You can’t walk 5 steps without someone telling you about AI. Or maybe that’s just me because I live in San Francisco and it’s incessant. But one topic gets very overlooked in the AI conversation, hardly even a mention, and that’s marketing. I guess early on it was the first use-case for AI when you could spin up infinite blog posts with ChatGPT, but that seemed to pass pretty quickly as those have gotten filtered out, and more and more content is video-based anyways.
So in this article I want to talk about what marketing actually looks like in the AI Era. Specifically about what builds a meaningful brand. Because a lot of the conversation around AI is that it’s use and the fear surrounding it has broken trust. Rebuilding trust means building a brand that people recognize and know if they work with you, they won’t get screwed.
This has always been the case, but AI maybe made it more prominent. I’ve seen a lot of businesses come in and sell a big dream, only to let people down, but this round with AI has taken that process to a whole new level. AI comes in hot, saying “X is dead” and brings a convincing demo and set of data to prove it. People freak out, and it does end up knocking out some of the industry it’s going after, but not because it replaces it, only because customers pause on using the original products for a while and try the AI version.
So we’re in a place where people don’t trust you to deliver on your promises because so much has been promised and only some of it has been delivered. The path forward is one I learned selling laptops in high school. I’d buy broken laptops and fix them. Back then if a computer had a virus it was toast, except if you reset everything, which I learned how to do and then subsequently bought computes with viruses, fixed them, and resold them.
There were a few components of that business which taught me everything about business.
1. You need a discovery engine - where do people find you. For that business it was Craigslist.
2. You need a cohesive brand - every time I posted a computer it was on the same hardwood floor background (honestly works great for electronics photos) and I took the same set of photos showing the parts of the laptop each time.
3. You need a message that resonates - I had my template for how I’d write the descriptions. Short, speaking to the things customers wanted to hear, well formatted with bullet points so it was easy to digest the information.
4. You need to talk to people - every potential customer would call me, and I’d talk to them. Listen to what they wanted, ask questions to figure out what mattered to them, and then pitch my laptop in terms of what they were looking for. Especially now with the AI mistrust, if there was one thing I’d bet all my effort on, it would be talking to people.
Those four things pretty much sum up marketing and sales. Get found, have a brand, dial in your messaging, and talk to people. I think those basics, when run by a human who learns over time (which we are good at, take that AI), is a sweet recipe for business growth.
