did they deliver results?

• Ask how they’ve navigated differences in opinion across a set of brand decision makers (e.g. various execs, founders; multiple co-founders, etc.)—how did they get to alignment (or at least forward progress)?

4. They can build alignment, not just beautiful work.

As I’ve written repeatedly throughout the years in this newsletter: the strength of your brand is a direct reflection of your internal alignment.

Your brand hires need to be as good at stakeholder management as they are at creative development. They need to navigate founder opinions, executive priorities, legal constraints, and cross-functional partners—all while maintaining creative integrity and focus on the true audience (not an aspirational one in a founder’s dreams).

For brand leaders, this is the primary job. You’ll spend more time building alignment than doing hands-on creative work. For ICs, this skill determines whether their great ideas ever see the light of day or die in review.

The best brand hires I’ve made were natural alliance-builders. They involved stakeholders early, documented decisions, and created frameworks that helped everyone speak the same language about the brand, while being highly mindful of potential sticking points or stakeholder sensitivities that could otherwise derail good work.

What to look for in interviews:

• Ask about a time when stakeholders disagreed about brand direction. How did they navigate it?

• Have them describe their process for getting executive buy-in on a controversial decision

• Listen for whether they view stakeholders as obstacles or as collaborators with valid perspectives

If you’re hiring in a founder-led company, this skill might as well be the most important for early team members. Working with founders requires understanding their motivations, speaking their language, and knowing when to push back versus when to defer. Struggling with this? More on that here:

5. They know consistency ≠ monotony.

Brand consistency is essential—but it’s not boring or repetitive.

The best brand hires know how to maintain consistency in what elements matter (values, positioning, core messages) while allowing for flexibility in how those get expressed across channels, campaigns, and touchpoints. They can tell you which parts of the brand are sacred and which can flex based on context.

What to look for in interviews:

• Ask how they balance creative exploration with consistency

• Have them describe a time when they bent brand guidelines—and why it was the right call

• Present a scenario where brand consistency conflicts with channel effectiveness. How would they resolve it?

6. They write (really) well.

I cannot overstate how important copywriting is to brand success. I’ve argued in the past that it’s the most underestimated discipline in brand strategy.

Good copy (further explained in the post linked below):

• Taps into what your audience already believes

• Gives your audience agency

• Takes advantage of every opportunity (macro and micro)

Even if you’re not (yet) hiring a dedicated copywriter, your brand hire needs strong writing skills. They’ll be crafting positioning statements, reviewing campaign copy, writing briefs, and documenting strategy. Weak writing creates weak brands. And if you ignore your copy, people will ignore you.

For brand leaders especially, writing is a big part of how you create alignment. Your positioning documents, strategy memos, and creative briefs need to be clear and compelling enough to get diverse stakeholders in agreement on what are sometimes high dollar investments.

What to look for in interviews:

• Include a writing exercise in your interview process (e.g. positioning statement, campaign brief, or website copy)

• Review their portfolio for evidence of strategic copywriting, not just visual work

• Ask them to critique your company’s current messaging—can they articulate what works, what doesn’t, and why?

7. They're data-informed, but not data-dependent.

The best brand hires are comfortable with both qualitative and quantitative inputs. They use customer feedback, market research, competitive analysis, and performance metrics to inform their decisions; they don’t only rely on formal brand tracking (which most growth-stage companies don’t need for some time) as their measure for success.

They (and hopefully now you) understand that brand health shows up in everyday business metrics—site traffic, conversion rates, retention, pricing power, customer acquisition costs. A quarterly six-figure tracking study to prove brand value? It’s nice to have at very large companies, and maybe they’re experienced with those, but it won’t move the needle day-to-day in the way your company probably needs.

What to look for in interviews:

• Ask what kinds of data they’ve used to inform brand decisions in the past

• Have them describe their approach to measuring both short- and long-term brand impact

• Listen for whether they default to “gut feel” or bring multiple inputs to bear

8. They know how to get the best out of others.

Brand is probably the most cross-functional role in marketing. You’re constantly working with agencies, internal creative teams, every other marketing function, product teams, founders with strong opinions, legal teams with compliance concerns, and executives who all have different ideas about what the brand should “be.”

The best brand hires are exceptional collaborators who know how to extract great work from everyone around them—not by being pushovers, but by being clear, strategic, and respectful of others’ expertise. (There’s a lot more we could add here about management, but I’ll save that for another post.)

With agencies specifically, your brand hire needs to be able to:

• Write clear, comprehensive briefs that set agencies up for success (duh)

• Evaluate agency work strategically, not just subjectively

• Push back when necessary while maintaining productive relationships

• Integrate agency output with internal team capabilities

For brand leaders, add to this list: negotiate contracts, manage budgets, know when to bring agencies in versus build in-house, and maintain relationships with multiple agency partners simultaneously.

Beyond agencies, great brand hires also know how to:

• Draw out a founder’s half-formed instincts and turn them into clear direction

• Navigate product partners who worry brand will slow them down

• Work with legal to find solutions that protect the company without killing creativity (huge in B2B)

• Collaborate with design teams across the org without stepping on toes

• Get honest feedback from sales and customer success about what’s resonating

They understand that their job isn’t to have all the answers—it’s to ask the right questions, synthesize perspectives, and guide everyone toward a shared vision.

What to look for in interviews:

• Ask about their experience working with agencies (both positive and negative)

• Have them describe how they’d orchestrate an RFP process for your specific situation, or how they’d brief an agency on a campaign (or, if appropriate, broader refresh or rebrand effort)

• Present a scenario where a founder, product lead, and agency all have different opinions on brand direction. How would they navigate it?

• Ask them to describe a time when they had to get buy-in from someone who didn’t initially agree with their approach. What did they do?

Candidates who’ve only worked agency-side may struggle with the in-house perspective initially, but it’s not necessarily a deal breaker; it might just be a learning curve. As I wrote in this post, the best brand operators can navigate both worlds and speak both languages.

9. They have strong opinions, loosely held.

Brand work takes a lot of conviction. It takes passion. (This newsletter is evidence of that!) I think the people that get into brand do so because they love storytelling, through word and image, and are motivated by the journey to developing and spreading a narrative that becomes embedded in the public consciousness. That’s a big dream and rarely achieved, but these people always exude aspiration and see potential around every corner.

You need people who can develop a perspective, evaluate multiple paths and approaches, make a recommendation, then defend that recommendation with clear rationale.

The worst brand hire (or leadership hire?) is one who can’t commit to a direction, or who allows their team to flounder under the shifting moods of an exec. They present five options and ask, “Which do you like best?” instead of saying, “Here’s what I recommend and why.” And if / when you disagree, they’re able to engage to both draw out your “why” (and maybe identify some blind spots) and find alignment.

The brand leader is the one who needs to make the call when stakeholders disagree, when the founder wants to go one direction and the data suggests another, when you need to choose between good and better. This doesn’t mean being inflexible or that they never disagree and commit—it means having informed opinions that you’re willing to test and revise. It means being able to say, “Based on our audience research and competitive landscape, I believe this positioning will resonate most strongly.”

What to look for in interviews:

• Conduct a standard portfolio review interview, and focus questions on why certain decisions were made, and the process from blank slate to final. You’re looking for clear perspectives and rationale for those perspective.

• Ask them to critique your current brand (or a specific asset) and recommend changes. This can be either a take-home or a live session. The first will give more in-depth thought, but the latter can give deeper insight into the person’s ability to “just flow” and frame perspectives live.

• Listen for whether they hedge (“it depends”) vs. commit to a perspective (“here’s why I think this is right”)

Candidates who can’t form strong opinions will get steamrolled by opinionated founders, executives, and team members. Look for people who can hold their ground while staying open to input.

10. They know that brand serves the business.

This might be the most important quality of all.

While branding is often rooted in beauty, brand isn’t art for art’s sake. It’s not about winning awards or impressing other marketers. It exists to serve business goals—to help you acquire customers, retain them, and grow profitably. We work for corporations, after all. It’s about making money.

The best brand hires never lose sight of this. They don’t get precious about their creative vision when it conflicts with business needs. They understand that sometimes the tasteful choice isn’t the right business choice—and they’re comfortable making that trade-off.

But they also are among the best business leaders in the world when trusted. They are the ones who will propose taking the risk that get your company to the next level. They’re the ones who will embrace disagreement and putting powerful execs out of their comfort zone because that’s what’s best for the customer and bottom line. They’re the ones who will be able to describe why you exist and what you’re about second to no one in the company. And, ideally, they will always keep their team grounded in hard metrics and a focus on delivery.

What to look for in interviews:

• Ask them to describe a time when they had to compromise creative vision for business reasons

• Have them explain how they prioritize between competing brand initiatives

• Ask them to critique a recent brand campaign from a competitor. Do they evaluate it purely on creative merit or do they consider business context, audience, and strategic goals?

In sum, the top 10 skills I think brand hires have are:

1. They can translate brand to business.

2. They have taste—and can develop it in others.

3. They’re comfortable with ambiguity.

4. They can build alignment, not just beautiful work.

5. They know consistency ≠ monotony.

6. They write (really) well.

7. They’re data-informed, but not data-dependent.

8. They know how to get the best out of others.

9. They have strong opinions, loosely held.

10. They know that brand serves the business.

Red-ish flags to watch for

And finally, here are some signals that suggest someone might not be the right fit:

🚩 Founder/CEO worship. Candidates who defer to founder/CEO vision without bringing their own expertise and perspective.

🚩 More resource-dependent than you can afford. Candidates from big agencies or well-funded, later-stage companies who assume every problem requires a six-month, six-figure engagement. (Not everyone who comes from agencies is like this!)

🚩 Portfolio over process. Candidates who show you beautiful work but can’t articulate the strategy behind it or the business impact it drove.

🚩 Too many buzzwords. Candidates who lean heavily on jargon (“brand purpose,” “brand truth,” “brand essence”) without being able to translate to the language of outcomes. (IMO, these phrases have their place, but successfully engaging with non-brand/design stakeholders usually means filtering these out.)

🚩 Struggle to make trade-offs. Candidates who treat every brand touchpoint as equally important and can’t prioritize where to focus.

Your brand is only as strong as your team

The strength of your brand is a direct reflection of internal alignment across your organization. And the quality of your brand team is what drives that alignment. Building a great brand requires intentionality at every level, from strategy to execution to measurement, and that starts with hiring people who can demonstrate brand’s strategic value to skeptics, translate creative decisions into business outcomes, and earn trust from leaders who might initially see brand as a cost center or a creative indulgence.

Your brand hires need to be equipped to change that perception. If they are—whether that’s a leader or a strong IC—they will set the trajectory for everything that follows. They’ll define positioning that differentiates you in crowded markets. They’ll create foundations that scale across products and regions. They’ll build internal alignment that prevents expensive misalignment later. They’ll get you more efficient growth marketing as brand awareness compounds. And they’ll attract other great talent who want to work on strong brands.

Brand thinkers and leaders are a rare breed—they’re hard to find and even harder to keep. So take your time. Understand exactly what outcomes you need now vs. later, and target hiring to the right skillset and seniority level at the right time. Only then is it time to source, recruit, interview, and hire… which I’ll cover in an upcoming post! 🥥

My 4-week course on Maven, Brand for Growth-Stage Leaders is an immersive dive into how to successfully invest and scale brand from alignment through execution and measurement. The last cohort of the year is now open for registration! You can use the code SUBSCRIBER to take $100 off your enrollment, or join the waitlist for updates.

Get Discount

Thanks for reading.

If you liked what you read, consider:

• replying and saying hi!

• connecting with me (Kira Klaas 👩🏼‍💻) on LinkedIn

• submitting a question or topic you’d like to see next

• sending to a friend 💌 or coworker 💬

Keep your streak going.

Read more

As for today’s post, my series on “How to use AI in brand” will continue, but I wanted to mix it up this week with my take on PMM vs. Brand—why startups often hire PMM first…and where that trips them up. What’s your take on this one?

You’re here because you recently subscribed or signed up for one of my resources—my course waitlist on Maven, lightning lesson, or Notion templates.

If someone sent you this post and you’re not subscribed, join those people learning how to tactically advocate for brand at your company. 📬

Subscribe now

The other week, I hopped on a call with a founder who opened with: “My messaging feels all over the place. I hired a product marketer six months ago to work on messaging and positioning, but we still sound like everyone else in our space. Should I be looking for brand help instead?”

I’ve heard this a lot. Founders know something’s off—their marketing feels fragmented, their customer acquisition costs keep rising, they’re constantly explaining what they do—but they’re not sure if the solution is hiring different people or asking their current team to do different things. 

Why is this a marketing challenge every startup seems to face? Well, when it comes to marketing, early-stage companies tend to hire tactics before strategy. Strategy is supposedly the founder’s job, but pressure to show immediate wins is high af, and the old myths about brand persist (that it’s a nice-to-have, that it’s always expensive, that it’s just TV ads and billboards). So the first marketing hire is usually a PMM or a growth marketer. They start executing launches and running Meta campaigns, then leadership wonders why things aren’t feeling cohesive and why they aren’t breaking through as fast as they want.

If you’ve never hired for brand or made it an explicit priority, or your marketing looks like jumble of activities (“random acts of marketing” has made its way into my daily lexicon, thanks to ), you’re probably underinvested in brand. And this happens most easily when you conflate the roles of Product Marketing (PMM) and Brand. Let’s talk about why this happens and what to do about it.

Signs you’re underinvested in brand marketing

Here are some signs that you might be underinvested in brand marketing—or confusing product marketing with brand marketing priorities:

Different language everywhere. Your homepage says one thing, your sales deck says another, and your latest campaign feels like it came from a different company entirely. Despite everyone’s best efforts to get everyone to work from the same messaging docs, people just can’t seem to stay consistent (and homepage messaging gets rewritten every damn time).

Slippery elevator pitches. Here you’re a “platform.” There you’re a “tool.” Over here you’re a “copilot.” (Saying “copilot” makes you sound like a tool, btw.) You’re constantly explaining what you do, even to people in your industry. Or you default to the “We’re the Uber for…” trope. Nothing sticks.

Launches that don’t build momentum. Each product announcement feels like starting from zero. “Thrilling” company news falls flat. There’s little to no compounding effect from previous marketing efforts.

Generic positioning. You sound like every other “all-in-one solution” or “AI-powered platform” in your space. (I’ve written extensively about why these phrases must die—they tell customers nothing about why they should care about you specifically.)

Acquisition costs only go up. You’re spending more on ads and getting fewer qualified leads. Performance marketing feels like you’re pushing water uphill with a rake! 💦

It matches the hiring pattern we see over and over: startups need someone to handle product launches, so they hire a PMM. Or they need someone to run ads, so they hire a growth marketer. That person does great work in their specialty, but then gets asked to fire off LinkedIn posts, make content, build a community. Suddenly your marketer is doing demand gen, writing blog posts, coordinating webinars, and somehow also supposed to be creating differentiated brand messaging. Tactics take over with no time for strategy.

And this is when marketing becomes a collection of channels and activities rather than a system that can compound on itself. You might have great launch materials, but there’s often no through-line connecting them to a bigger story.

Why product marketing isn’t brand marketing

People sometimes act like PMM and Brand are competing functions—they certainly do with brand and growth, pitting them against each other like it’s an either-or thing. It’s the opposite (read my take in for that breakdown)!

Kyle Poyar’s Growth Unhinged

It's not brand vs. growth

👋 Hi, it’s Kyle Poyar and welcome to Growth Unhinged, my weekly newsletter exploring the hidden playbooks behind the fastest-growing startups…

Read more

a year ago · 74 likes · 5 comments · Kira Klaas

As for PMM and Brand, they are also complementary functions that get conflated (resulting in companies underinvesting in the latter) because most early-stage companies don’t understand this: Not all product marketing is brand marketing, but all brand marketing is product marketing.

Why? Because brand marketing’s function is to ensure that the messages and images that get shipped (across any channel) address prospects’ perceptions and needs to make a clear connection to what the company offers to address those needs (the product). Brand marketers are experts at making sure the product stands out in the competitive landscape, with growth as the end goal.

Product marketing at its best is focused on conveying functionality, features, and benefits of individual products, helping address exactly the functional requirements customers need solved so there’s no question about capability or competency. But product marketing, in the weeds of product specifics, can sometimes end up losing sight of the bigger story and emotional connection that’s at the core of brand-market fit.

At its worst, product marketing can pose as brand marketing, occupying expensive real estate as the BIG tagline or H1…that doesn’t actually help create emotional connection or differentiation:

…whereas the messaging in these examples tells you something more beyond functional benefits or what features exist (without obscuring what the product is or does):

And when it comes to brand strategy and marketing vs. product marketing, there tend to be some fundamental differences in approach and perspective that can lead to dramatically different outcomes in terms of what gets shipped or prioritized.

Both roles involve “messaging” and “positioning,” but they operate at different levels. PMM creates tactical, product-specific messaging that helps people understand what collective and individual features do. Brand creates the overarching narrative that helps people understand what your company means in their lives and why they should care in the first place.

You might see differences in interpreting research or competitive insights—when PMM sees competitive research that shows how everyone in your space talks about “efficiency” and “automation,” they might think, “This is what resonates with our audience, so we should use similar language.” When Brand looks at the same research, they might think, “Everyone sounds exactly the same. We need to find a different way to talk about these benefits to stand out.”

Or your PMM reads customer feedback that says “the onboarding flow is confusing” and could think: “We need better tooltips and a more intuitive UI sequence.” A brand strategist could read the same feedback and think: “Customers don’t understand what we fundamentally do or why they should care. This is a comprehension and connection problem, not a UX problem.”

Both perspectives are valuable; they solve different problems. PMM optimizes the experience for people who already understand your value prop. Brand makes sure people actually get to that value prop in the first place.

It’s a tension that can also show up in asset or campaign development: PMM teams tend toward safe, proven messaging because they’re measured on launch success and feature adoption. Brand teams need to take creative risks to break through market noise.

And at the root, brand marketing is more foundational.

PMM focuses most on: Competitive research, feature-to-benefit translation, launch coordination, sales enablement. They’re focused on taking products to market efficiently.

Brand focuses most on: Foundational positioning, emotional differentiation, cross-product narrative, demand creation between launch moments. They’re focused on building the strategic foundation that makes all your marketing more effective.

How to balance your investment in PMM and Brand

If you’re recognizing these patterns at work, these questions might help you figure out where to go from here:

Do you have a brand strategy foundation? Can you clearly articulate who you’re for, what you stand for, and how you’re different? If yes, when did you last revisit this? And is everybody using the same language? If not, no amount of tactical execution will create coherent messaging. Getting alignment on all of the above is where you need to focus all of your energy first.

Who’s creating demand between launch moments? When you don’t have exciting or meaningful product updates, is someone building awareness and affinity anyway? What’s sustaining you from launch to launch? (That’s Brand’s job.)

Are you solving the right problems? When customers say they’re confused, are you fixing UX issues or comprehension gaps?

Are you making your investments compound? Are your individual product launches building toward a bigger story, or do they feel like one-off announcements? How are all of these laddering to something bigger, to your mission or vision? 

If you’re a brand operator, use these frameworks to explain your value. You’re not competing with PMM—you’re creating the foundation that makes their work (and everyone else’s in the company) more effective.

If you’re the one hiring, don’t let role confusion cost you strategic clarity. Understand what you’re actually hiring for, and structure your team accordingly. To be blunt, I think it’s a mistake when founders overlook hiring for brand early on and instead hire for pure PMM or Growth backgrounds. The hiring managers that see how brand investment—essentially investing in alignment and deep audience understanding that makes all your other marketing activities more meaningful—have a huge advantage. So think about how you might look for brand-building skills in your early hiring, or bring in an external consultant. 👋

Never forget that your brand exists from day one—whether you’re investing anything in it or not. Brand strategy isn’t a luxury reserved for later-stage companies—it’s the foundation that makes all your other marketing efforts, like product marketing, more effective.

Thanks for reading.

Have your own thoughts about the differences between PMM & Brand? I’d love to hear ’em—consider:

• connecting with me on LinkedIn: Kira Klaas

• sharing this with someone who needs better copy

• sending to a friend 💌 or coworker 💬

  Thanks for reading On Brand! This post is public so feel free to share it.

  Share

I do want to remind you that today’s the last day to take Typeform’s Get Real survey on the ways you’re seeing gen AI reshaping marketing, and I would genuinely love to hear what On Brand readers are thinking. 👉🏼 If you can, take 10 minutes to share your thoughts. Then keep your eyes peeled for the hot, hot readout later this quarter!

You’re here because you recently subscribed or signed up for one of my resources—my course waitlist on Maven, lightning lesson, or Notion templates.

If someone sent you this post and you’re not subscribed, join those people learning how to tactically advocate for brand at your company. 📬

Subscribe now

Last week in 📎 How to Use AI in Brand | Part 1: Using LLMs to Understand Your Audience, we talked about ways to use AI to more deeply understand your audience through data you already have—things like sales transcripts, support tickets, competitive analysis, and social listening. Now comes the harder part: translating those insights into good brand foundations, and by good, I mean they help you create brand-market fit.

This is where teams often get stuck—they have solid audience research, but when it comes to developing positioning and messaging, they default to the same generic language everyone else uses. Or they swing too far in the opposite direction and create messaging so “unique” it confuses their audience (and everyone else internally).

Today, I’m sharing a few of the systematic approaches I’ve found help bridge the gap between LLM-derived research insights and strategic brand direction.

Before we start: What’s the end goal?

Above I mentioned that we’re developing a brand strategy specifically to help us find brand-market fit (BMF). You might recall my two-parter from the other week (part 1, why you need BMF and part 2, how to find BMF). Brand-market fit is the degree to which a company’s identity, values, and overall customer experience resonate with and meet the emotional and aspirational needs of its target market.

Your AI research from Part 1 should have shown you not just your audience’s functional needs, but emotional ones too. Your brand strategy needs to address both, and most of today’s prompts should help with this:

• Functional: What job does your product do?

• Emotional: How does choosing your brand make them feel or look?

🧷 A disclaimer before we begin: I’m not one of those people who is obsessed with prompting optimization, and I’m still (always) learning. These aren’t intricate or complex prompts, and I guarantee each one I share below can be improved and refined, let alone customized to your use case—so take them as a starting point, see what works for you, and tell me what you learn as you go!

Technique 1: Identify positioning white space

Homework: Take your competitive analysis from Part 1 (this builds on what you already did with Technique #2 from that post) and use an LLM to further map out where you have possible opportunities to differentiate.

The prompt:

Based on this competitive messaging analysis, create a positioning map that shows:

1. What territory each competitor owns (their core message/benefit)
2. Where competitors cluster (oversaturated messaging areas)
3. What customer needs are under-addressed or ignored entirely
4. What emotional territories are unclaimed
5. Potential positioning opportunities that align with our strengths

Present this as a visual map with competitors plotted and white space clearly identified.

Include notation around where you see contradicting information, are making assumptions, or may need more information to fully validate your analysis. 

[Insert competitive analysis from Part 1]

This technique should make it easier to spot white space in the marketplace that you can lay claim to—benefits, emotional territories, or philosophies that other brands aren’t talking about.

📋 Pro tip: Beyond analyzing what competitors say about themselves, analyze what their customers talk (or complain) about in reviews, social media, and forums. I often find the biggest white space opportunities in the gap between how competitors position themselves and what their actual users experience. Look for phrases like “I wish [competitor] would...” or “[Competitor] is great but...” in Reddit threads and review sites.

A couple of other templates I like to pair here are my simple competitive positioning framework and my brand differentiator 2×2:

Subscribe now

Technique 2: Develop your unique angle

Homework: Gather any audience insights you have (this may be your audience insight brief from Part 1) to craft a positioning statement that speaks directly to what you learned about their needs and language. You’ll notice this prompt keeps things directional so you can more easily compare a few different avenues and then narrow/refine from there. LLM output is often worse when you ask it for one definitive answer (or in this case, positioning statement)—ask it to share its thinking instead.

The prompt:

Based on our audience research showing that [key insight], help me develop positioning statements that:

1. Address the specific problem using their exact language where possible
2. Differentiate from competitors who focus on [competitor themes]
3. Tap into the emotional need for [emotional driver from research]
4. Position our approach as uniquely valuable because [our differentiator]

Generate 5-7 different positioning directions, each with:
- Core benefit statement
- Supporting proof points
- Audience it would resonate with most
- Potential tagline options

Share your thinking on why these would be effective directions. Include notation around where you are making assumptions or may need more information to fully validate the suggested directions. 

[Insert audience research summary]

📋 Pro tip: Also apply the taste test here—good positioning demonstrates respect for your audience, empathy for their needs, and cultural awareness. It should go without saying, but if your AI-generated positioning feels manipulative, overpromises capabilities, or talks down to your audience, it fails the taste test.

Technique 3: Craft your brand pillars

Homework: Gather your audience research and positioning directions to inform 3-4 brand pillars that your team can actually use to guide decisions.

The prompt:

Read more

I think one of AI’s best use cases is helping us better understand the people we’re marketing to and pushing our creative thinking further…not being creative for us. How do we do that? Let’s start with audience research because everything else—your positioning, your messaging, your creative—falls apart without that foundation.

Perfect timing, because Typeform just launched the next installment of their Get Real series, and we’re teaming up to ask the exact questions I’ve been wrestling with. They’re digging into how generative AI is reshaping our industry—the stigma around using it, the fear of being replaced by it, and the pressure to prove we’re still human. They’re capturing actual marketer perspectives through writing, video, and audio responses to get the nuance behind the data, not just numbers. You’ll see yours truly 👋🏼 in the survey asking (and answering) the exact question I was getting at above—how do we make sure our use of AI actually makes our marketing better for our audience, not just easier for us as marketers?

👉🏼 Share your honest take by September 26—I predict a spirited final report.

If someone sent you this post and you’re not subscribed, join those people learning how to tactically advocate for brand at your company. 📬

Subscribe now

🧷 A disclaimer before we begin: I’m not one of those people who is obsessed with prompting optimization, and I’m still (always) learning. These aren’t intricate or complex prompts, and I guarantee each one I share below can be improved and refined, let alone customized to your use case—so take them as a starting point, see what works for you, and tell me what you learn as you go!

If you’re using AI to help produce any type of customer-facing creative output, there’s critical context you need to feed your tool. And whether you’re a marketer, a founder, a CEO, a sales manager, whoever—in order to create effective marketing, you need to understand your audience deeply, from demographics to firmographics to psychographics. It’s the responsibility of any marketer, but especially of the brand leader, to get past “our customers have these titles and work at companies with $X in revenue and have these functional problems” to understanding the underlying motivations, emotional drivers, and cultural context surrounding the people with whom we aim to connect.

My goal in this post is to share how I’ve used AI to build (and maintain) a tidy foundation of context to quickly ramp the LLM assistants you (should) set up for each skill area or workstream. Using these methods will help you get to strategic plans, campaign budgets, and asset production readiness faster—and makes it less likely you’ll wind up with the same garbo as anyone else with a free ChatGPT account. 😛

This post is focused on foundational context inputs, with 5 separate prompts/techniques, plus my audience insight brief template. The following posts in this series will build on this foundation, building up to a strategy for using AI systems empowered with your unique context to build a robust, measurably successful brand strategy. Don’t miss 📎 How to Use AI in Brand | Part 2: Building Brand Foundations.

Subscribe now

AI audience research tools

Both Claude (Anthropic) and ChatGPT (OpenAI) are great for analyzing qualitative data like interview transcripts, support tickets, and survey responses, or for processing structured data and creating research frameworks. Perplexity is where I tend to go first for competitive research, advanced sourcing, and trend analysis (but all the major LLMs are getting better at citing sources). There are tons more tools out there, and I’m exploring them in real time with you.

The benefit of these tools compounds when you layer context over time within the same thread, like with Claude Projects (my personal preference) or Cursor Agents. The first step is to set up a project environment with a purposeful goal, like for customer interview analysis and persona development.

Technique 1: Mine your existing customer data

Homework: Gather/export any and all data you have related to your goal—sales call transcripts, support tickets, customer survey responses, review site comments, social media mentions. CSV files are perfect (and you can have your LLM clean those up before analysis, if needed). This works because you’re not asking AI to guess what customers want—you’re asking it to organize and analyze what they’ve already told you.

The prompt:

I'm sharing [X, Y, Z types of data] from our customers. Please analyze this content and identify:

1. The top 5 pain points mentioned most frequently
2. The language customers use to describe these problems (exact phrases, note any interesting nuances)
3. The outcomes and/or ulterior benefits they're seeking
4. Any differences in priorities between different customer segments
5. Emotional undertones (frustration, excitement, confusion, etc.)

Format your response as a table with direct quotes as evidence for each insight.

📋 Pro tip: Analyze both positive and negative feedback. Pay attention to complaints and support tickets where customers got frustrated—this usually shows you an opportunity via a gap between what they expected and what they experienced, which often points to positioning or messaging issues. I’ve found some of my best brand insights in Zendesk tickets where customers said things like “I thought this would...” or “Why doesn’t it just...”

Technique 2: Competitive message analysis

Homework:

Collect homepage copy, ad creative, and marketing emails from your top 5-10 competitors. If you’re using an LLM with live search on, you can ask it to pull these for you, but it’ll be more limited to what it can find publicly online (like web pages, not an email series). IMO, it’s worth it to spend the extra time to gather this yourself—I keep a big Figma file of my “competitive landscape” on hand with all kinds of screenshots of various competitors’ marketing, and I add to it all the time.

The prompt:

Review the attached marketing messages from these companies in or adjacent to the [industry] space. Analyze and identify:

1. What themes/benefits do most competitors emphasize?
2. What language patterns do they use repeatedly?
3. What pain points or customer needs are they NOT addressing? Order these by impact and importance.
4. What positioning territories seem unclaimed or underexplored?
5. How could we differentiate our messaging in this landscape? 

Create a competitive messaging map showing where competitors cluster and where white space exists.

Include notation around where you see contradicting information, are making assumptions, or may need more information to fully validate your analysis. 

📋 Pro tip: The output for the “white space” opportunities (bullet #3 above) will benefit the most from any context you gather on customer needs and opportunities, so you don’t just end up with a list of every possible applicable feature. Secondly, you don’t have to limit yourself to direct competitors in this exercise. Include companies your prospects might consider as alternatives, even if they’re in adjacent categories—whatever is ultimately competing for your audience’s time and attention.

As a follow-on prompt, you can also enter this snippet again so the LLM creates a visual map separate from the text artifact (and here’s a super rough example of the potential output):

Create a competitive messaging map showing where competitors cluster and where white space exists.

Technique 3: Social listening at scale

Homework: Gather Reddit threads, LinkedIn posts, Twitter/X conversations, industry forums (consumer Facebook groups, startup forums like Bookface or Hacker News, etc.), and review sites where your audience talks about their challenges. Perplexity, for example, can also help pull these for you, but do your own search and see how it differs from what the LLM finds.

The prompt:

Read more

If you’ve been following my newsletter for a while, you know I’ve been beating the brand-market fit (BMF) drum since the early days. 🥁 But knowing what brand-market fit is doesn’t necessarily tell you how to achieve it. Today, I’m officially turning Why You Need Brand-Market Fit (Part 1) into a two-parter and breaking down the more tactical steps to finding brand-market fit—the strategic approach that turns good companies into iconic brands.

Class is now in session—grab your pencil case and a steaming mug of cinnamon tea (or iced, if you’re roasting in the Bay Area like me) as we jump into this week’s deep dive.

You’re here because you recently subscribed or signed up for one of my resources—my course waitlist on Maven, lightning lesson, or Notion templates.

If someone sent you this post and you’re not subscribed, join those people learning how to tactically advocate for brand at your company. 📬

Subscribe now

Startups need both strong product-market fit (PMF) and strong brand-market fit (BMF) if they want a chance at surviving whatever competitive market they’re operating in, let alone making it to the exits and IPOs that founders dream of. And even huge, well-established companies have to continually establish BMF because nothing exists in a vacuum—the context in which we interact with our audience is perpetually changing as culture shifts, as new entrants emerge, and consumer needs and tastes evolve.

You need both because product-market fit gets you in the game. Brand-market fit helps you win it.

What is brand-market fit?

Did you do your reading last week? If product-market fit (PMF) is the degree to which a product satisfies a market demand by providing a solution to a problem for a specific target audience, then brand-market fit (BMF) is the degree to which a company’s identity, values, and overall experience satisfy a market demand by fulfilling the emotional and aspirational needs of its target market.

BMF isn’t just about what your product does (which can be copied). While achieving product-market fit means you are solving a specific problem that the market has, having brand-market fit means you’re solving that problem in a way that creates a meaningful, emotional connection with that audience.

Here’s how BMF augments PMF:

Most products today are commodities. Your competitors likely solve the same core problems with similar features and functionality. Rippling, Deel, Remote, Workday, etc. all essentially solve for the same thing. Sephora sells thousands of makeup products for you to choose from. When products are functionally equivalent, your brand becomes the primary differentiator—and often the deciding factor in purchase decisions.

PMF alone hits ceilings. Even the strongest product-led growth strategies eventually plateau without brand investment. As you scale, enter new markets, or face increased competition, functional differentiation becomes insufficient. You need emotional resonance to break through, let alone strengthen loyalty.

Brand-market fit drives pricing power. Customers pay premiums for brands they connect with emotionally. Without BMF, you’re stuck competing on features and price—a race to the bottom that eats at profit margins.

Customer acquisition becomes exponentially harder. In crowded markets, prospects need a reason to choose you over established alternatives. Strong BMF creates mental availability—the likelihood that customers think of your brand when they have a need. Without it, even perfect product-market fit struggles to generate awareness beyond your core user base.

Companies with both PMF and BMF see higher customer lifetime value, lower acquisition costs, reduced churn, and stronger word-of-mouth growth. Those with only PMF are constantly fighting uphill battles for attention and loyalty.

In today’s landscape, product-market fit is, obviously, table stakes. Brand-market fit is your competitive advantage.

How do you find brand-market fit?

1. Know your audience deeply

To understand what brand-market fit for your market means, you need to truly understand your audience. This goes way beyond demographic and even firmographic data—you need psychological insights. I’m working on a deeper-dive post on researching your audience—stay tuned for that in the coming weeks!

Subscribe now

The goal is to understand not just what your customers do, but why they do it. What are their unspoken desires? What status are they seeking? What fears are they trying to overcome? Most importantly: What do they believe about themselves, and how does your product help them live up to that identity?

The research you should focus on:

1. Conduct in-depth customer interviews focused on motivations, not just behaviors

2. Study who they admire and what brands they already love—these reveal aspirational values

3. Map out customer pain points, fears, and what “success” looks like to them (beyond achieving their KPIs or solving a functional need)

4. Analyze customer support interactions for emotional language and recurring frustrations

5. Review user-generated content and community discussions for authentic customer voice (what jargon do they use or not use?)

6. Create detailed customer personas that include values, aspirations, and identity drivers (not just job titles or company revenue)

This differs from typical PMM work—your goal is to understand the “job to be done” emotionally, not just functionally.

Why surface-level research fails: Traditional market research asks what people want. Brand-market fit research asks who people want to be. The difference is everything. Customers don’t just buy products—they buy better versions of themselves.

Bobbie (Infant Formula)

Bobbie’s been having moment on LinkedIn lately, and their success—both as a brand and employer—stems from understanding that parents weren’t just shopping for formula. In a market with over 50 infant formula brands, Bobbie was the first new entrant in over six years. At a high level, their product is a commodity. But by deeply understanding parents’ emotional landscape, they are building a brand that helps parents feel like the thoughtful, informed caregivers they aspire to be.

It’s clear from their marketing that their audience research revealed that parents wanted:

• Transparency about ingredients and honest communication about feeding challenges

• Alignment with modern parenting values—a nonjudgmental attitude that recognizes feeding is complex and not one-size-fits-all

• Acknowledgment that infant nutrition decisions carry enormous emotional weight and societal pressure

By directly addressing those emotional needs, Bobbie’s feels like refreshing, clearly differentiated approach to a stagnant market and the result is working well to attract both customers and top talent. Their recently posted marketing director role attracted 600 applicants in a single day—proof that strong BMF creates magnetic pull across all stakeholder groups.

2. Find the emotional whitespace in your competitive landscape

You can’t create meaningful differentiation without understanding the current market narrative—both what competitors are saying and, more importantly, what they’re not saying.

Beyond feature comparison charts: Your PMM team has probably done some thorough competitive analysis, but I’ll hazard a guess and say it stops at feature parity and pricing. Brand-market fit requires understanding the emotional territories your competitors occupy—and more importantly, the ones they’ve left empty.

To find BMF, your competitive audit should include:

• Detailed competitive messaging analysis across as many key touchpoints as possible, like nurture emails, onboarding, and upsell/expansion (not just homepages and pricing)

• Mapping emotional territories: What feelings do competitors evoke? What greater customer aspirations do they tap into, if any?

• Identified whitespace in positioning—both functional and emotional gaps

• An understanding of how competitors talk to (and about) customers, with examples (Do they say “users” or “clients”? Do they address broader considerations, like the complexity of combo-feeding in Bobbie’s case, or sweep them aside?)

• Analyzing their brand narrative: What story do they tell about success, progress, or transformation? Do they depict a “before and after”?

Notion

I’ve written about Notion a lot, but let’s talk about how Notion found BMF. When Notion entered the productivity space, they faced very entrenched competitors like Microsoft (enterprise-focused), Google (collaboration-first), and Trello and Asana (project management). Each occupied clear functional territory, but all of them had the same emotional approach: productivity for productivity’s sake.

No one was speaking to creativity and personal expression in work tools. While competitors focused on efficiency and productivity outcomes like saved time, Notion recognized that modern knowledge workers want tools that reflect their identity and support both professional and personal projects.

So instead of messaging around “better project management” or “faster collaboration,” Notion built their brand around creativity, flexibility, and the idea that work tools should be as unique as the people using them. And the result is a multi-billion-dollar valuation and a community of over 1 million users who don’t just use Notion—they evangelize it, create content about it, and build entire professional identities around it.

Notion’s competitors are all fighting over the same emotional real estate (efficiency, productivity, professionalism). By claiming the whitespace around creativity and self-expression, Notion found a space where they had virtually no direct competition.

Questions to guide your competitive analysis:

• What emotions do competitors evoke (or avoid)?

• What customer aspirations are being ignored by the market?

• What assumptions about the category could you challenge?

• What would it look like to be the opposite of your biggest competitor?

• Where is there room to reframe the entire conversation?

3. Craft your brand narrative with intention

Way too often, mission statements are just business goals disguised as inspiration—and your customers don’t care about your growth ambitions. A compelling brand narrative connects your product’s functionality to deeper human motivations and cultural shifts.

What makes a brand narrative compelling (💡 tip: steal these questions to kick off your next stakeholder workshop):

• Clear point of view: What do you believe that others don’t? What assumption in your category are you willing to challenge?

• Cultural relevance: What’s happening in the world that your brand can uniquely address?

• Aspirational identity: Who does your customer become by choosing you?

• Consistent story arc: How does every touchpoint reinforce the same core narrative?

Brex

At Brex, while we were rebranding, there were a dozen or so “lines” or philosophies that would frequently bubble up at the leadership level (stated at All Hands, used in internal messaging, etc.) but it wasn’t clear which idea should take the lead in our brand narrative. We wrote all of the lines we were hearing out on a doc and then had a discussion about their importance and hierarchy to land on the biggest, most important idea(s), like “dream big,” vs. ideas that served a purpose at one time (“built by founders for founders”) but we’d since outgrown.

Linear

Linear borrows from a very similar playbook to Notion’s, but the execution is their own. When Linear launched, the project management space for product teams in particular was similarly crowded with tools vaguely focused on “collaboration” and “productivity.” Linear figured out that developers were emotionally exhausted by bloated, slow tools that made simple tasks complicated.

Instead of another “all-in-one project management platform” (please, no more), Linear’s narrative doubled down on purpose-built tools, speed, craft, and most importantly, respect for developers’ time. A good brand strategy is opinionated… and Linear is almost elitist in its approach, appealing to product professionals who hold a high quality bar for themselves and their teams.

4. Test and iterate relentlessly

Brand-market fit isn’t binary. It exists on a spectrum. That’s why your BMF can be strong or weak, not just “there or not there.” And like with PMF, you’ll benefit from continuous validation and refinement through real market feedback. When it comes to achieving PMF or BMF, neither is a check-the-box exercise.

Ways to validate your brand-market fit:

• Run small-scale brand messaging tests with target customers—are they picking up what you’re putting down?

• Monitor organic brand mentions and sentiment (what people say when they think you’re not listening)

• Track leading indicators: brand search volume, direct traffic, referral rates

• Create systematic feedback loops with your most engaged customers

• Measure consideration rates within your target market

Over time, you’re trying to build feedback mechanisms that capture both rational and emotional responses to your brand. You want to know not just if people understand what you do, but how your brand makes them feel and whether it aligns with who they want to be.

5. Align internal stakeholders (again and again)

Your brand narrative means nothing if your team doesn’t believe it. Every employee either strengthens or weakens your brand-market fit through their daily interactions with customers, prospects, and each other.

Most often, this needs to come from the top down for it to hold, so you’re really only successful here if you can get all your executives and brand decision-makers on the same page here—not just your team. There’s a whole host of alignment strategies to lean on, so many that I dedicate an entire module (one of five) to alignment in my Maven course, Brand for Growth-Stage Leaders!

But a few of my favorite alignment tactics include:

• Hosting a listening tour—gather internal context, then host a cross-functional workshops to develop brand principles with your key stakeholders

• Use what you heard from your listening tour and customer research to build a simple, plain-text brand strategy summary that all core decision makers are aligned on

• Find your brand’s blank space with my Brand Differentiator 2×2 template

• Build a brand culture from the inside out:

  • Create clear brand guidelines that go beyond visual identity

  • Develop training programs that help every team member understand the brand story

  • Integrate brand values into performance reviews and hiring processes

🚩 Red flags: Signs you don’t have brand-market fit

You can have strong PMF and still struggle to grow—so, wondering if it’s your brand-market fit that’s holding back your growth? Here are the red flags that reveal weak brand-market fit:

Customer language shows you the gap.

• Customers describe your product in totally functional terms without emotional connection

• When customers recommend you, they lead with “it works” rather than “I love it”

• User-generated content focuses on features, not feelings or identity

• Customer testimonials never sound like personal stories, just product reviews

Growth metrics plateau despite strong product.

• You’ve got high churn rates even though you’re solving a clear, validated problem

• Competitors with similar functionality are outpacing your growth

• Customer acquisition costs keep rising while conversion rates stagnate

• Strong trial-to-paid conversion but weak long-term retention

Internal confusion and misalignment abounds (there’s a new narrative every All Hands meeting).

• Leadership can’t explain what makes you unique beyond features

• Endless debates about messaging, strategy, and positioning without resolution

• Different teams describe your value prop differently

• Marketing campaigns feel generic or interchangeable with competitors

When you talk to your sales and performance marketing teams, they share market signals that point to weak differentiation.

• Prospects consistently ask “How are you different from [competitor]?”

• Sales cycles are longer than industry benchmarks for your solution

• Win/loss analysis shows decisions based primarily on price or specific features

• Lack of organic word-of-mouth growth—you’re paying (dearly) for most of your traffic and awareness

The ultimate test: If someone could swap out your brand name for a competitor’s in your marketing materials or messaging, and you can barely tell the difference, you don’t have brand-market fit. Strong BMF means your brand narrative, voice, and positioning are so distinctly yours that they couldn’t belong to anyone else.

The long game of BMF

Finding brand-market fit is a marathon of learning and refinement. While you can and should tackle brand development in stages, finding your brand-market fit is not a one-time sprint. (Read my take on the 5 sprints of brand building and you’ll see what I mean by approaching this work in phases that build on each other over time.)

Think about the brands that command premium pricing, inspire fierce loyalty, and grow primarily through word-of-mouth. These are the ones where customers don’t use use the tools but build their identities around them, who evangelize rather than just recommend the brand.

Your product solves functional problems. Your brand fulfills human aspirations.

If you have strong PMF, you’ll always have competitors, and with strong PMF, your BMF becomes a necessary (and likely most powerful) differentiator. Companies that treat brand as a strategic asset—not a nice-to-have—consistently outperform the teams that focus only on product superiority.

And the most important step toward strengthening your BMF is… just start! Your customers are waiting (begging, probably!) for a brand that gets them. Start with genuine curiosity about your audience’s emotional landscape, and commit to the long-term work of building something people want to be part of. 🦚

Thanks for reading.

If you’re team BMF, consider:

• connecting with me on LinkedIn: Kira Klaas 👩🏼‍💻

• commenting with a question or topic you’d like to see next

• sending to a friend 💌 or coworker 💬

As I was working on my editorial calendar going into the rest of the year, I realized On Brand is officially one year old! 🎂 So many new faces have joined us since this launched with a list of 500 or so readers—as we near 4,000, it feels like the right time to revisit one of the core tenants underlying my approach to brand, marketing, and growth: Brand-Market Fit.

So I’ve refreshed this post with a few new examples, and I’m also officially turning this into a two-parter, with a more tactical guide, How to Find Brand-Market Fit (Part 2), to follow next week. Stay tuned—and let me know what you think!

You’re here because you recently subscribed or signed up for one of my resources—my course waitlist on Maven, lightning lesson, or Notion templates.

If someone sent you this post and you’re not subscribed, join those people learning how to tactically advocate for brand at your company. 📬

Subscribe now

My post original introduction—keeping for posterity! Scroll on to get to the good stuff.

Hi! I’m Kira Klaas, and you’re reading the first edition 🗞️ of my newsletter, where I’m sharing my first-hand perspectives on corporate brand-building and marketing.

I’ve long wanted to write about this niche, and while on sabbatical this past year, I finally put pen to paper: why brand often gets undervalued, how to de-silo brand from growth, and how to brand-build successfully when you’re starting from a place of ambiguity and low buy-in.

There are so many resources about branding, advertising, and theory, especially written by agencies and measurement providers. They’re great if everyone’s already bought into “doing brand.” But no one’s talking about the realities of running brand at tech companies that tend to be product-first, founder-led, and performance-obsessed.

As a full-time marketing operator who moonlights as a teacher and advisor, I have deep experience developing winning creative, shipping effective brand campaigns, and helping companies scale to multi-billion dollar valuations (Notion, Brex, Gusto).

As an early subscriber, you’re getting access to tactical frameworks, practical advice, and Notion templates drawn from my experience working with founders and some of the top brand teams in tech.

Why You Need Brand-Market Fit

What’s brand-market fit? Well, I’m officially coining the phrase.

I’m sure you’re tired of hearing about familiar with product-market fit—enough people have shared their takes on how to achieve PMF. It’s so critical that First Round Capital (a VC and publication I admire) recently published a 14-week intensive on the “PMF Method.”

PMF was first coined by Andy Rachleff, and you’ll find some classic definitions on the a16z.com blog. When I re-read this article for this post, I hit cmd+F—and couldn’t find the word “brand” anywhere on the page. Um? ✋🏼 With such a huge piece of the success equation missing, it feels like founders have been done a huge disservice when it comes to the core advice out there on building a lasting business that customers love.

To build a massive company, you have to be able to win on both product AND go-to-market...but go-to-market is just one piece of brand-market fit.

What is Brand-Market Fit?

I’m defining brand-market fit (BMF) as: the degree to which a company’s identity, values, and overall customer experience resonate with and meet the emotional and aspirational needs of its target market. It complements product-market fit by ensuring that not only does the product solve the right problem, but the brand itself creates a meaningful connection with customers.

When we talk about brands making comebacks, it’s not just because they “ran some new ads” or spent on different channels—it’s almost always because they adjusted their brand-market fit (Abercrombie and Gap, to give some recent examples).

Product-market fit gets you in the game, but brand-market fit helps you win it.

How Brand-Market Fit complements (not replaces) Product-Market Fit:

1. While product-market fit focuses on solving a specific problem or fulfilling a functional need, brand-market fit addresses the emotional and psychological aspects of customer engagement.

2. Product-market fit gets a company into the market, but brand-market fit helps companies differentiate themselves in crowded markets, where multiple products may solve similar problems (e.g. commodities).

3. Brand-market fit ensures a unified customer experience. It aligns every touchpoint of the customer journey—from product functionality to marketing to customer support to sales—to create consistency and, in turn, trust.

While product-market fit ensures that a company is solving the right problem with its product, brand-market fit ensures that the company is doing so in a way that creates a lasting, meaningful relationship with its customers.

In extremely simplified terms, brand-market fit is how great products find differentiation, the key to beating competition.

We don’t need to spend a ton of time talking about the companies who’ve achieved both product- and brand-market fit, because it’s pretty obvious. They’re the aspirational brands whose names come up again and again—Patagonia, Apple, Nike, and Airbnb are all up there. But here are a few more:

Companies that have achieved both Product-Market Fit and Brand-Market Fit, and how:

Ōura

• PMF: Provides comprehensive health tracking through a sleek, wearable ring that monitors sleep, activity, and recovery metrics.

• BMF: Ōura’s branding has made it a status symbol. It dominates as the premium, lifestyle-forward choice in wearable health tech. Their recent “Give us the finger” campaign is bold and irreverent, tapping into a cultural shift toward proactive aging and wellness ownership. You’ve probably never heard of or can’t name their functional competitors (Ultrahuman Ring Air, RingConn Gen 2 Air, and Samsung Galaxy Ring… am I right?). They aren’t just selling you your health data; they’re selling you the identity of being someone who takes a sophisticated, intentional approach to wellness.

Spotify

• PMF: Offers a comprehensive music streaming service with robust discovery and personalized contextual recommendations.

• BMF: Spotify has cultivated a brand that represents their product very well. Their yearly Wrapped campaign (although it fell off in 2024…too much AI reliance? Remember, BMF is not static!) still inspires a huge slew of copycats, and other features they’ve added more recently both encourage social sharing and foster a sense of individual identity (my latest daylist is “k-pop hallyu afternoon” what’s yours?). The brand resonates with users’ desire for self-expression through music and positions itself as a companion in users’ daily lives—down to specific moments in the day.

Oatly

• PMF: Provides a popular plant-based milk alternative that meets the needs of health-conscious and environmentally-aware consumers.

• BMF: Did you have any idea this company has been around since the 90s?! But their brand-market fit is more recent. Their irreverent, quirky branding and bold sustainability claims have created a strong emotional connection with the target audience. The brand positions as a rebellious, eco-friendly alternative to traditional dairy—and their approach is pretty fresh. It’s unconventional (for the industry) marketing that turns a mundane product into a lifestyle choice, something we’ve rarely seen done well by other long-standing alt-milk brands (like soy or rice milk).

  

Notion

• PMF: Provides a flexible, all-in-one workspace for notes, project management, and collaboration for individuals and teams aiming to organize work.

• BMF: Notion (my former employer) has cultivated a brand that represents creativity, flexibility, and productivity. Their differentiated, minimalist design aesthetic (clutter-free dashboards, no confetti-spraying or flying unicorns in sight) and emphasis on customization resonate with users (1 billion+ views on TikTok) who value both practicality and visual appeal. Their global community is the envy of any B2B brand; over 1M users share workflows and templates (here’s mine 😘), fostering an uplifting sense of collective productivity and creativity.

Glossier

• PMF: Offers simple, effective skincare and makeup products that cater to a desire for a natural, effortless look.

• BMF: Glossier once was the “it” brand of inclusive beauty—they’ve been synonymous with “Millennial pink” but don’t alienate Gen Z. Their “skin first, makeup second” philosophy was differentiated while addressing a cultural shift consumers cared about. Their DTC + pop-up model (major emphasis on experiential marketing, which Millennials still want) and heavy use of UGC has created a strong a sense of community and accessibility. TBD on if they can make it through another decade of shifting taste and economic realities, but Glossier has positioned itself as a friend and confidant in the beauty space, rather than an aspirational, unattainable ideal.

Discord

• PMF: Provides a customizable communication platform for communities.

• BMF: Discord has built a brand that represents community-building and authentic connection. Unlike Slack, Teams, and other professional-oriented platforms, Discord’s brand leans into informality and fun—and now is leveraging brand to monetize without losing that core identity and differentiation. It’s successfully expanding beyond gaming to become a hub for more types of communities, particularly for “savvy techies” to gather.

Perplexity

• PMF: Provides AI-powered search that delivers direct answers with cited sources, solving the problem of information overload and unreliable search results.

• BMF: Perplexity earned a first-mover advantage by positioning itself in the research-focused whitespace around LLMs, even as competitors like Claude and ChatGPT have added better source/citation functionality. Their brand appeals to users who specifically value information quality (over speed, or a chattier tone, etc.). How? Citations are intentionally central to the branding and visual language. Messaging consistently emphasizes “the power of knowledge,” along with accuracy, transparency, and intellectual curiosity. Let’s see if this one sticks, given this space is changing fast!

Duolingo

• PMF: Offers free language learning that works, with bite-sized lessons and effective spaced repetition.

• BMF: Language learning is fundamentally academic, but Duolingo found a BMF whitespace by ditching the boring, rote parts of study while keeping the rigor (Duo, the owl, is vaguely outright threatening if you miss a lesson and the app heavily emphasizes keeping your learning streak alive). Being unhinged in a space that had never known the meaning of “unhinged” created all the differentiation (s/o ) they needed to take market share from comparatively boring incumbents like Rosetta Stone and Babbel.

Companies that’ve achieved Product-Market Fit, but have struggled with Brand-Market Fit:

Now let’s get into some examples of companies who’ve struggled to achieve both—they’ve achieved obvious product-market fit, because they’re still in business, and even growing!

But as we look at where they’ve struggled to grow or to “own” a category, it becomes apparent that brand-market fit is the challenge.

Dropbox

• PMF: Dropbox solved a significant problem by offering easy file synchronization and sharing across devices.

• BMF challenges: While a category leader, Dropbox has struggled to differentiate itself emotionally from competitors. It might be more often seen as a utility rather than a brand people feel passionate about. Although I loved their 2021 “For all things worth saving” campaign (and many gorgeous brand evolutions over the years), Dropbox has had a hard time translating beautiful campaigns to the product experience. It needs a vision that goes beyond storage in order to jump on opportunities to connect with users’ broader digital lifestyle needs. You could argue that Dropbox Paper could’ve been what Notion became—but hasn’t found brand-market fit to the same degree. By contrast, I see WeTransfer doing more on the BMF side to turn utility (file transfer) into something users connect with emotionally (e.g. their 2024 “Move like a pro” campaign).

LinkedIn

• PMF: LinkedIn successfully created a professional networking platform, filling a gap in the social media landscape.

• BMF challenges: Despite its necessity, LinkedIn hasn’t cultivated a brand that people engage with enthusiastically—until more recently, as we usher in the era of the B2B influencer (but does their presence improve brand affinity?). The brand has struggled to shake off perceptions of being stuffy or overly corporate and users tend to cringe when they launch new engagement features (like those really bad “AI-powered takeaways” on posts in feed). LinkedIn, though, is definitely getting better at tapping into professionals’ aspirations and emotions beyond job hunting and networking by elevating the voices of those who choose to play the game. Are they going to truly crack video? How long will this monopoly last?

Craigslist

• PMF: Craigslist succeeded by providing a simple, functional platform for classified ads and local listings.

• BMF: It’s not that exciting to talk about Craigslist, but somehow it’s clung on all these years. Their bare-bones approach, while functional, has resulted in a lack of brand personality (and zero marketing). The site’s outdated design and minimal features, while immediately recognizable and maybe part of its appeal to some, actively create a frustrating brand experience. Craigslist hasn’t evolved its brand to meet changing user expectations for design, safety, and community building in online marketplaces, and traffic is steadily moving over to a million other platforms like Facebook Marketplace, Nextdoor, Poshmark, Mercari, etc.

Oracle

• PMF: Oracle has long been a leader in database management systems and cloud applications. I think. What do they do again?

• BMF: In the consumer and broader tech space, Oracle’s brand lacks the resonance of more consumer-facing tech companies. Its historic PMF is undeniable, but it’s often perceived as old-school and corporate, struggling to appeal to younger tech decision-makers and startups. Oracle’s cohesive brand narrative is almost nonexistent, and they struggle to go beyond technical capabilities to connect with the aspirations and values of the modern tech workforce.

Threads

• PMF: Successfully filled the gap left by Twitter’s decline, offering a more civil social media experience.

• BMF challenges: Despite rapid user growth, Threads simply hasn’t cultivated the cultural relevance that Twitter once had. Users often describe it as “nice but boring”—it’s functional but far behind becoming the “cultural town square” where conversations happen that matter to people’s identity and social status.

Not all BMF challenges look the same—some struggle with creating emotional connections, others with aligning their brand with user values, and still others with evolving their brand to meet changing market expectations.

As companies expand their product portfolio, they might struggle to appeal to new audiences without alienating their existing users (e.g. How does Rippling stay relevant as an HR platform as they also try to target IT and financial decision-makers? Or some questions I’ve faced personally—how does Notion appeal to both B2B and B2C users, targeting enterprise without turning off individual users? How does Brex move upmarket without alienating startups?) In the case of sprawling umbrella brands like Meta or Oracle or Adobe, a common BMF challenge is to maintain a compelling overarching identity.

How do companies achieve brand-market fit?

If you lack brand-market fit, the brand needs to change. (Important: Make sure you aren’t blaming weak brand-market fit on weak product-market fit.) In extreme cases, weak brand-market fit is at the root of reactive rebrands—like Facebook to Meta and Uber’s rebrand(s) in the example below.

Ideally, when a company rebrands or refreshes, it’s because they want to proactively get ahead of brand shortcomings before they slow down growth. Happily, this was the case when we rebranded Brex in 2019-2020—we knew that the existing brand, while resonating well with a core startup audience—would stunt our growth into a more mature market, and our rebrand set us up to scale, matching Brex’s product evolution pace.

Uber

• PMF: Uber revolutionized transportation with its ride-hailing app, solving significant pain points in urban mobility.

• BMF: Since its launch, Uber’s brand has suffered various controversies, including issues with driver treatment, corporate culture, and passenger safety—leading to two rebrands in two years (2016 and 2018). These created a disconnect between the convenience of the product and the values the brand represents. This led to “safety” as the core focus of the 2018 rebrand and on new design and visual language (the color blue!) to represent safety features more explicitly. As Uber focused on building a consistently positive, trustworthy brand image that aligns with users’ ethical expectations and desire for responsible corporate behavior, they’ve been able to move from more reactive brand work to proactive work (e.g. in January 2024, they announced a brand expansion with JKR to move into additional delivery services).

In every case of weak BMF, the company has a product that serves a clear need, but hasn’t fully developed a brand that resonates with their target market beyond the product’s functional benefits. Their long-term survival, or whether they can succeed without also dramatically altering their product-market fit, ultimately comes down to whether they can create—and maintain—brand-market fit.

My 4-week course on Maven, Brand for Growth-Stage Leaders dives deep into the practical methods behind achieving brand-market fit and internal buy-in. After a few months off, I’m finally opening a long-anticipated cohort for November! You can use the code SUBSCRIBER to take $100 off your enrollment, or join the waitlist for updates.

Get Discount

Thanks for reading.

If you liked what you read, consider:

• replying and saying hi!

• connecting with me (Kira Klaas 👩🏼‍💻) on LinkedIn

• submitting a question or topic you’d like to see next

• sending to a friend 💌 or coworker 💬

To keep reading: