This week: marketing gets a Patagonia vest and a new job title, brand positioning learns how to leave the boardroom and do some actual work, and AI gives marketers a new KPI to obsess over. We’re digging into the trends reshaping how brands get built, discovered, and talked about.
Let’s dive in.
🤙 What’s Up With the Bro-ification of Marketing, Bro?
Why is marketing suddenly putting on a Patagonia vest and living in Silicon Valley? Many classic marketing jobs now seem to have decidedly tech-y titles like Narrative Engineer, Growth Architect, and Media Engineer. Beneath the title changes lies a bigger conversation about perception, power, and who gets credit for creating value. So before you move your marketing team to Silicon Valley, here are a few things to consider:
- Don’t get distracted by the buzzwords. Many of the skills being celebrated under new titles—storytelling, audience insight, positioning, distribution, and brand-building—have been core marketing competencies all along.
- AI is changing what gets valued. As technical execution becomes easier and more automated, human judgment, creativity, taste, and strategic thinking become more important—not less.
- Language shapes perception. The way roles are labeled affects who applies for them, who feels welcome in them, and how much organizations value the work.
- Marketing’s moment may finally be here. Tech leaders are increasingly acknowledging that growth isn’t just about building products—it’s about creating demand and reaching audiences effectively.
- Be wary of equating value with technicality. Adding “engineer” to a title may increase perceived prestige, but it can also diminish appreciation for the uniquely human craft behind great marketing.
The irony? Tech may finally be recognizing marketing’s importance just as marketers start questioning whether they need a new title to earn respect. For marketers, the message is clear: don’t let the job title distract from the job itself. The skills everyone suddenly wants aren’t new—they’ve just become impossible to ignore.
Your Brand: Working Hard or Hardly Working?
Every company loves the moment a new brand positioning is unveiled. The messaging is sharper, the value proposition is clearer, and everyone nods along in the boardroom. Then sales dusts off an old deck, marketing interprets the strategy three different ways, and leadership gets dragged into yet another debate over whether a partnership “fits the brand.” Sound familiar?
Positioning isn’t successful because it’s approved—it’s successful because people can actually use it. Here’s how you ensure that happens:
- Treat positioning as a decision-making tool, not just a messaging exercise. Great positioning should help teams decide what to say, what to launch, what to prioritize, and what not to do.
- Hunt down the friction points. Pay attention to where teams stall, disagree, improvise, or go off on their own. Those moments often reveal where brand guidance is missing.
- Translate strategy into practical guidance. A brand book is a great start, but growing organizations often need clearer direction tailored to specific teams, channels, and customer touchpoints.
- Create governance that empowers—not bottlenecks. Teams should know what can flex, what can’t, and when leadership actually needs to weigh in. Good governance speeds up decisions.
- Activate your positioning in the real world. The best brand strategies get stronger through use. When teams apply them to real situations, they become operating systems instead of PowerPoint slides.
The big lesson? Positioning shouldn’t be a beautiful document gathering dust on SharePoint. It should be the thing helping your organization make smarter, faster, more consistent decisions—even when the brand team isn’t in the room.
🤖 How to Become AI’s Favorite Brand
For years, marketers obsessed over impressions, clicks, and rankings. But as ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and other AI assistants increasingly become the first stop for product discovery,a new metric is emerging: mentions. In the AI era, your brand’s first impression may happen before a consumer ever visits your website—and there’s a very good chance it will come from a chatbot’s recommendation. So moving forward, keep in mind:
- AI citations are the new top-of-funnel battleground. If an AI assistant recommends your brand—or leaves it out entirely—it can significantly influence whether you make the consideration set.
- Measure visibility differently. Traditional impressions don’t translate neatly to AI experiences. Instead, marketers should track metrics such as mention rate, visibility, sentiment, and how AI systems describe their brands.
- Content matters more than ever. AI models learn from the content ecosystem around your brand. Owned content, third-party coverage, and consistent messaging all influence how AI engines understand and recommend you.
- Consistency is critical. The stories, sources, and citations AI platforms surface collectively shape consumer perception. Brands that actively monitor and manage those narratives will have an advantage.
- The upside is real. Early examples show brands increasing AI mention rates by combining optimized website content with strategic third-party placements—demonstrating that AI visibility can be influenced.
The takeaway? In a world where AI increasingly acts like a digital concierge, marketers need to think less about whether consumers see their message and more about whether AI recommends it in the first place. The next great visibility challenge may not be winning the click—it’s winning the citation.
🚨 New Podcast Alert!
What happens when a rising creative star, a bag of BeanBoozled jelly beans, and a conversation about AI, TikTok chaos, and great design collide? Senior Art Director Shannon O’Grady joins Heather Riexinger and shares why human creativity matters more than ever, which brands are crushing it right now, and how to bring personality to even the most serious industries.
