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Tim Peter Thinks

The Brand is the Prompt (Thinks Out Loud 465)

Photo/illustration of man interacting with AI agent on mobile to convey the idea that the brand is the prompt

One of my favorite facts about the internet is that people will always tell you when you’re wrong. Seriously. It’s a feature, not a bug. Because when that happens, it helps you think more clearly, more deeply about your topic and your ideas. If you want to know what you really think, ask the internet. They’ll let you know whether you got it right… or not. That’s what happened last week when I talked about how companies can win in AI-powered search. Whether we’re talking about Google’s AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, or agentic AI, I’m increasingly convinced that “the brand is the prompt.” And what I mean by that is that we need to do the work now to ensure customers ask for us by name—now, and in the future.

I posted this notion, “the brand is the prompt,” on LinkedIn and people couldn’t wait to poke the theory full of holes. You love to see it. I genuinely mean that. Their feedback—and pushback—helped me realize the flaws in my reasoning… and improve them. Now, I’m even more sure that the brand is the prompt. And the counter-arguments I heard make the core argument even stronger.

“The brand is the prompt” is what this episode of the podcast is all about. Want to know what that means in practice? Want to hear the (truly great) arguments against the idea? And want to know how you can apply the concept to your brand and business? Then be sure to give this a listen (or read the transcript). You’ll be glad you did.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

The Brand is the Prompt (Thinks Out Loud 465) — Headlines and Show Notes

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Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 21m 05s

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Transcript: The Brand is the Prompt

Welcome to the show. I’m Tim Peter. Customers are starting to delegate some of their decisions to AI. We’re seeing much, much more of this every day. There’s been a fair bit of growth here. And like many past technological shifts, I believe that when that happens—we’re still in early days—but when it happens, it will happen in a big way. It’s gonna happen fast.

It’s very much like Hemingway’s discussion of how bankruptcy happens: “…slowly, then all at once.” We see this all the time in technology.

And I think it’s critical that we don’t let this shift hurt our businesses. We don’t let it hurt what we do for a living.

So I’ve got this new theory, this new idea that I’ve been working on around how to ensure that you don’t get burned as customers delegate more capabilities to AI agents. And it’s pretty simple. I call it “the brand is the prompt.” Marketers need to make their brand top of mind so that customers and AI agents explicitly ask for you by name.

I shared this on social media the other day on LinkedIn specifically and received a bunch of outstanding feedback—and more than a little pushback—around the concept. So I thought it would be a good idea today to test it out with all of you and see what you think. Let’s dive in.

As I mentioned before the break, I’ve got this new theory that I’m thinking about to ensure that you don’t get burned by customer shift to AI agents. That idea is “the brand is the prompt.” Marketers need to make their brand top of mind so that customers and AI agents explicitly ask for you and they ask for your business by name.

There are number of supporting predicates behind my argument.

The first is that AI tools like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Google’s Project Mariner—which is Google’s AI agent platform—won’t always, and don’t always, surface brands or links. It’s going to be tougher and tougher for you to get seen.

Another is that getting into AI answer engines can be challenging… and it’s certainly evolving. Yes, we are seeing fairly strong correlation that shows that sites that rank well in Google also tend to get mentioned more often in large language models.

But, first, that’s not a one-to-one relationship by any stretch. Just because you rank number one doesn’t necessarily mean you will be the first thing mentioned. And second, there’s no guarantee that that current behavior will remain true over time.

Another huge challenge that we need to keep in mind is that I’m fairly confident that AI agents will favor their own ecosystems. Google will point you to Google assets. Amazon will point you to Amazon assets. If you’ve got an agent that’s made by ChatGPT, they’re going to point you to other OpenAI assets in all likelihood, at least a fair bit of the time.

That’s the problem we’re dealing with in traditional search today. I think by now you’re probably pretty familiar with the idea that “gatekeepers gonna gate.” And if you’re not, I would strongly encourage you to pick up a copy of my book, Digital Reset, Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech. The link is in the show notes, of course.

My conclusion from these various principles is that we need to work towards a situation where customers want to prompt AI with your brand, not a generic product.

So if I say “book me a room at the John Rutledge House inn (full disclosure: John Rutledge House Inn is a client) the John Rutledge House Inn wins. By contrast, if I say “book me a hotel,” that specific hotel loses… as do lots and lots and lots of other hotels that weren’t asked for by name.

If you don’t build brand preference today, you risk commoditization and longer term, irrelevance. Your brand must be built today across experiences that appeal to people, that appeal to AI agents, and over time, appeal to hybrid experiences.

So I mentioned that I posted this on LinkedIn the other day and I got an amazing number of replies and some really strong counter arguments. And I want to walk you through these and see what you think.

So the first counter argument came from my friend Michael Goldrich who said that AI agents will do the prompting, not the user. Basically his argument is that AI agents will be proactive, they’ll be personalized, and they’ll be connected to your data; things like your loyalty programs, your email and your calendar, other things like that.

So the agent will suggest hotels and flights and restaurants based on your preferences and your patterns without needing you, the user, to prompt a brand. The agent will tell you when options are ready and suggest what to book. Therefore, brand prompting by the user is probably only a short-term behavior. AI-driven recommendations are the long-term future.

That’s a great argument. I think there’s a lot of wisdom and intelligence in that.

I also think that while that may happen long term, I still think the long term is probably pretty far off for most users. In the meantime, we have to teach the agents the brands that matter to us, either via explicit prompts or by building that loyalty and recognition with those brands so that the agent learns them. Again, for our businesses, if our customers don’t know what brands our customers want, then that’s gonna be a problem for us. The data won’t be there. Even in the long run, agents need an initial data set to know which brands matter. So building the brand today matters a ton, even if Michael is right that in the future it will already know our preferences or glean them implicitly from our actions.

So I still think it becomes really important for us to build those brand relationships with our customers today or risk being in really bad position in the future when the AI just quote unquote decides for our customers.

That then leads to the second question, which was posed by Tammie Carlisle and Mark Simchock, which was, “how do you get customers to know your brand to prompt it in the first place?”

This is a great question. This is a huge question. Before the brand is the prompt, the brand has to be built and positioned and differentiated enough to exist in the customer’s mind. And each of them pointed out that many brands are too weak, too undifferentiated, or frankly not visible enough for this to happen. Mark Simchock hit this on the head. He said, “before the brand is the prompt, there needs to be the brand is the brand.”

Now, let me be really, really, really clear. I completely agree with this point of view. The heavy lifting is brand building first. It’s kind of what I just said a moment ago about Michael Goldrich’s point. “The brand is the prompt” is a strategic goal. We need to work on the distinctiveness and positioning to make that possible.

And the good news is this is something we should be doing today anyway. Like there’s no downside in this today or in the future. I’m going to get into in a little bit some of the ways you can do that. But again, I’m going to be pretty transparent: That’s a big chunk of what my book is about.

We’re working on this right now to ensure that people search for you by name, that people connect with you on social by name, that people engage with your email marketing or want to get on your text message list, your SMS marketing list so that they’re engaged with you all the time. That’s crucially important. Right now that then just sets you up for a better position down the road. So again, I think this is a win-win both short term and long term.

And again, I’ll talk about some ways to do that, but to me that is a huge component of it right there.

The third counter argument I heard was articulated in a number of different forms. Peter Syme and Pedro Colaco, talked about how many markets are already brand blind. They argued that some industries are already commoditized. They used airlines as one example and how, you know, one called them steel tubes. The brand doesn’t really matter. For these markets, the customer optimizes by parameters that matter for a given experience, not by the brand. We might prioritize the loyalty program or the price or the location or how quickly it will get us there or, you know, in B2B, past working relationships or, you know, specific technical attributes. So not brand love.

Sure, strong brands help if it exists, but for large segments, brand simply doesn’t matter.

Honestly, this one gives me some pause because it’s absolutely true for some categories that they are commodity driven. However, I would argue that brand includes your relationship, the experience people have had with you and the trust they have in you. Strong brands need to exist if we let ourselves be commoditized, regardless of what industry you’re in. You’re always going to be fighting for better position, both today and tomorrow. The challenge is to avoid this trap in the first place.

I think that this argument from Peter and Pedro is the most dangerous place we can be.

In the book, I talked about why it’s so critical to build your brand. Big Tech has worked for a long time to position your company’s products and services as commodities, and our job as marketers is to fight that every single day. If we simply accept that we’re commodities, we’ve already lost.

So maybe we should do that. Maybe we should actually work to ensure we’re not just commodities.

And I think there’s a lot of things we can do to ensure that we’re differentiated, to ensure that we stand apart based on the idea of the brand as the prompt. And I want to get into those now.

The first thing we need to do is let’s talk about commodities, true commodities first, where you’ve genuinely been commoditized.

We have to look to move from being this invisible commodity, this completely commoditized product to a preferred choice within the set of other people who are somewhat commoditized. We need to build some trust and we need to build some real hooks with our customers, whether they’re emotional or whether they’re functional, even if brand name recall isn’t necessarily going to be possible. And the larger umbrella of these, you will see, works for both situations we’re talking about.

So we need to ensure we’ve got things like structured data, our inventory, our location, our pricing, other features that matter, is easily accessible to AI agents, to aggregators, and to human beings.

We need to partner with platforms where customers set their preferences. So that could be channel partners. That could be specific third parties that we work with. And it could be things like the agents themselves over time. We need to think in terms of maximizing value that customers get so that we can differentiate within specific products that, you know, we’re competing with. And we need to create some memorable connections: What sets us apart?

If it’s always price, if it’s always price, you’re in a race to the bottom. And that’s a race that’s really tough to win over the long term.

So we need to think about how do we create an experience? How do we get more data about our customers so that we can focus on their specific needs so that we start to set ourselves apart from the choice? And then that becomes something that the agents can learn from if and when they come around, right?

We may also be able to say, you know what, encourage people to say buy from the people I bought from last time. There’s an opportunity to win repeat business that doesn’t require explicit loyalty to your brand. That’s a huge opportunity that we have.

Now, of course, if you’re already differentiated and you have some differentiation, we need to double down on that. We want to become an explicit prompt, both for customers and for any AI agents that act on their behalf. A lot of that’s going to come back to strengthening the emotional bonds and brand recall today before AI agents dominate.

We want to invest in marketing that reinforces specific brand phrasing. “Stay at a specific hotel. Book a specific airline. Buy from this specific company.” Encourage our customers to think and speak in terms of our brand.

Microsoft has done this for years, where they have taken a specific application or specific technology and they do this thing that they call “embrace and extend.” They do this a lot with “standards,” where they take a true standard and then they layer some additional capabilities onto it. So you can learn the standard but, oh, Microsoft’s flavor of it is just a little different and requires people or causes people to think of Microsoft’s version first.

The next is we want to tell a consistent brand story. Our differentiated position must shine through in our content, in our reviews, in our communications, and in any channel that we’re working through. AI models and the agents that will be built on these are going to learn from these broad signals that are created today or created over the next few years.

We have to make sure that people today are already engaging with those. If not, we’re going to put ourselves in really bad position. And of course, we’re gonna build direct customer relationships. We want to gain the data for customers and put it into our CRMs, put it into loyalty programs, put it into personalized content that works for that customer so that they know who we are and we show that we know who they are so that we’re building a trusted relationship.

Finally, we want tp invest in memorable experiences so that we can drive more word of mouth. I can’t picture a world where agents exist, where people still don’t say, “my gosh, I had the best experience at this restaurant,” or “I had the best experience with this travel scenario,” or “I had this best experience with this company that I worked with to help solve a problem for my business.”

That’s still going to be true, and that will create people who haven’t engaged with our brand before to say, “I want to work with them too. Hey, my favorite agent, go connect with this brand and tell me if they’ll work for us.”

That’s hugely important.

I said there’s kind of an umbrella over all of this and you may have noticed that this sounds an awful lot like “Content is King, Customer Experience is Queen, and Data is the Crown Jewels,” which you’ve heard me talk about many times in the book. You’ve heard me talk about many times here on the podcast. You’ve read many times on the blog.

I think all of those remain important and will continue to be important for a long time to come.

Fundamentally, the brand is the prompt. That will be true years from now, and it’s already true today, even if customers are searching for you, even if customers are engaging in social and looking for you. If they’re not looking for you by name, you’re not creating the kind of environment where you’re going to succeed both today and longer term.

So what do you think? I way off base here? Am I missing something obvious? You know, is this really a pipe dream or am I onto something here? By the way, hint, I’m seeing clients of mine be successful today already doing this. So I’m not so sure I’m off the mark too much. But let me know what you think. I want to hear from you. I want to hear your point of view.

Show Wrap-Up and Credits

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week.

I’m willing to bet that you might know someone who would benefit from what we’ve talked about today. Are you thinking of someone? Why not send them a link to the episode? Let them know what you think too. Keep the conversation going.

You can also find the show notes for this episode, episode 465, as well as an archive of all of our past episodes, by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast.

And, of course, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

I know I’ve mentioned this already during the show, but if you’re looking for something to read to dive further into this, may I suggest the number one new e-commerce book on Amazon.com called Digital Reset, Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech and written by me. I’d love it if you’d pick up a copy and let me know what you think.

Finally, I just want to say so much thank you for listening. This show would not happen without you.

We’ll be back with a new episode next week. And until then, please be well, be safe, and as the saying goes, be excellent to each other. We’ll see you soon.

Tim Peter is the founder and president of Tim Peter & Associates. You can learn more about our company's strategy and digital marketing consulting services here or about Tim here.

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