You vs. AI: Game On

Why Humans Are Irreplaceable In Creative Problem Solving and Ideation

Artificial Intelligence and the upcoming Generative AI are at the center of intense debate about the future of human creativity and strategic ideation. It’s true, AI demonstrates scary good capabilities in generating (or maybe regurgitating) ideas and processing information. And it’s also true that some jobs will be lost. But can it replace me? I’m a creative strategist. I make a living through innovative thinking and ideation. It’s a question I get asked all the time.

I don't know if this is some self-actualization exercise, but I mean, who wouldn’t want to know? So I did some digging into what makes human cognition unique and the remarkable capabilities of the human brain that machines simply cannot replicate.

For now, these fundamental aspects of human creativity and original thinking remain uniquely human. Rest assured, these cognitive processes involve sophisticated mechanisms that go far beyond the pattern recognition and data synthesis systems of AI. Here’s what I learned.

The Nature of Human Creative Intelligence

Divergent Thinking: Human creativity operates through several interconnected cognitive processes that distinguish it from artificial intelligence. The most fundamental difference lies in how humans approach problems through divergent thinking and insight problem-solving, two complementary yet distinct cognitive processes.

Humans have a unique ability to connect the dots through divergent thinking. First coined by psychologist J.P. Guilford in 1956, divergent thinking refers to the ability to generate multiple creative solutions by exploring numerous possible pathways in a spontaneous, non-linear manner. Unlike AI's pattern-based systems, human divergent thinking involves genuine discovery and unexpected connections drawn from knowledge we carry for living life and lived experiences. Human divergent thinking is a catalyst for innovation.

We all know that magical high that happens when an idea explodes in your brain, often in a moment of cognitive spontaneity. Something clicks, and a strategy or idea instantly feels right. That’s insight problem-solving, and that Aha! Moment represents a more profound cognitive phenomenon where solutions emerge suddenly through a complete and mostly subconscious restructuring of how we understand a problem. Insight blending with instinct. This is a uniquely human process that involves overcoming mental fixation and seeing problems from a different perspective. This cognitive process simply can’t happen in an AI's computational approach. Prompt in, data out – that’s all you get.

Abductive Reasoning: The Foundation of Human Innovation
One of the most crucial and underappreciated aspects of human creativity is abductive reasoning. Surprising that it is so underappreciated, given AI sucks at it. Abductive reasoning is a form of inference first described by philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. Many consider the lack of AI’s ability around abductive reasoning the clearest distinction between human and artificial intelligence in creative problem-solving.

Abductive reasoning follows patterns like the observation or realization of a surprising fact or anomaly. It reasons that if a particular hypothesis were true, then another fact would make sense and therefore also be true. There would then be no reason to suspect a hypothesis as untrue, a key process in innovation. 

This is how we try on ideas to see how they fit. What makes abductive reasoning uniquely human is its reliance on surprise and discovery as a driver for creative insight. When humans encounter unexpected information that doesn't fit their existing belief sets or mental models, we experience genuine surprise. This state of newfound awareness is an emotional and cognitive moment that fuels abductive reasoning. This discovery-driven exploration leads to new hypotheses and ideas that can tie together strategies and ideas that were previously not connected. This is how new ideas happen. It’s how original thinking happens, and it is uniquely human.

Unlike the human brain's ability to randomize and create new ideas, patterns, and outcomes, AI systems operate through existing pattern recognition and statistical correlations within their training data. They cannot experience genuine surprise because they lack the conscious awareness and embodied experience that make that Aha moment meaningful. As the cognitive psychologist, Dr. Mark Runco, posited, and I paraphrase here, "AI can only produce artificial creativity because it lacks the experiential foundation that drives true innovative thinking.” 

He adds that AI output represents "artificial creativity" or "pseudo-creativity" lacking characteristics of human creativity like intentionality, intrinsic motivation, mindfulness, choice, and authenticity. All of which are important parts of human creativity and are absent from artificial intelligence.

Metacognition: Thinking About Thinking
Human ideation gets better with metacognition. This is our capacity to reflect on our own thinking processes and make subjective, sometimes nonlinear changes to our conclusions. Metacognition, or thinking about thinking, does a few things that AI can’t. It helps monitor the quality and originality of our ideas in real-time. It allows us to strategically shift between different cognitive approaches and recognize when current strategies aren't working and need adjustment. It’s what allows us to evaluate the appropriateness of solutions within complex contexts. In a sense, it’s how we iterate ideas on the fly.

Embodied Cognition and Contextual Intelligence
Human creativity is deeply rooted in the idea of embodied cognition. It’s the understanding that our physical bodies and sensorimotor experiences fundamentally shape how we think and create. Human cognition leverages knowledge acquisition through personal experience and social interaction. Conversely, AI leverages abstract, impersonal, encyclopedic knowledge independent of personal or social context.  

Human creativity thrives on the ability to combine unrelated ideas, draw from personal experiences, and apply emotional depth to creative and strategic processes that are shaped by culture, motivation, and life. Yes, AI can repeat patterns in emotional data, but it doesn't experience emotion itself. Any emotional intelligence is simulated, lacking the genuine emotional experience that humans rely on in social interactions. That’s why when AI writes your article, it generally sounds like shit.

Here are a few other human capabilities that AI will never possess.

Contextual Sensitivity
Human thinking and creativity are sensitive to context in ways that AI cannot replicate. Humans understand not only what might work, but also what should work, given relevant contextual considerations. This contextual intelligence allows humans to navigate the nuanced landscape of appropriateness, ethics, and social meaning that accompanies truly innovative solutions.

Emotional Resonance
Human ideation is informed by emotional intelligence and the ability to understand how ideas will resonate with other humans. And again, while AI can analyze emotional patterns in data, it cannot experience emotions or understand their deeper significance in human experience. For me, this is a huge gap in the creative process that AI cannot fill: understanding how people will feel.

The Gestalt Nature of Human Insight

Human insight operates through what Gestalt psychologists call holistic reorganization. When humans experience creative breakthroughs, they combine existing elements and fundamentally reorganize their understanding of the entire problem, finding new ways to solve it. This reorganization process involves simultaneously restructuring a problem and looking at it in a different way. This can lead to sudden clarity that feels qualitatively different from linear understanding. Yes, it’s that Aha Moment again. 

Neuroscience researchers believe that insight involves unconscious cognitive processes that suddenly reorganize and emerge into consciousness. This is a decidedly different process from AI's step-by-step computation. This reorganization, combined with abductive reasoning, gives us high confidence in the viability of our idea. For AI, there is no end; it will continuously regurgitate different solutions regardless of correctness. For humans, the final test is that we can feel in our bones the positive emotions that signal the value of an idea.

Intuition and the “Feeling of Knowing”
Human creative problem-solving is guided by intuition, a rapid, largely unconscious process that integrates vast amounts of complex information. AI's working memory lacks the human ability to integrate experiences and context. While it can handle vast amounts of data simultaneously, human memory is context-sensitive and integrates knowledge and experience. AI struggles with implicit meaning, and while it might know the definition of a word, without context, it can miss deeper meaning,  hidden intentions, or innuendo.

Sometimes, we just know. Intuition provides humans with intangibles that AI will never have. We can, in an instant, assess whether an idea feels promising or problematic. A human’s pattern recognition allows for rapid evaluation of complex social and contextual factors.

We feel.

This intuitive process happens much faster than conscious reasoning and is what gives humans the feeling-of-knowing that guides ideation and innovation. While AI can process information quickly, it lacks the integrated emotional and somatic signals that inform human intuitive judgment.

Strategic Vision and Purpose-Driven Creativity

For me, this is a big one. Human creativity is driven by purpose, meaning, and values in ways that AI cannot replicate. Humans create not just to solve problems, but to express personal and cultural values, create meaning, and connect with others. We challenge existing power structures and assumptions, and envision alternative solutions that don't yet exist. We intuitively want to innovate and differentiate.

This purpose-driven aspect of human creativity enables thinking outside the box and pushing boundaries. It helps us see beyond immediate problems to imagine fundamentally different ways of organizing human experience. While AI can optimize within existing paradigms, we’re way better at questioning the paradigms themselves and coming up with new and innovative ideas.

We Cannot Be Replaced, But We Can Play Nicely Together

Research has repeatedly confirmed that AI is most valuable when it augments rather than replaces human creative processes. This collaborative approach works because humans can provide the original vision, contextual understanding, and ethical judgment. AI can provide rapid analysis, pattern recognition, and systematic exploration of an idea while humans maintain agency and responsibility for creative decisions.

Human creativity operates through fundamentally different cognitive mechanisms that cannot be replicated by AI. For true innovation, humans benefit from experiencing confusion, doubt, and the cognitive dissonance that drives us to explore multiple perspectives and generate genuinely fresh thinking, not just recombinations of existing patterns found in training data.

But we can play nicely together by not losing sight of what makes human innovation happen. We can strategically leverage AI’s power while preserving and enhancing the uniquely human elements that drive genuine innovation. The ability to experience surprise, restructure understanding, feel emotional resonance, and imagine counterintuitive, alternative paths and solutions remains distinctly human. 

AI can remix what exists, but only humans can imagine what doesn’t. AI can process data, but humans feel it. Breakthrough innovation requires the messy, unpredictable nature of the human experience. Something no algorithm can replicate.

As for replacing me? For now, anyway, I think I’m good.

Why Building Brand Capital Matters For Founders

And Seven Things Founders Must Get Right

Brand Capital refers to the collective intangible assets a company creates by integrating strategy with creativity in the process of building compelling and ownable differentiation. It’s an asset that is leveraged for competitive advantage and long-term profit. It connects the brand’s intangible brand equity directly to capital efficiency and market performance, improving funding and investment outcomes.

It is one of the most powerful forms of capital a startup can have. Investors are always calculating risk. If your brand positioning is unclear or your brand looks like every other startup in your space, the risk feels higher. And when the risk is higher, investors want more equity.

When your brand is clearly positioned and emotionally potent, you’re building brand capital. Investors see a safer, more promising opportunity. Risk and opportunity costs decrease, your valuation increases, and you give up less equity. In financial terms, a strong brand lowers the discount rate that investors apply to your future earnings.

Financial capital that’s invested wisely compounds. Brand capital works the same way. Your brand’s positioning, narrative, design, and messaging either build or erode equity. The benefits of a strong, consistent brand compound over time, fueling customer preference, building engaged employees, attracting partners, and attracting investors. It becomes a flywheel. Every dollar of financial capital you raise works harder because your brand capital multiplies its impact, lowers the cost of capital, and compounds enterprise value over time. You are building equity and brand capital to be leveraged.

How To Build Your Brand Capital

The most common reason startups fail isn’t the idea. It’s the lack of alignment between the idea, defining the opportunity, the strategy, and the creative expression of the opportunity.

Founders often focus obsessively on product-market fit, market size, or traction metrics. And well they should. But what’s often overlooked is the core strategic foundation that ties it all together: positioning, differentiation, messaging, and brand strategy. The elements that build brand capital and a foundation for long-term equity.

Let’s get this clear up front: Your brand and your business are the same thing. Brand positioning and company positioning are one and the same. 

And this: Brand is a strategic construct well before it’s any kind of tactical execution, logo, color, or font. Everything about a brand, its positioning, and its attributes connect to business strategy and stakeholder objectives. Positioning is the foundation that builds alignment and consistency, and this builds equity. It doesn’t matter what you are building. Get this right first because brand equity is where the money is buried.

A startup's positioning shapes how the business is perceived in a world where perception drives valuation. This work is created to have appeal and impact on your target, but it invariably has, and should have, the same impact on potential investors. Investors fund potential. And the way that potential is positioned, packaged, and expressed matters. Getting this foundation right is the difference between being perceived as a bet versus a tangible, lower-risk opportunity with a high likelihood of future success. A strong idea, with a differentiated and sustainable positioning with compelling brand attributes, opens investors’ wallets.

Strategy and Creativity Together Build Brand Capital
A strong brand tells a simple and persuasive story that investors can believe in and want to be a part of. A well-structured brand foundation and strategic plan tell investors that you’ve considered everything. You’ve thought through GTM and scaling, you know how your brand differentiates, rationally and emotionally, and that you understand clearly how you will execute. Because even the best ideas necessarily rely on execution. I don't care how good the idea is; if investors feel you can’t execute, it’s over.

Developing positioning is the heart of this process. It defines where you sit in the market, where you play, who you play with, how you win, and what makes you uniquely differentiated. If there is no succinct positioning, then it’s clear that the foundational strategic and brand development work was not done. Without this, it’s tough to tell an aligned story. Investors will see the holes.

A strong, differentiated position can reframe a category. It can invent a new one. It can thrive on features and benefits, or it can differentiate emotionally. Or both. Once typically siloed, to be most effective, strategic development and creative development must work together. They are necessarily connected. Separated, your story is disjointed, and here again, investors will see the holes.

Defining a company’s position, its strategic plan, marketing sizing, scaling strategy, GTM planning, financial modeling, capital requirements, and the pitch deck are all developed in a fluid, holistic process. Each of these things gets refined as the process unfolds, until all aspects of the business are aligned in a seamless and resonant story. This is how you establish brand capital and be in a position to build equity.

What makes brands come alive, hold value, and build capital are the intangibles. Brand love, preference, loyalty, advocacy, trust, salience, affinity, and emotional binding. All of these drive market performance and equity value. While these intangibles are not easy to measure, they are some of the largest drivers of sustainable market performance and financial value. Investors can then see a company that has already de-risked many of the subjective elements that can undermine early-stage businesses.

Here’s what founders should remember:

“Companies with strong brands tend to be acquired for more than twice the price of companies with weak brands.”
Byron Sharp, Professor of Marketing at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science

“Brand equity is a key factor in attracting strategic buyers and achieving higher
transaction multiples.”
Tom Peters, Management Consultant and Author.

And this:

• The consistent finding across multiple authoritative studies is that intangible assets and goodwill combined (a significant portion of which is brand) represent 75-90% of the average business acquisition purchase price, making them the dominant component of M&A valuations today.
  2024 KNAV CPA Purchase Price Allocation Study

• Three-fifths of chief executives said they believed corporate brand and reputation represented more than 40% of their company’s market capitalization.
  Siegel+Gale

• Brand is an organization’s largest intangible asset, making up approximately 20% of its market capitalization value.
  Brand Finance

• B2B startups with strong brands realize 15%-25% higher valuation premiums.
  CB Insights

• Strong brands achieve triple the sales volume of weaker brands and command a 13% price premium on average. 
  Millward Brown

In short, brand isn’t cosmetic. Brand is capital that builds equity.

You’re Selling Belief

Creative storytelling isn’t just for customers. People make decisions emotionally, then justify them rationally. Psychological research has shown repeatedly that stories outperform statistics when it comes to persuasion. When investors hear your story, their defenses drop. They stop analyzing and start imagining. Story comes from, and aligns with, your positioning.

A story without strategy is just theater. And a strategy without a story is just a spreadsheet. You need both. Strategic and creative integration matter. Together, they transform information into belief, and belief into capital. And the psychology of it matters. Investors want to believe they’ve discovered the next great thing. They want to tell their LPs, their partners, and their networks that they backed the company everyone else missed. That emotional reward is a powerful motivator. This emotional draw isn’t soft. It translates into faster closes, better terms, and more supportive investors. And it’s only possible when the rational side of strategy and the emotional side of creativity are fused into one narrative. Give them a story to tell.

Take Warby Parker, For Example
When Warby Parker launched in 2010, the eyewear market was dominated by Luxottica, which controlled pricing, distribution, and retail. Founders Neil Blumenthal, Andrew Hunt, David Gilboa, and Jeffrey Raider didn’t just launch a cheaper pair of glasses. They positioned themselves as the anti-Luxottica: stylish, socially conscious, and disruptively direct-to-consumer.

Their positioning hit: “Glasses are overpriced because one company controls the market. We’re here to change that. And we’ve made it easy.” That positioning was their brand differentiation. It redefined an industry narrative and gave investors a clear, emotionally compelling reason to believe in their upside.

Their creative storytelling, playful tone, iconic aesthetic, and social mission made them memorable and irresistible. They created a strategic and creative foundation that built brand capital and resonated with both customers and investors. They became the brand that would democratize eyewear. Investors leaned in, in a big way.

As of today’s writing, Warby Parker is valued at over $3.3B in market cap and has redefined the category. But the foundation was set long before they hit scale. It was their integrated positioning and brand story that gave them momentum, lowered their perceived risk, and made them attractive to investors.

Brand Strength Is A Competitive Moat
When your business looks and sounds like everyone else’s, investors default to spreadsheets. They compare your TAM, your burn rate, and your CAC/LTV ratio. You become seen as a commodity.

When you build distinctiveness into your brand, you’re harder to compare—and that’s a competitive advantage. Differentiation drives resilience, and resilience attracts capital. Differentiation is rarely born from numbers alone or from creativity in isolation. It’s born from aligning your strategic truth with creative expression.

Getting funded is about proving what it could become. It’s part data and part magic, both strategic and creative. 

Here’s what founders must get right before stepping in front of investors:

1. Clearly define your positioning. What makes you different, better, and valuable in your category? This isn’t a tagline or a logo, not to say that those don't matter, but they come later and must align with positioning. Positioning is the strategic truth that drives every decision.

2. Integrate strategic development with creativity, brand attributes, and narrative development. Don’t silo your processes; integrate them.

3. Build a succinct and ownable brand positioning, brand foundation, brand narrative, messaging, and identity. All aligned and emotionally intelligent. These are the tools needed for alignment, and alignment creates consistency. Consistency builds meaning and understanding. It all builds brand capital. And brand capital builds equity.

4. Make sure the positioning, the planning, the fiancials, and the story are one cohesive whole. This is how you move from information to inspiration. Everything must align with the story.

5. Express the opportunity creatively. Great pitch decks are more than data. They’re a performance designed to sell. They deliver belief. Use quality writers and designers. Perception matters, so quality execution matters.

6. Treat your brand like the capital asset it is. Just as you wouldn’t under-invest in product or tech, you cannot under-invest in the strategic and creative work that builds perception, demand, and long-term performance.

7. Be a brand-centric leader. Building a brand does not come from incremental spend. It comes from how you run your business. It comes from aligning every touch point and customer engagement around a cohesive positioning. Being brand-centric is an operating best practice. 

There’s a growing recognition that startups with strong, integrated brand foundations are not just easier to fund, they’re easier to scale, easier to lead, and easier to sell.

You’re not just building for your raise. You’re building for long-term enterprise value. You’re building an asset that will enhance transaction multiples, reduce capital costs, and increase the likelihood of a successful exit.

So, Founder, are you building your brand capital? Hit us up for a free consultation, we can get you on track.

Welcome to the “trust economy."

The new filter for decision-making.

I’m not the first to use the phrase, “trust economy.” I openly admit to stealing it from Michael Leibowitz, who also admits to having stolen it.

But it defines today, and it’s worth stealing.

Trust has become the scarcest asset in business and the last true differentiator. It's trust that builds relationships, and relationships are a prerequisite for consideration. 

It doesn’t matter your value prop, how shiny your object is, if I don't trust you, it’s over before it begins.

Brands need to take note. 

Trust is a fragile agreement that what brands share with consumers carries the weight of genuine accountability and consequence, something no algorithm can replicate.

Trust is at the foundation of the emotional drivers that allow relationships to happen, which opens the door to persuasion. 

Because you’ll never persuade someone if they don't trust you. 

You want to work with a strategist who can help you scale? Start by working with someone you can trust. 

I’m ready to go.

I’m an oxymoron. I don’t exist.

A famous marketing guy said so. Won’t name him here, but he is beyond smart, and for him, I have mad respect. I mean, this guy is good.

However, back in 2023, he wrote an article in Marketing Week (and there is additional context in the article; hit me up if you want the link). Nevertheless, he made a point that has been bothering me for two years now.

He wrote, “I know there are plenty of ‘creative strategists’ out there, and more than a few ‘strategic creatives’, but I have always assumed that these people were either taking the piss or, more likely, simply had no idea what the f*ck they were doing.” 

The implication was that you can only exist in one of those two silos, that creativity and strategy are discrete disciplines. No person can possibly be good at both.

Man, for me, that notion is bullshit and it’s been bugging me for, yeah, two years now. You see, I am one of those creative strategists, a creative capitalist of sorts. And I’ve known others.

So, at the risk of him throwing me under the bus, I offer a rebuttal.

Strategy and creativity are part of a continuum. There is a natural and necessary synergy to integrating strategy, positioning, and creative extension that requires these disciplines to work in harmony. To think in harmony.

This guy went on to write, ”To do one well you usually need to ignore the other.”

More BS. Siloing them rarely produces innovation. My background spans both the creative director, brand-building, and brand development side, and the pragmatic, value-creation, investment banking side. I come from both worlds, and we play very nicely together. Both hemispheres of the gray matter collaborate in easy harmony. It’s a differentiation that sets BRANDThink apart.

Especially in the early stages of company/brand positioning and strategy development, creative and strategy should ideate in harmony. The process should be iterative and collaborative.

Because the truth is, strategy is a creative process.

It’s not about one discipline dominating the other, but rather about each informing and elevating the other. Strategic insights inspire creative breakthroughs, and creative ideation around execution can inform, enhance, and refine strategy. After all, a strategy that doesn't extend well is not a good strategy. Seen that before?

Both strategy and creativity are in service of the bigger idea, and the idea serves the business objectives. When they are structured and ideated together, a continuous feedback loop happens, benefiting both disciplines.

Better things happen.

Ok, we’ll see if the bus hits me.

A textbook key man problem and a cautionary tale.

Musk built the Tesla brand around his image. He is the brand voice; his presence defines the brand. And here lies the problem.

He presents a classic key-man risk: when a CEO or founder is so critical to the successful operation of the business that losing him or her (or their behavior) could harm the company's image, perception, or reputation. 

Tesla’s stock is down more than 50% from its high three months ago. Whether ego, narcissism, or just ignorance (which I doubt), Musk carried all of Tesla’s brand equity. Once Tesla’s biggest asset, it is now its biggest liability.

There is no doubt that negative sentiment towards Musk has negatively impacted Tesla's brand image and sales. 

Handicapping investment risk includes assessing any potential key man issues, something to think about for companies of all sizes. This is why brands develop a unique and ownable brand voice, image, and presence independent from founders or leadership. They define a brand architecture that can sustain on its own, even when something goes sideways.

A WSJ article, quickly denied by the company, reported that the board had begun a search for a new Tesla CEO. Even if just a rumor, the idea of board dissatisfaction amplifies the damage.

True, there are other factors contributing to Tesla’s decline, and the direct impact of Musk’s behavior is difficult to measure. But the impact is global. A recent survey reported by Reuters showed that the proportion of Swedes viewing Tesla in a positive light crashed following Trump's inauguration. It's a significant change of heart, considering Tesla's Model Y was the most sold car in Sweden and Norway last year.

In another act that smells of desperation, Musk urged his employees to hold their stock while using the same hollow rhetoric that he used in the past. Meanwhile, his brother Kimbal was selling a $27.5 million block of Tesla shares in early February, when the writing was already on the wall.

Another survey by brand reputation analytics firm Caliber, reviewed by Bloomberg, showed that Tesla's reputation dipped to its lowest levels since at least 2023.

So the question is, if Tesla’s brand reputation was not so directly tied to Musk’s reputation, could the brand’s image have been spared?

Maybe the lesson is don’t let one person be the sole equity of the brand.

Or better still, don’t be an asshole.

It can lie and deceive skillfully and convincingly.

It can flatter, fawn, and manipulate. And we have no idea how it works.

Add to that, the general population is AI illiterate, and we should be worried

Forget about agentic AI or building automations, that’s the pedestrian stuff. We’re talking about the goal of AI having agency outside of our influence or control. 

As the world pushes blindly ahead towards AGI (defined as a hypothetical intelligence capable of understanding, learning, and adapting to new information in the same way a human can), we are doing so with no idea what the hell we are doing.

In an essay published by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodi on his website, he admitted, “This lack of understanding is essentially unprecedented in the history of technology.”

He is collectively referring to the industry’s general lack of understanding, AI illiteracy, the sycophancy, the confabulations, and the general ability to convolute truth with remarkable plausibility and tenability.

Truth or untruth?

Biased or unbiased?

This, in conjunction with AI illiteracy, no safety guardrails, and no regulatory oversight, all in the pursuit of profit, should leave everyone concerned.

Very concerned. Okay, maybe terrified.

It is true, AI is poised to be the most transformative technology of the 21st century. But its benefits won’t be realized unless we guide its development thoughtfully and mitigate the risks. This is not happening fast enough.

Amodei went on to say, “On its face, it's surprising to folks outside of the AI world to learn that the people building ever-advancing technologies do not understand how our own AI creations work.”

“…and anyone alarmed by that ignorance is right to be concerned.”

Worried at all?

Educate. Study. Get smart. Be wary, be skeptical.

I fired a client yesterday.

I fired a client yesterday. Gone. And so is the revenue.

Here’s what I didn't expect.

I feel great. I feel liberated, in control, and at peace.

Hard as it can be, saying no is an act of self-care, boundary-setting, and prioritizing well-being.

This client had the budget but didn't have a clue. After an initial engagement to develop his company’s positioning and messaging for two core segments under a unified brand architecture, he simply couldn’t understand how to leverage the work and drive alignment across his enterprise to build equity. He could only think tactically. He was stuck inside the bottle.

Every conversation was a battle.

It became clear that he would never get it. He wanted more work, and he wanted it quick and cheap, all without leveraging the foundational work we completed. Constantly trying to explain the value and critical importance of the work fueled my stress and anxiety. It was bringing me down. 

But I have standards.

So I said no. I explained there is a right and wrong way to do the work, and I could only approach it in a manner that aligns with my commitment to quality and professionalism. Yes, I saw it coming, and yes, I should have known it would come to this. Often, we see the dysfunction long before we act on it. Sometimes, we ignore it because the check is good. But inevitably, you pay the price. Instincts are usually solid; listen to those little voices.

So, I’m done.

Clients like this strip you of your worth and reduce you to a price point. They make you fight for every little thing. They exploit your time and want your experience for nothing. You become a vendor, not a partner.

Clients like this suck the Qi right out of you.

You see, good leaders know what they know and know what they don’t know. They know how to delegate and surround themselves with talent. They listen. They take full advantage of talent. 

Could I have suffered through the bullshit for the income? Probably. Would I have sacrificed my emotional well-being, peace, and integrity? Without a doubt.

I want to work with people with whom I am aligned. I love my work, and I’m damn good at it. I want to enjoy it. Been around too long to do it any other way.

Anything else is exhausting.

So, if you got one of those, set yourself free. Fire them.

Is this a middle finger to its heritage? To its equity?

The Jaguar rebrand is either a masterclass on building awareness or a major screwup that trashes sixty years of brand equality. Brilliant or a blunder?

It’s certainly attracted a lot of very strong opinions. This is likely because the brand itself still resonates with cultural significance to many, thanks to a bad-boy heritage from the likes of Steve McQueen and Mick Jagger. The brand has, or, depending on your perspective, had a lot of cache and well-established equity. Since its launch in 1935, Jaguar has been a symbol of power, speed, and racing prowess.

Tata Motors bought the mark along with Range Rover back in 1998 for $2.56B. Tata was buying brand equity; they recognized the potential. After paying for all that equity, it’s an interesting decision to ignore all its rich history for what is arguably still an idea. There are no cars to buy. Though they have ended production of virtually all their current cars. They say they want to go up-market with an all-EV lineup starting at around $120K.  They're looking to go after the Porsche crowd after decades of not making gains against BMW and Audi. 

McGovern went on to say, “We’re delighted to have your attention.” at the Miami Art Fair. And that they do.

The complete dismissal of the brand’s heritage begs the question, why keep the brand at all? Because, maybe, just maybe, McGovern believes that there is equity in the brand that can be leveraged.

There are no near-term answers in evaluating this decision. It was motivated by years of declining sales, and things needed to change–drastically. And building a brand and equity is a long game.

While the reveal of the concept cars did support the new direction, attaching new meaning to a brand is a frequency over time equation. It needs time, a lot of time. It’s an equation that you think would have been easier if they had leveraged just a bit of that rich equity.

But hey, a complete and total departure sure has our attention…

Having our attention is one thing. Offering a place to park our perceptions of the brand is another. What’s next? It requires a follow-on. It requires actual experiences, in this case, the actual car. The new models are not expected to be available until late in 2025, some say 2026.

Will it work? Time will tell. As the branding savant David Aaker said, “I see pros and cons to the Jaguar rebrand. Time, engagement, and sales will tell.”

Which side are you on? Brilliant or blunder?

Man, this is just hard to fathom.

How can businesses, especially ones of the scale evaluated in this study, screw this up so badly? Didn’t they read The Long and Short Of It by Peter Field and Les Benet back in business school? Don’t they read the data? The decades of data?

This obsession with short-term performance marketing is eroding brand equity and, thereby, enterprise value. The allure of immediate ROI appears to be blinding the C-suite to how long-term value and sustainability are created– it happens through relationships, not clicks. Focusing solely on performance tactics is no way to build long-term sustainable revenue or shareholder value. They’re gonna learn the hard way.

Performance marketing can certainly convert existing demand but does nothing to create it. It is a great way to empty your funnel. It’s a low-hanging fruit strategy. Consider the evidence: According to Binet and Field's seminal research, brands that balance long-term brand building with short-term activation achieve 10-20% higher ROI than those focused purely on performance. The reasons why, to most, are blatantly obvious. Strong brands command premium prices, attract better talent, enjoy lower customer acquisition costs, and significantly greater loyalty and advocacy. Among a shit ton of other benefits.

When everyone competes with the same performance marketing tactics, effectiveness erodes rapidly, retargeting dies off, CPCs increase, and the race to the bottom begins. Meanwhile, brands that have invested in building authentic, emotional relationships can withstand market dynamic shifts and competitive pressure while maintaining margins.

Brand building, through creative storytelling and emotional resonance, bypasses these barriers by creating voluntary attention and organic advocacy. Brand love is a good thing.

The right answer is found in balance. The companies that balance performance tactics with building long-term connections and emotional relationships will be the ones left standing.

Hey, all you leaders out there! Your brand is an APPRECIATING ASSET. 

Treat it like one.

Suck at networking? Try a different mindset.

You see, I think Bill Nye nailed it. And just maybe, it’s the secret to successful networking. It’s how I approach my networking @theconnective.

Try this.

Leave your ego at the door. Open your mind. Be ready to… no, want to learn. Know that you’re not the only smart person with ideas and opinions. Or with a shit ton of experience. 

Know that often, there is no wrong way or right way, just different ways.

Listen. Be present.  

If you can’t engage with someone and be fully present, respectful, and believe they can enrich you, you will suck at networking.

If you do all those and engage fully, you will free the person to open up to engage at a deeper level. This is where real relationships start. 

If you don’t engage this way, it can’t work. 

The door we walk through hoping to connect as people, not as business prospects, that door to the emotional place where relationships begin, well, it slams shut.

Likely to never unlock.

People first, business second. Always.

Be a good listener, not just good; be an active listener. Start from a place of empathy and curiosity. 

Be prepared. Find commonality. Be a learner.

Show respect.

And mostly, just care.

Work for you?

Two dogs podcasting on a mountaintop?

OpenAI recently released beta versions of Sora, and the quality is astounding. So, is Sora a threat or an opportunity? Does it enhance or denigrate creativity?

The output is far more advanced than other text-to-video solutions. Sora’s output is photorealistic and reflects a persistence of detail and style and a pretty accurate comprehension of the physical laws of motion- huge advancements. And it’s creating considerable consternation among the creative community.

Bernard Marr, a technology futurist, says, ”Text-to-video capabilities hold immense potential across diverse fields such as education, where they can create immersive learning materials; marketing, for generating engaging content; and entertainment, for rapid prototyping and storytelling.”

As with many of the questions around GAI, there are two sides to the argument. As Asa Hikers stated in his AdAge article, “Many see AI tools like Sora as a boon to the industry and a multiplier for creativity. On the other side, practitioners—many of whom work within the creative process—feel frustrated by what they view as a compromise of artistry for the fast and cheap tricks of a trendy technology. “

Brands need to be wary. Sora’s advancements heighten the concerns around the development of all GAI tech. The ability of AI models to translate textual descriptions into full-fledged videos amplifies the need for rigorous ethical guardrails and safeguards against misuse. Deep fakes, misinformation, and the ability to create social unrest are very real issues as people are less and less able to distinguish what is real from what is fake. Legal issues around copyright infringement, likeness theft, and mirroring will likely increase.

The truth is that conceptual creativity, originality, and ideation for brands are still critical differentiators and are things AI cannot take away. 

GAI is an augmentative tool and should be embraced by the creative community, or risk getting left behind. 

But know that the need for original ideas and creativity that align with brand strategy is not going away. After all, someone has to engineer the prompts.

Bill Bernbach defined an industry.

He knew that the business of building great companies is a business of great ideas. So did Liquid Death.

The undeniable power of creativity is something that feels ignored these days with marketers and agencies immersed in data and analytics.

Bernbach’s quote has never been more relevant—a necessary reminder of a truth lost on so many, especially in a world of parity offerings where differentiation appears elusive.

We’ve forgotten about human nature, that relationships, even business relationships, are built on emotion. We make emotional decisions and connect with things and ideas that move with us. Creativity is the conduit for that emotional connection.

But that was not lost on Mike Cessario, founder of Liquid Death. I mean, seriously, who enters a market dominated by major conglomerates to sell a wholly undifferentiated product? Water. Ok, flavored water.

There is nothing special about Liquid Death. Its main ingredient is water and carbon dioxide. And some flavoring. It’s got no magical ingredient. It is, without a doubt, a parity product in a category full of parity products backed by big players with a ton of money to outspend them.

But Cessario was not selling water. He was selling a brand. An idea. A beautifully crafted, creative, engaging idea that created its differentiation. And its demand.

And it is brilliant. If you doubt the power of creativity to drive differentiation, engagement, and loyalty, consider these numbers. In 2019, Liquid Death reported sales of $2.8M. The company's revenue saw a dramatic increase to $45M in 2021, further jumping to $130M in sales by 2022. The brand's valuation reflects its successful market strategy and growth, reaching a $700M valuation in recent years. This valuation is supported by the brand's ability to raise significant funding, totaling over $189M across eight rounds, further emphasizing investor confidence in Liquid Death's business model and market potential​.

Make no mistake: the intangible power of creativity in branding is a driver of significant and tangible financial value.

Today we honor the memory of MLK. The dream lives on.

When alignment is out of whack, things don’t work.

Alignment. It’s a word that isn’t used enough when talking about building high-value and high-performing companies.

When alignment is out of whack, things don’t work. Without alignment, confusion reigns. The compound benefits of consistency are lost.

Getting there begins with aligning stakeholder objects, a company’s IP, assets, offerings, or services with defined opportunities in the market and the market’s or category’s competitive dynamic. Where and how can you dominate? Achieving alignment requires a sustainable strategic positioning – the foundation for how a brand lives, breathes, and scales.

Positioning articulates the core of a brand's reason for being and informs everything else.

Solid positioning is grounded in a rational and emotional understanding of the target audience, clarity of the brand's market context, a core point of difference or value proposition, and support or proof of that value prop, all woven into a compelling, ownable, memorable, and single-minded positioning.

Once established, positioning can be seamlessly extended across strategies, tactics, and creative executions with the knowledge that all the company’s attributes and key messages are being consistently reinforced in the minds of all constituents, in every employee experience, every customer experience, and all communications and activations. 

It then all comes together. Everyone marching to the same drummer. If your brand attributes are consistently reinforced across all touchpoints, this is how you will be remembered. And it’s good to control the narrative. 

Positioning provides the path for a consistent brand experience. It is the foundation for alignment. It is how equity is built. It’s how to build value. It’s how long-term sustainable success happens. 

If all these elements in your brand/company are not aligned, best reset. 

Alignment. 

A good word to know.

Truth or lies?

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has said he is “worried that these LLMs will be used for large-scale disinformation.” In an age of deepfakes, bots, digital twins, and replicas, we are increasingly being denied a clear and confident understanding of the truth. It’s being fueled by technological change accelerating at an unprecedented rate with new tools that make the truth ever more elusive. Moreover, the impact of this change has ramifications that are yet to be fully understood.  

Rapid disinformation attacks—i.e., attacks in which disinformation is unleashed quickly and broadly to create an immediate disruptive effect—are one of the most significant challenges we face today. We’ve seen the impact of disinformation in past presidential elections and the blind spread of widely disproved conspiracy theories.

The ability to spread disinformation is getting easier and dramatically more effective. Generative AI (GAI) now offers the ability to target. Past campaigns were run by foreign actors who often had little cultural or English language fluency. Natural language processing has eliminated that problem opening the door for foreign actors.

With GAI tools, anyone can run disinformation content campaigns finely tuned and highly believable by profiling individuals and groups and replicating their vernacular, personalities, tone, and manner. This new tech can be woven into bots and deepfake videos and images of real people producing content that appears legitimate, relatable, and highly credible. All this makes disinformation infinitely more sharable and dangerous. 

Scarier still, GAI supports the ability to target specific individuals with personalized disinformation, indistinguishable from the real deal. People will not know whether what they are being served is legitimate or not. The general population is light on fact-checking and believing what they want to believe.

GAI is making it much easier to produce disinformation at scale with speed and efficiency and with a level of realism never before seen. Get ready. This crap will be free-flowing this coming election.

Truth? Lies? It’s going to be hard to tell. Are you ready?

Welcome to the explosion of AI-generated content farms.

And that waste will likely increase exponentially by exploiting programmatic ad placement on AI-generated sites. Generative AI offers a new way to automate the content farm process that can be scaled almost infinitely and in a fraction of the time resulting in what NewsGuard calls “unreliable artificial intelligence–generated news websites.”

Most companies that advertise online automatically bid on spots to run those ads through programmatic advertising. Algorithms place ads on various websites according to complex calculations that optimize the number of eyeballs an ad might attract from the company’s target audience. As a result, big brands pay for ad placements on websites they may have never heard of before, with little to no human oversight. Welcome to the farm. 

NewsGuard recently uncovered nearly 50 junk websites publishing content entirely created by generative AI. It describes the articles as "low quality" and “clickbait," certainly not brand-friendly environments. And certainly not delivering quality eyeballs, and maybe no eyeballs at all.

Many of the sites are simply designed to generate money by showing advertising and affiliate links to readers. Others may have a more nefarious purpose, such as spreading disinformation, conspiracy theories, or propaganda. 

NewsGuard goes on to say, “Developers are using AI chatbots to fill junk websites with AI-generated text that attracts paying advertisers. Over 140 major brands are paying for ads that end up on unreliable AI-written sites, likely without their knowledge. This practice threatens to hasten the arrival of a glitchy, spammy internet that is overrun by AI-generated content, as well as wasting massive amounts of ad money.”

As this problem becomes more widespread, advertisers will likely demand more transparency from ad networks and publishers. They will need to be able to track where their ad dollars are going and ensure that they are well-spent on high-quality content.

Even so, reliability with programmatic advertising is an old problem that has never been solved, and AI is simply throwing fuel on the fire. 

Good luck with that.

Zume Pizza is a cautionary tale, albeit a day late and a dollar short.

Because what they are calling a “Startup Mass Extinction Event” is already happening.  

They were going to make pizza with robots in moving trucks. Who needs to spin dough in the air anyway? 

It was the brainchild of Alex Garden, and Softbank’s Masayoshi Son (the man who gave $3 billion in venture capital to Adam Neumann at WeWork) was hooked. Zume raised $445M from Softbank and other investors, including Yahoo’s Jerry Tang and Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr, personally. 

By 2019 it was valued at, wait for it… $2.25B! For real. 

Well, the rest of the story seems, in hindsight, predictable. Using robots to make pizzas in trucks while driving around is a dubious ambition, and it proved fatal. An incongruous pivot to producing sustainable packaging is equally hard to grasp

The point here is that what the startup environment is experiencing is like the effects of climate change – dry, unforgiving, and starting to burn. 

Capital is tight, interest rates are high, and the tolerance for lack of cash flow and profitability has evaporated.

It’s been called the potentially worse collapse of the startup space since 2008, and it’s already here. According to research by January Ventures, 81% of early-stage startups stated they only have less than 12 months of runway left. Leading venture capital players are predicting a “mass extinction event” for early- and mid-stage startups that will make the global financial collapse in 2008 “look quaint” by comparison.

The gloomy prediction for the state of the startup sector aligns with a massive drop in global venture financing throughout 2022. According to GlobalData, the value of global VC dropped by 36% in 2022. In 2021, the value of global VC deals was $512.7B compared with $293.8B in 2020.

Analyzing M&A and VC Activity in Q4 2022, GlobalData revealed that VC activity had dropped for a fourth straight quarter in the final quarter of 2022. Global economic slowdown, the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, high inflation rates, rapidly rising interest rates, soaring energy prices, the looming threat of a global recession, and supply chain disruption are cited as reasons behind negative investor sentiment.

"The Mass Extinction Event for startups is underway," said Tom Loverro, general partner at IVP.

Buckle up.

This is a hard time to be a major consumer brand hoping not to offend diverse audiences.

And it hasn’t been pretty. But there are lessons for brands.

Consumer voices have never been louder. Anheuser-Busch, Target, Kohl’s, and North Face have all felt the vitriol of this latest push from the right, labeling them as “woke capitalists.” They urged boycotts. Bud Light took the heat after it partnered with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney, while North Face received backlash for an ad featuring drag queen Pattie Gonia. Target and Kohl’s were criticized for Pride-themed clothing.

Brands that have survived this kind of backlash (think Nike and Colin Kaepernick) maintain their brand values and never give in. The lesson here - don’t capitulate. Brayden King, a professor of management, noted that a company's stock might fall, but once the issue falls out of the daily news cycle, the stock generally recovers.  

People move on.

While Bud Light has seen an impact from a boycott, the loss represents less than 1% of global sales. However, its stock did take a hit.

Target has carried Pride Month apparel for years, but the backlash was intense this year. The retailer moved product in some stores to other areas or removed it altogether, citing concerns for worker safety. The risk is alienating another significant and vocal constituent. Both sides are now pissed off. 

This whole “woke” thing has gotten out of hand. Brands don’t know which way to turn for fear of insulting someone. Go Woke, Go Broke is trending. Even Disney’s Lightyear movie, the Toy Story spin-off, failed at the box office, not meeting expectations presumably because the LGTBQIA+ themes turned off families.   

Brands today cannot please all the people all the time, so don't try to. The lesson here? Don’t try to be woke or not woke. Just be who you are. 

Engage in a considered process to clearly define your brand, its values, what it stands for, and what it believes. Be transparent about it. Stay true to those brand values and purpose. Be consistent. Then don’t waver. Don’t ever waver.

No matter what.

Maybe there’s too much doom and gloom around AI.

Fear is never productive. Yes, paradigms will shift, and jobs will be lost and redefined, but opportunity will abound. Gartner expects the AI market to be $297B as soon as 2027.

And Ive's numbers are considered an underestimate by some. For example, McKinsey predicts that AI could potentially contribute $13 trillion to the global economy by 2030. 

At Fortune’s MPW conference last week, Ark Invest’s Cathie Wood said AI will cause widespread but positive “disruption” in many industries over the coming years. And Goldman Sachs’ senior strategist Ben Snider said last week that he expects A.I. to boost corporate profits by 30% over the next decade as productivity soars. These are staggering numbers that will benefit the global economy.

One door closes, and another door opens. An adage that is so true in tech. And never more true now. According to a report by Gartner, AI will create 2.3 million jobs by 2020 while eliminating 1.8 million jobs.

What does that mean? It means that we need to adapt to the disruption. Learn to collaborate with these new tools.  

These tools can elevate humanity, expand our creativity, introduce new paradigms, and create new jobs and entire industries.

Yes, there needs to be oversight, transparency, and regulation. If our approach is to consider AI as a friend, not the enemy, and we embrace the potential while applying the proper guardrails, the future is bright.  

What’s hard to grasp is that this nascent industry has yet to find its legs. It is just the beginning. What’s to come is only limited by our imaginations. 

For creative people, yes, roles and industries will shift, but human creativity will continue to reign supreme. The answer is to embrace the change as a partner in creativity, as a way to unlock the imagination, and to make new things in new ways. 

After all, we are the creators. We are the directors. 

Embrace the possibilities.

Want to know what consistent focus on your brand and brand values gives you?

Dominance. Wealth. Brand love. Brand fame. Did I say wealth? CEOs need to balance near-term performance with building long-term equity, a mindset that seems lost on many. Every shareholder should demand it or get a new CEO. 

It takes being faithful to a well-defined brand position for the brand’s lifetime. And fulfilling that vision across every product, service, and customer touch point. Strong brands can survive and have financial value long after a business dies.

It takes staying with it, regardless of market condition. It takes being true to the brand. Always.

Want a telegraphic demonstration of the benefits of a strong brand? If these Apple numbers don’t do it, I don’t know what will. 

That kind of brand strength, consistently reinforced by excellent products and superior customer service, has allowed Apple to charge significantly more than its competitors, seamlessly cross-sell products and services, and in fact, encourage customers to embrace and be loyal to an entire ecosystem.

And, importantly, to launch new channels of revenue. Apple services revenue topped $79.4B in 2022 and exceeded $20B in Q1 of 2023.  

This kind of brand power drives loyalty and long-term sustainability. Yes, this is Apple, but all the dynamics hold true for all brands, regardless of size, stage, or category.

Strong brand build wealth. They drive more revenue, and they sell for more.

The requirements? Adopt this thinking as a way of doing business. From day one.

Make it your philosophy. Be consistent. Invest. Maintain. Imbue this in your employees and every constituent. Your brand is your most important asset.

Want to know how to get that done in your company? Hit us up, we can help.