Category: Brand & Positioning
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AI Visibility Is a Layered Problem
As AI systems increasingly mediate how people discover and assess brands, visibility is no longer a function of ranking alone (the model we have all been used to for years). Before a brand can appear in an AI-generated response, it must first be legible to the system. It needs to be recognised as a coherent…
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How My Approach to Marketing Differs from the Standard Playbook
You need to do something different to be seen
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AEO Visibility Decays Faster Than SEO
…And That Changes How We Should Measure It Generative search engines (Perplexity, Bing AI, ChatGPT Search, Google’s AI Overviews) operate very differently from traditional search. instead of slow moving changes in ranking, they regenerate answers dynamically, pulling from: This dynamic behaviour creates a situation where AEO visibility actually decays unless a brand actively maintains its…
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Brand is how you impact GEO
Why AI Visibility Lets Us Measure Brand Impact. Finally. For as long as I’ve worked in marketing, there’s been one problem I could never quite solve: how to measure the impact of brand work. We’ve always had solid tools for performance — clicks, conversions, funnel stages. But brand strength? Hand-wavey and unmeasurable. I’ve tried surveys,…
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Why GEO Matters More Than SEO: Shaping What AI Says About You
Introduction: A New Frontier in Visibility* For more than two decades, digital marketing has revolved around search engines. Brands competed for rankings on Google, invested in SEO playbooks, and built inbound marketing machines. But the terrain has shifted. Increasingly, customers don’t just “search” – they ask AI. Tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Bing Copilot, and Google’s…
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Slaying a few marketing myths
We’ve been doing some digital marketing work recently and the more and more time I spend on digital work the more beasts I feel need to be slain. NB: I’m talking specifically about B2B marketing here – which is important. It’s important because many of the problems that B2B marketers face come from taking a…
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Balance and Flow
Measuring marketing performance is tough. At times I’ve argued that it’s impossible and therefore pointless. But I don’t think that’s true. As a starting point pretty much any company you work for in a senior marketing role, will expect you to understand the impact of your work (and that of your colleagues). Part of this…
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B2B marketing help
One thing I learned very early on in my career – you can’t do a marketing job without almost constant interaction with the rest of the business. Whether that’s the sales team, the product team, HR or anyone else, you need constant input and feedback from both inside and outside the building. One very specific…
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Why HR is the Most Important Department in your Business
Surely not!? Surely it’s the Marketing department (I am a marketer after all)? Or maybe Sales, maybe Engineering, maybe Customer Support. But no, I want to argue that getting HR right is one of the step changes you can make to a business, with far broader impact than any of the areas listed above. There…
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Review: “Subscribed” by Tien Tzuo
The Subscription Economy is the idea that more and more customers (and therefore vendors) are moving over to being subscribers of services rather than purchasers of products. An obvious example is Spotify – the money spent by consumers on streaming services now significantly outweighs revenue from physical CDs or even digital downloads: In 2019, more money is…
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Brand Amplifiers
I’m writing this on my way to the Sirius Decision Summit in Vegas (sitting in Terminal 3). I’m hoping to get a lot out of the conference (though I’m currently in option paralysis mode – too many sessions to choose from). But this post is about a very small part of that conference – though…
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To learn about the “Buyer Process” try buying something
I guess this is more a post about sales rather than marketing per se, but still – understanding buyer journeys and how you can help at different stages is an important part of the marketing role, particularly when the sales cycle is complex. I’ve read quite a lot about marketing funnels – how customers at…
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If a Brewery Can Innovate, So Can You
This weekend we went to Southwold and Aldeburgh – two of my favourite places in the UK, for various reasons. One of these reasons is the Adnams Brewery, based in Southwold. It’s been going for over a century and has always produced wonderful beer (as well as other drinks). But a few years ago I…
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Your People Are Your Customer Experience
We went to Milton Keynes today (school holidays – where else would you want to go?) and there were two examples of what I’d call, using marketing jargon, “A great customer experience” for the children. Listening to them talk about it afterwards, it wasn’t just something to do with the actual places we went to,…
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Guerilla Marketing for Startups – An Example
We’re on holiday at the moment, in the Netherlands, but just thought I’d write a short post about a great example of guerilla marketing we spotted today, for something we visited whilst in The Hague. There’s a great attraction in a small basement near the centre of The Hague, called Amaze Escape – http://www.amaze-escape.com. Essentially…
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Why Measuring Marketing ROI is Like Trying to Measure Employee ROI – Impossible!
I’m beginning to think I might need to change the tag line for this blog. One of my earliest posts was about how we needed to apply some scientific rigour to the process of marketing attribution and therefore ROI. How can marketers be getting away with such unproven and unprovable techniques, spending all this money…
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The Need to Constantly Change in Marketing
There’s a quote that I really like from one of Christopher Isherwood’s early novels, The Memorial: “Men always seem to me so restless and discontented in comparison to women. They’ll do anything to make a change, even when it leaves them worse off. […] Whereas […] we women, we only want peace.” Removing the sexism…
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Keeping an Eye on The Competition
Many, many years ago I studied psychology and one of the most interesting courses I did was on development psychology – how we go from babies to infants to toddlers to children to teenagers to adults. The most fascinating lecture series was on Theory of Mind – the notion that, as we grow up we…
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SaaS Product Management, Lovefilm and Getting Stale
Lovefilm have just revamped the app that is used by devices such as Blu-ray players and the PS3 and it is, in my opinion, a great improvement. There are a large number of changes but I think also, and I’m speculating massively here, that the improvements were heavily shaped by some great data driven product…
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Why Product Managers Often Aren’t Great at Marketing
Back when I was a developer, many years ago, I worked with a superb sales person – an ex-McKinsey sales person – who had been tasked with explaining to all us techies “What Sales Did”. Of course we already knew the answer – “Nothing, except get paid more than us, drive nicer cars, get more…
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Book Review: Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout
Another book review this week, this time Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout. Obviously this is a book that had been around a long time. And there are endless reviews, over the years with different opinions. However, what’s interesting from skimming through the Amazon reviews, is that there’s a real mix between people who…
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Product Management and iTunes 11
Just to start – this isn’t another post written just to whinge about iTunes. It’s a post written to whinge about iTunes and its relevance to product management. Is the following situation familiar? Product manager or marketer wants to add new features, use-cases and options to their product, based on customer feedback, that they think…