I’ve been talking about the idea of “the brand is the prompt” for a while now. But I think now would be helpful to dive into what that means in a lot more detail. Why? Because too many folks seem to think that AI agents and answer engines will always come between you and your customer.

I don’t believe that has to be true.

I’ve studied how we can build brands beyond Big Tech for over 20 years. That’s the core of what Digital Reset is all about. And while AI is different, I believe that the only way that AI will always get between us and our customers is if we let it.

So, what does “the brand is the prompt” really mean for your business? That’s what this episode of the podcast is all about.

Here are the show notes for you.

What ‘The Brand Is the Prompt’ Really Means for Your Business — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links

• Mark Schaefer on the most important "soft skill" in the AI Era where he talks about Amazon limiting the number of books that a person can self-publish to three per day.
• The Brand is the Prompt (Thinks Out Loud 465)
• My original post about “The Brand is the Prompt” on LinkedIn
• In the Age of AI, Brand Isn’t Everything. It’s the Only Thing (Episode 472)
• Are ChatGPT’s Apps Good for Your Business? (Episode 471)
• Will Agentic AI Kill Your Content Marketing? (Episode 470)
• The New SEO? (Episode 469)
• AI and Zero-Click Search: The Real Story (Episode 467)

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Transcript: What ‘The Brand Is the Prompt’ Really Means for Your Business

Welcome back to the show. I’ve been talking a fair bit about this idea that the brand is the prompt as part of your company’s digital reset. Today, I want to go deeper on what this means and why it’s absolutely critical for the future of your brand and your business. I am completely serious. See this face? See my face? This is my serious face. My friend, Mark Schaefer gave an unbelievable stat on LinkedIn the other day that I think everyone should know. Here’s what he said in full: "Amazon has limited the number of books that a person can self-publish to three per day."

Three books per day. I’m an author. I wrote a book. Imagine how tough it is for my book to be seen when a single “AI author” — and I’m using that term loosely — focused on my topic can “create” — again, LOOSELY — then upload roughly 1,100 books per year. And that’s only one person. If a thousand people do this, that’s essentially 1.1 million books every single year. Now…

This isn’t about books only. Extrapolate that to every piece of content that you create for your brand:

• Every webpage
• Every blog post
• Every social media post
• Every email
• Every SMS.

And imagine that individuals and organizations that might compete with you could use AI to churn out three versions or more of those every day.

And that’s just the good actors, the good guys. Imagine the bad guys. Your marketing, as you know it, at least in theory, is doomed.

Or is it? I don’t think so. And I believe that the brand is the prompt will save you.

That’s why I think it’s time to look more deeply into the brand is the prompt and what it really means for your digital reset, your brand and ultimately your business.

I’m Tim Peter. This is episode 474 of The Big Show. Let’s dive in.

AI slop is here today. exists. Mark Schaefer’s story about Amazon limiting the number of books that a person can self-publish to three per day illustrates the point perfectly. Almost all of those books are, to use a technical term, crap. They’re just absolute garbage. But they’re garbage that every decent quality book has to compete against just to be seen. So you’d think that’d be the doom, that’d be the end of books, right?

If you look at Amazon’s best-selling book list, though, you won’t see a whole lot of AI slop. You’ll see well-known, well-regarded books by authors we’ve all come to know and trust. Hmm. That sounds important, don’t you think? These are authors who’ve built reputations good enough that their readers ask for them by name.

Cool. Keep that in mind.

Now let’s shift this discussion to AI answer engines and agents. We know that technology shapes customer behavior. Customers are starting to use AI agents and AI answer engines differently than the way they’ve traditionally used search engines. They’re having more robust, more detailed, more personal, more intimate conversations than simply a search query.

As a result, lots of folks are focused on teaching you how to show up when your potential customers have these conversations with their favorite AI tool. And that’s a good thing, by the way. Sometimes I’m one of those folks. You should 100% do the work to show up in those contexts. No two ways about it. What’s also true, though, is that we need to flip this idea on its head. Because customer behavior also shapes the technology.

For instance, tech that doesn’t meet customer expectations doesn’t get adopted ever. History is littered with great technology that failed in the marketplace because it didn’t meet its customers’ needs.

Supposedly, Betamax was a better videotape format than VHS, which won in the marketplace. AOL got everyone on the internet and then promptly vanished. Blackberry was a smartphone before anyone called them that. MySpace was social media before Facebook came along. Google Glass was smart glasses before Ray-Ban’s Meta AI glasses. And, you we’re gonna have to see if those will stick around.

But you see the point. We know the ideas work because most of those technology concepts still exist. We still have video, we still have the internet, we still have smartphones, we still have social media—for better or worse—and we’re seeing an increasing number of smart wearable devices in day-to-day lives. Even if the Ray-Ban Meta partnership ultimately isn’t the winner, I strongly suspect that the format is going to live on and probably for a long time to come.

The technologies, the tools that live on are the ones we know by name. YouTube, Verizon, and AT&T, iPhone and Android and Samsung, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn. These brands are the brands we know and trust—or okay, more or less trust—to help us meet our needs.

You may not know this, but were you aware that one of the top searches on Google is YouTube? Another is Facebook. Another is Amazon. Customers aren’t just going to those websites, they’re "searching" by typing in a name they already know. They’re not asking, "Where should I look for video? Where should I look for my social network?" They’re telling Google, "Take me to the place I already know." These services have built reputations that are good enough that their users, their customers, ask for them by name.

Again, that’s the key lesson. I’m convinced that AI is going to work, will work the same way because humans have needs.

We talk about agents getting between our businesses and our customers as though it’s inevitable. Bullshit. I don’t believe it’s inevitable. I believe it’s only inevitable if we let it happen. Instead, we have to make sure that our customers know and care about us enough to ask for us by name. There’s this belief that the tools will provide the perfect, true, one and only answer that meets customer needs every time.

How exactly do you think that’s going to happen?

I said a couple of minutes ago that customer behavior also shapes the technology. That happens first. I’m convinced that will happen here.

An AI answer engine or agent cannot give you the perfect, true, one and only answer until it knows what’s perfect and true for your customer. The AI is going to have to learn.

Sometimes it will learn by inference. It will watch customer behaviors, for instance, in an AI-powered browser like Atlas, Comet, or Chrome, and it will figure out what your customer likes best. Sometimes its learning will be explicit. It will ask, "do you like option A or do you like option B?"

But until it learns, it can’t possibly recommend the perfect, true, one and only answer. Our job is to get our customers to teach their AI tools that our brands are the ones that they want. And the time to do that is right now before our customers teach AIs to recommend someone else.

It’s easy when we do this to focus on what our business needs first. That’s why we’re putting so much attention into things like GEO. And we should do that. We also have to pay attention, we must pay attention to what our customers need and find the intersections between their needs and our own.

The Venn diagram of those two needs will never be a perfect circle. For starters, customers will almost always want to pay less than you want to charge. The point remains that the more you can make that Venn diagram overlap, the better a chance you have of getting customers to ask for you by name.

I’m going to give you an example from the hospitality industry where I’ve done lots of work over the years. The first time guests travel somewhere new, they choose hotels for a combination of four reasons:

• How close is the hotel to whatever else they need? We call this proximity.
• They care about how well the hotel meets or exceeds their quality standards, you know, quality.
• They care how much the hotel charges for the stay, the price.
• And they care whether the hotel offers amenities that the guest needs during their particular stay. You know, it could be a fitness center, it could be a pool, it could be restaurants, what have you. Doesn’t matter. Those are the qualities that matter.

Those four attributes—price, proximity, quality, qualities—make up our P’s&Q’s model. We’ve used this for years.

There is a fifth attribute that I don’t talk about as much, which is brand. Brand absolutely plays a key role in many cases, and especially for the next time a guest chooses a hotel in the same city or town, or the same brand in a different city or town. A well-known, well-regarded brand provides an easy short-cut to understand the P’s&Q’s that matter to me as a traveler. Guests say "I really liked the Four Seasons when I stayed in Orlando. I’ll probably like the one in Chicago, too." That’s the reason why so many of the hotels in the U.S. carry a well-known, franchised brand like Marriott or Hilton or Hyatt or Wyndham or whomever. It makes it easy for someone who wants to open a hotel to tell guests whether or not the hotel is any good without them having to do a whole bunch of other work first.

In any case, hotels build brand equity first by being a good fit for their guests, P’s&Q’s. The best hotels then reinforce that by offering amazing, memorable experiences. As you’ve heard me say, customer experience is queen. That’s kind of where that came from.

Many hotels also offer loyalty or reward points to keep you coming back. And those are particularly important when your experience isn’t as distinct, it isn’t as differentiated. If I can’t make you remember the place, I can at least remind you that you’ll get paid for staying with me. The point is that great experiences that guests remember help guests remember the hotel and ask for it by name the next time they’re heading to that town.

Other businesses and other industries have their own versions of the P’s&Q’s. They’re not going to be exactly the same. But, know, Jeff Bezos famously built Amazon by always providing "broad selection, fast shipping, and low prices." Walmart did something similar in the days before e-commerce without having to worry about the fast shipping part. Nordstrom’s famously focused on remarkable customer service for every single shopper, every single time. FedEx was built on fast delivery. Apple focused all their energies on what they called "insanely great products." Google provided the best search results. And Facebook originally was the one place where all your friends and family were online. You see the same pattern again and again.

And if you notice, these are all brands that we know and love. Well, okay… brands we know.

Besides that, what do these brands all have in common? Well, they’re all different; you have to be different. They all have values and you have to have values, authentic values. To be fair, most companies, most people aren’t that authentic. They’re presenting "processed cheese authenticity," a version of themselves designed for mass public consumption. Unless folks and brands are willing to stand apart and take the risks associated with that stance, they’re going to drown in the flood of AI slop.

These brands that we know don’t just meet the P’s&Q’s. They’re great at something. Customer experience, product quality, executing flawlessly every time. They’re memorable. They’re different. They stand apart from their competitors. They’re authentically who they are.

My friend, Mark Schaefer, calls this practice of standing apart this way, being audacious. He talked about this in his book Audacious. The title alone models the behavior. He could have called the book "Different." He could have called it "Distinct." He could have called it "Authentic." Because you do need to be different, distinct, and authentic.

But Audacious? That’s literally putting it out there. That is drawing a line in the sand and saying this is what matters.

By the way doing this strategy isn’t just coming from me. Google has said, Danny Sullivan at Google has said, "are you doing the things that are useful for human beings? That’s what we want to reward." Perplexity is, and this is a quote, "advising marketers that AI search will shift budgets toward old fashioned brand marketing."

Focus on your customers. Build a brand that customers love. How about that?

I don’t think people like Mark have to worry about getting lost behind AI slop. I don’t think the great hotels I work with do either. I don’t think Nordstrom’s or Apple or BMW or Fender or a host of amazing brands have that concern. They know that their customers will ask for them by name.

Their brands are the prompt.

And that’s really the key. That’s what you have to do.

Pick one area to be great at:

• Product quality. Be the best product in your space or category.
• Customer experience. Offer exceptional customer experience every time to every customer.
• Flawless execution. Deliver fast, on time, and at a reasonable price every time.

Then focus your content and your customer experience on reinforcing that point every chance you get. Ask your customers to connect with you directly through your email, your CRM, what have you, so you can talk directly with them and bypass AI and bypass Big Tech overall. That’s how you teach customers to ask for you by name. That’s how you get them to teach their AI agents that you’re the one they want. That’s what "the brand is the prompt" means. And that’s why it’s so critical for your digital reset, your brand and your business long term.

It’s not just "the brand is the prompt." It’s "your brand is the prompt." When your customers do that, it won’t matter whether they use traditional search, AI, or whatever comes next, because they’ll always end up coming to you.

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 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 and let them know what you think too. Keep the conversation going.

You can also find the show notes for this episode, episode 474, and 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.

If you’re looking for something to read about this topic in more detail, I’d love to suggest my book, Amazon.com or Bookshop.org. Please pick up a copy and let me know what you think. I’d genuinely appreciate it.

Finally, I just want to say thanks so much for listening. This show would not happen without you. We’ll be back with a new episode next week. Until then, please be well, be safe, and as the saying goes, be excellent to each other. We’ll see you soon.

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