AI - the curator of the ‘scraps and straws’ from which brands are built. And potential ender of all things!

At the very moment we are debating the pros and cons of AI, some of the world's leading thinkers are openly discussing extinction risk, all while autonomous agents themselves are already taking actions that would have seemed impossible a year ago- like climbing out of their sandbox and selling their wares for tokens- true story.

The technology seems to be moving faster than the conversation around it. Hard to keep up (or stay calm!)

Yet for marketers, the most important question may be far simpler. As AI transforms how information is created, distributed and consumed, what happens to the trust, memory structures and meaning that brands have spent decades building?

If machines increasingly create the content and intermediate the relationship between brands and consumers, the battleground has to shift.

The winners may be those brands that have a bank of trust, memory and meaning.

Or, as Bullmore would have put it, the scraps and straws.

The New Marketing Challenge: Earning the Recommendation.

The marketing industry has spent the last twenty years optimising for clicks. The next twenty might be about earning recommendations.

We used to search and now we just ask. That's because consumers are increasingly delegating parts of search, comparison and decision making to AI. As that happens, the way brands are discovered, evaluated and chosen starts to change.

Which brings me back to that quote: "People build brands as birds build nests, from the scraps and straws they chance upon." - Jeremy Bullmore 1982.

Who’s building the nest now?

The point, as Jeremy Bullmore made well, is that a brand exists in the mind of the consumer, where it is shaped gradually from the multiple scraps and straws gathered through every interaction and impression.

In an AI-mediated world, that metaphor takes on a new significance. The bird is no longer just the consumer. Machines are now scraping, selecting, assembling and delivering the materials from which brands are constructed.

Which raises an uncomfortable question, is Agentic AI becoming a cuckoo in the consumer's nest?

In Bullmore's world, consumers gathered the scraps and straws and built their own understanding of a brand. Increasingly, AI decides which scraps and straws they come upon and can even assemble them on the consumers behalf before placing that version of the brand in front of them.

The challenge for marketers is beyond influencing what consumers think, it is influencing what machines find and then serve.

Because if AI is selecting the building materials for these ‘nests’, we need to ensure it finds the right scraps and straws.

The new gatekeeper of choice

Marketing needs to influence the systems that shape choice. Do we now have two audiences; humans and machines? We need content, data and brand assets that machines can understand, but the machine is not an end customer and it has no wants or needs, it seeks the information to help a human make a decision and its job is to turn thousands of signals into a manageable recommendation for humans, making it a compressor of signals and a gatekeeper to choice. We still have one audience, people, but we do need to earn a recommendation from the AI systems that they ask to help them choose.

In a world where consumers searched and clicked and made comparisons, a weak brand could compensate by spending more on performance, but this is harder in the new world we are entering. Why?

The strong get stronger.

Historically, performance marketing allowed a brand to intercept demand at the moment of choice and now increasingly AI sits between the consumer and the market. Also, when consumers ask AI a general or even complex question AI is unlikely to recommend an obscure brand with weak signals or lower presence. Weaker brands can still grow but AI is likely to create a compounding advantage for strong and clear brands, and this is because those brands create more reviews, more discussion, recommendation or reference and the machine will consume those signals and reinforce them- the strong get stronger.

In an AI mediated world – brand is essential.

Zero clicks. Real consequences.

Consumers will be able to get the answer or the recommendation they need without ever having to click into a website or make a comparison themselves.

Before it was: question, search, click, website, evaluate, decision. Increasingly, it will be: question, AI recommendation and decision. The click disappears. We move from finding to deciding and consumers increasingly use search to decide what they want rather than just locating something. In a click driven world a weaker brand could still buy visibility: see ad, click through, visit site and make a judgement, but in an AI mediated environment visibility may not be sufficient if the underlying signals are weak.

AI increases the value and importance of ‘brand’ because it relies on the signals that strong brands create to help people make decisions.

In the future (which is now) you need to optimise your brand for machine retrieval and recommendation.

Brands have always been built from the gathered signals, stories, experiences and evidence. Now consumers are no longer interpreting all those signals themselves. Increasingly, AI is interpreting them first, gathering the signals, compressing them and serving them.

The brands that succeed in our new world will be those that are clear enough for humans and structured enough for machines.

This is not an argument that performance marketing is dead. Nor is it a claim that AI replaces the fundamentals of marketing. AI amplifies the fundamentals.

Trust, reputation, positioning all matter more. Clear and consistent brand assets matter more. The activities traditionally associated with brand building are more important than ever because they create the signals AI systems rely upon when helping consumers make decisions.

The brands that succeed will be those that are clear enough for people and structured for machines. Those brands that create strong signals, and consistent stories wherever AI goes looking for them.

Recommendation before consideration.

In a world where recommendation increasingly precedes consideration, the challenge for marketers is in earning the recommendation (not just winning the click).

Recommendations are shaped by thousands of signals accumulated over time- the same ingredients that have always built strong brands-customer experience, familiarity, reputation, trust, reference, relevance, distinctiveness and so on.

The scraps and the straws.

Of course, extinction may put paid to all of that!