If your brand strategy is weak, AI will not fix it. It will move you faster in the wrong direction, which is why Edward Farley says you have to settle the purpose and the problem you uniquely solve before you automate anything. Farley, a brand strategist at Newport LLC, joined The Artificial Intelligence Podcast to explain why AI is an accelerator, not a cure. He compares it to NOS: "AI is kind of like NOS. If you're going in the wrong direction and you push that button, you're in the wrong direction faster." Companies with soft branding or cracks in their messaging accelerate with AI and go off the cliff faster. A company in Canada was sued because its AI made a promise in customer support. The company had to honor it and lost in court, because whatever the AI said is treated like an employee said it. In England, a company's AI said the company stinks, and the message got around the world. AI can also damage your brand through bad posting and a drop in image quality. It can make your logo quickly, modify designs quickly and test ideas quickly, but Farley says people have damaged their brand with bad AI posting.
What is a brand if it is not your logo?
Your logo is very unimportant. Few people decide not to buy from you because they dislike your logo. Brand is purpose, authenticity, and the problem you uniquely solve. It is what people remember or how they identify you. Farley says every business should have a value proposition: what you deliver to the marketplace on one side, what differentiates you on the other, and in between an understanding of the culture you operate in and the needs of the consumer or business. That becomes a long-term approach, not a tactic. Mission, vision and values matter, and smaller companies should have them too. People need to know what box you fit into. If McDonald's started selling shoes, customers would reject it because it violates what they think the brand does. When you go outside that box, you have to educate, then sell, then market, which is much harder. Gen Z and Gen Alpha value purpose and community, and they see through trend-chasing and hollow social cause marketing. If you copy a cause because everyone else has one, it does not mean the same thing. Do one thing well and go back to why you started the business.
Should you hand customer support and social media to AI?
No. Once the strategy is clear, AI can power execution, including predictive personalization, anticipating needs, and content that evolves in real time. But a human needs to be in the middle. If you hand over all your communication channels, your entire brand is represented by the AI, and any crack expands. You also lose the early warning signs. Social media is often where a customer posts a complaint first, and you would rather catch it before it goes viral. Customer support is worse: people call because they are already somewhere on the angry spectrum, and most people have not had a positive experience with someone else's AI chatbot. The legal risk stays with you too. You are still on the hook for what the AI says. Data is a useful compass, but if no human synthesizes it into insights and creative pathways, you are left with a day-to-day marketing plan that optimizes for who opens what. Performance marketing, chatbots, programmatic advertising and social can be hollow but engaging: they create awareness, not recognition or retention.
How do you keep the human soul in AI marketing?
The sweet spot is AI plus human. Farley's line is: "AI scales human, humans give it soul." Patagonia is an example of alignment. It has a brand purpose about saving the home planet, and it uses AI to personalize recommendations and design sustainable products, but the strategy has been consistent for decades. Warby Parker, Dove and REI have similar durability because their commitments connect to how people emotionally react and how generations react to community. Authenticity starts with your own story. Talk to founders about what compelled them to start the business and what problems they were solving. Personalization matters too. People are more likely to read an email from a person than from a brand, and they choose you because they like you, including the challenges you have overcome. AI can help bring your mission, vision and values to a community more efficiently and give you more time for creativity, but only with discipline. Do not let it get out of control.
What to do before you scale marketing with AI
Fix the direction before you press the accelerator. Write a purpose-driven brand strategy first, because AI makes a weak brand fail faster.
Define your value proposition. State what you deliver, what differentiates you, and what you understand about the culture and the customer or business you serve.
Write your mission, vision and values. Farley says large corporations have them, and smaller companies should too.
Keep a human in the middle of customer communication and decisions. Use AI to power execution after the strategy is clear.
Use AI for data, personalization and content that evolves, but have a human synthesize the insights and creative pathways.
Do one thing well. Go back to why you started the business instead of chasing trends or copying another company's social cause.
AI can give you more time for creativity, but only if you stay the soul of the brand.
Original show notes
Can AI build a brand — or just accelerate a broken one faster? Jonathan Green sits down with brand strategist Edward Farley (Newport LLC) on purpose-driven brand strategy in the age of AI: why your brand is far more than a logo, why AI is like NOS (it speeds you up in whatever direction you're already going — including off a cliff), and how to keep the human soul in your marketing while AI scales the rest.
Key Takeaways: • AI accelerates everything — including weak branding. Fix the strategy before you optimize with AI • Brand isn't your logo; it's purpose, authenticity, and the problem you uniquely solve • Gen Z & Gen Alpha see straight through trend-chasing and hollow "social cause" marketing • Don't outsource all customer communication to AI — you lose the early warning signs and the brand's soul (and you're still legally on the hook for what it says) • The sweet spot: AI scales human, humans give it soul — keep a person making the decisions
Notable Quotes: "AI is kind of like NOS — if you're going in the wrong direction and you push that button, you're in the wrong direction faster." — Edward Farley "AI scales human; humans give it soul. You don't want to lose the soul of anything." — Edward Farley
Connect with Edward Farley: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edward-farleyjr Website: https://newportllc.com
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Auto-generated transcript, 5,958 words. Timestamps link to the moment in the episode.
Purpose-driven marketing with today's amazing special guest, Farley. Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Podcast, where we make AI simple, practical, and accessible for small business owners and leaders. Forget the complicated tech talk or expensive consultants. This is where you'll learn how to implement AI strategies that are easy to understand and can make a big impact for your business. The Artificial Intelligence Podcast is brought to you by Fraction AIO, the trusted partner for AI digital transformation. At Fraction AIO, we help small and medium-sized businesses
boost revenue by eliminating time-wasting, non-revenue-generating tasks that frustrate your team. With our custom AI bots, tools, and automations, we make it easy to shift your team's focus to the tasks that matter most, driving growth and results. We guide you through a smooth, seamless transition to AI, ensuring you avoid costly mistakes and invest in the tools that truly deliver value. Don't get left behind. Let Fraction AIO help you stay ahead in today's AI-driven world. Learn more and get started. FractionAIO.com. Today's episode is brought
to you by my private coaching community, Automation Skool. That's school with a K. If you're an experienced business professional, you know that missing the AI wave is not an option, but keeping up with it feels like a full-time job. I built Automation Skool to take that weight off your shoulders. Instead of wasting hours testing every new tool yourself, I do the heavy lifting for you. You get two cutting-edge trainings every single week that show you exactly what is working right now.
But the real game changer is the access. You get to jump on a live call with me every week. You can get unstuck, ask your specific questions, and get a direct answer from me. Stop trying to navigate this alone and start moving with confidence. Go to skoolofautomation.com right now to lock in our special pricing. That's skoolofautomation.com, spelled S-K-O-O-L. Now, Ed, I'm so excited to have you here. Before we kickstart it, uh, I just want people to know what are they
gonna learn over the next 20 minutes? Why is this gonna be one of the best episodes of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast ever? What are we gonna dive into? That's a big task. I think that, um, and thank you for having me. I'd like to talk a little bit about brand strategy and the role that AI will play In helping businesses connect with consumers and businesses connect with other businesses, uh, through the lens of transformational brand strategy. Are we thinking about purpose-driven brand strategy before we
optimize it with AI marketing? And there's a lot of questions to be answered over the years, but we're just touching the surface of it. But I'd like to spend a little bit of time on the front end, and that's transformational brand strategy with a, with an eye towards purpose. And that's perfect. For those of you listening, if you're thinking about using AI as the face of your business and your branding, I know you all are, everyone wants to use it on social media, everyone
wants to use it in customer support, which is the face of your brand. You wanna make sure you listen to today's episode so you don't make some of the big mistakes other companies are making, and you can do things the right way. One of the key things that I've learned about artificial intelligence, I think of artificial intelligence kind of like NOS. You're watching Fast and the Furious, they push that button, and the car goes faster. But if you're going in the wrong
direction and you push that button, you're in the wrong direction faster. Like it doesn't fix the direction. And what we've seen is people who have, like, soft branding or cracks in their branding or cracks in their messaging, then you accelerate with AI, and you just kind of go off the cliff faster. We've seen it where people have had… A company in Canada just got sued because the AI made a promise in to customer support. They go, "Well, you have to honor it,
it's, it's your customer support. Like, it doesn't matter that the AI said it. Whatever it said, it ha- you have to stick with, just like if an employee said it." And they went to court, they lost. And we're seeing where companies in England where the AI is like, "Oh, our company stinks," and like it got around the world. So, like when you don't tighten up your brand and you don't tighten up the tech, then you can start to have these gaps.
And it's very tempting to… And there are some advantages with AI, like yeah, you can make your logo very quickly, you can modify your designs very quickly, you can test ideas very quickly. And this is where we start to see a lot of, like, drop in image quality. And some of the people I've followed have actually damaged their brand with me because I can tell that they're doing bad AI posting. Mm-hmm. And, like, that's one of the small things. So for people that are listening,
let's start right at the beginning. What does it really mean to be purpose-driven? What are the things we should think about before we bring AI to the picture? How can you start to design your marketing strategy or your sense of identity for your brand? Well, I think it, uh, you know, it I think you, you couldn't have given me a better segue because before we talk about marketing and branding, we should talk about brand, and what is brand. That really isn't changing, right?
It's the idea that we're in the business for more than profits. Now, that sounds funny, doesn't it? But we wanna make profit, but we also want presumably, uh, you know, a l- a long runway of times, uh, so that you can address different generations and be able to flex and be useful across, you know, as long as you wanna be in business. So it's about a test of integrity. It's about what are we solving, what are we compelled to do with our brand, with
our business now and into the future? And I don't care what kind of business you create, it's important to understand, um, the roots and authenticity of your brand, what makes your brand special, what makes it unique and different, and how you can infuse a sense of belonging to the community in which you do business. And that becomes the threshold, the proverbial ticket to get into the theater whenever you're putting a market-- uh, whenever you're putting a product or a service into the marketplace, and
it's more important than ever with kind of this bubble, this Gen Z bubble, you know, just around the corner. Uh, they value purpose. They value community. How are you positioning yourself in that community? AI can do a great job optimizing for that, and we'll talk about that, I'm sure, a little bit later. But the idea that AI can help you mine insights and understand and begin to deliver on engagement metrics down the line. But before you start that, you can
use AI, but you can al- also use your own vision for the company to develop a purpose-driven brand strategy that guides your company in all of its decisions, and not just marketing, right? Because it's going to have a, it's gonna have a role across the board. And I think that a lot of people, especially when they're starting out early on in their business, they're like, they think brand means logo Or I see brand awareness campaigns all the time, and it used to be, right, you have
to see a brand seven times or 30 times. The number always changes before you, like, remember it, right, to create that. And I'm not sure if people still buy the same way they do. There's a lot of people that see an ad on Instagram and buy right from it. Like, they don't go through that brand cycle as much anymore. Yeah. And it's-- Your logo is very unimportant, right? Most people don't know your logo. Like, very few people go, "I was gonna
buy from them, but I didn't like their logo." Like, that doesn't happen. But we spend so much time, we're starting a business on it, right, so we sometimes focus on the wrong things. And that's what I kinda wanna talk about first is like what's the important part and the not important part that think-- people think is important to branding, but it's actually not. Like, what are the distractions? Yeah. Like I said, I, I do think you make a great point about how people
let, certainly people who are designing brands or getting into business, let tactics lead the way. And I think if we are being true to ourselves, we go back to, there's a couple ways to think about it, right? We all have a value proposition. Every, every business should have a, a value proposition. And on the left-hand of the ledger is sort of the what you do, right? What is it that you deliver to the marketplace? And sort of on the right side of the
ledger is, you know, what kinds of things differentiate yourself in the market. What are your products, what are your services, what are those things? There's an insight in between, right? How are we understanding the culture that we operate in? How are we understanding the consumer or the business, their needs? What's changed? What are the dynamics? What are the business trends? How are we taking both from what we do and why it matters in building the sort of intrinsic purpose-driven value
proposition that will then inform a brand? When you consider the market like that, you are then defining kind of a long-term approach to the brand, and you're beginning to think about, like I said, the culture, the community wh- where you do business. And there are a lot-- there, there's lots of ways that you can begin to think about how to then transform your brand over time. One of the things that I encounter a lot now, there's so many AI startups and so many tools that come
out there, and they kind of think that branding is, like, being cool. They're like, oh, I go, "What do you do?" And like, "We do this cool thing." Yeah. And I'm like, "Well, what problem do you solve?" And we're kind of unfortunately skipping past that, and that's why you see, like, so many startups fail. It's like, well, if you don't solve a problem, then when people have to lower their bills, the first thing they eliminate is the extras, which is what you are.
And it's like there's plenty of tools, like for example, make AI music. Really cool, not really useful, right? I don't need that much music that I need to generate a new song every day. Maybe I change the theme song to the podcast every couple of years. It's not a huge expense. So it's like we have to separate those two things, and I think that even starting at that core level, which is we get the things we think matter, we sometimes forget those core principles, which
is why are y- exactly what's your USP? What makes you unique? How-- What's the problem you solve, and how do you solve it in a unique way? And I always look at what is different about me. So if my book is short, I go, "Why do you want the long book? It's gonna take forever to get the same answer." If my book is long, I'm like, "Hey, do you want the manual or do you want like the pamphlet?
Do you want some of the…" Like w- it doesn't matter which side I'm on, right? Like you can advocate whatever it is. If I'm a small company, I'm going, "Yeah, big companies are impersonal." Big company, I'm like, "Yeah, small companies don't have time for you." So it's like whatever it is, you can become that, like and that becomes your advantage. I think that we're seeing this, um temptation right now to shortcut some critical steps. And when it comes to the face of your
business, it starts to be, it's like your brand is kind of, I think, what people remember or how they identify you. It's what they think of. And it's kind of like sometimes you see, like, if McDonald's started selling shoes, everyone would be like, "I'm not buying McDonald's shoes." They could be great, right? But you'd be like, "It violates what I think the brand does." And it's like whenever people go outside what they should be selling or the advice they should be giving, people go,
"That doesn't make sense." This is like you fit in this pigeonhole. So people need to know what box you fit into, which is why whenever you go outside the box or outside, they're going, "We don't understand what you do," that's, like, really challenging when you have to educate and then sell and then market. So there's this temptation right now to, like, really hand over all your social media and all of your, like, basically all of your communication channels. I see people wanting to switch to
AI sales calls, AI inbound calls, AI social media, AI customer support. Well, now you never talk to your customers, so now your entire brand is represented by the AI. And if there's a crack in there, it's gonna just expand 'cause that's what it does. It accelerates everything. So when it comes to, like, first principles, do you kind of think that's even a good idea, or is it still worth having a person in the middle kind of making those decisions? Because if your AI, let's just
say it says something racist on Twitter, no one's gonna go, "Oh, well, it was the, it was the AI. It doesn't matter." It's like, it does. You're still, you're not, that's not a get out of jail free card. They're still blaming you for it. So it's like there's, it's still treated the same as if you'd said it, no matter what the AI does. Yeah. I mean, there's no doubt. I, uh, there's a lot to unpack there, but let's all remember that most human
decisions are fueled by emotion, right? And when you let a robot or a, uh, an algorithm determine what it is you're trying to accomplish, I think you're taking the human element out. I think you're right. A human needs to be in the middle. Once the strategy's clear, AI can power the execution, right? I mean, it does enable predictive personalization. It does anticipate needs. It does build tools and content that can evolve in real time, but it also, it's important because a human fuels
the creativity part of it, right? You can't take the insight and in, in, you know, and install it into a generative AI model. You can't use… I mean, you can, you can develop things based on human insight, but I think the filter of the human mind and the creativity that comes from human insight, y- at least now Is, you know, it's the time to think of AI as an augmentive, you know, an augment, uh, type of a tool. And that's just, I think it fits nicely.
I think marketers have to wrestle with that every day. They have to think about, well, am I interested in tomorrow's engagement, or am I interested in, um, not thinking about this as short-termism, as David Aaker puts it in his, uh, eloquent view on branding and AI. It's all, it's about making decisions. So like Patagonia is a great example of alignment, right? They have a brand purpose. They have a brand strategy that's about saving our home planet, and they only, uh, they use AI to personalize their
recommendations, but they also use it to design sustainable products, right? They create campaigns, they generate AI-driven insights very quickly, and then they engage in a strategy that they've had for decades, which is to save our home planet. That's genuine, that's authentic, that's simple, and that's something that I, their consumers embrace into. And other, other companies are doing it really, really well, like Warby Parker or Dove. Those are great examples of brand strategies that have a durability over time that were written in the context
of how human beings will emotionally react to it and how different generations will react to, uh, the commitment do they have to their community, right? The community of beauty in the case of Dove, or the community of democratizing access to eyewear in Warby Parker, or the save our home planet we talked about with Patagonia. REI does it as well. And so those are the, those are the examples we should look towards when we're thinking about brand strategy that informs culture, that informs
generational durability over time, that informs value and community commitment. And you can do that in just about any industry. And the other thing I would add to that, to make a long story longer, is that you've got your own authenticity to think about, right? Where, how did you… I mean, you should be questioning your own, uh, your own founders. If you're a private-driven company or a, or even a corporate, uh, company, uh, many of which I've worked in, you have, uh,
the opportunity to talk to your founders. You have the opportunity to talk to what compelled them to start the business in the first place. What were the problems that they were solving? How can you show that In your thinking and your sort of your brand positioning long term, so that when you do develop commitments, social commitments, or community-driven commitments, or ways to position your brand in the context of human need, you are then creating great marketing that pulls all of that in, and
you're not just engaging with them on the product or the service, you're engaging with them at a higher level, and that's when you're really cooking with emotion. Yeah. So many products are commodities, as in there's a million CRMs, there's a million social media networks, there's a million podcasts, there's a million consultants of every kind, and it's like there's nothing I teach or know that I'm the only one who knows, right? Like it's just, that's just not reality. Like I didn't invent anything that
I do, and I'm the… There's certain things that I'm like first on or first ideas, but there's always other people that do the same thing. And why do people choose me over someone else? 'Cause they like you. Whether it's your brand or as a person, that's the thing too I think is really important as well, is I think, well, often it's like the things that we, the challenges we face or the things we think are the least interesting are actually
the things people like about us the most, or the things that draw people to us, whether it's a challenge you've overcome. And I think that sometimes we have this idea, and I see this a lot when brands switch from like emails to newsletters. Like a corporate-- Like when you get a newsletter at Christmas from like the family member who's like, "Here's our family update," you know they sent it. No one reads it 'cause you sent everyone the same letter, right? It doesn't feel personal.
It loses an element. Whereas it's like, who are you more likely to read an email from? Like the CEO of the company or the brand of the com- Like, I don't care what Nike has to say. Like I'm not… But like, you know what I mean? Like it's just a, like I don't want a brand's newsletter. But when it comes from a person, so there is an element of personalization and becoming like, yeah, what does this brand mean? What c- what do they do
and what do they not do? And starting to create that, and whether you're a small brand or a large brand, I think that's a really important step because even then, some things I think about a lot are things that's very important to me is like how AI is changing electricity resource usage, rare earth metals, water. These are really important issues, and it's like, it's very interesting how all these brands that were very much like, "Hey, we're all about solar power and environmentalism," like, "AI?
All right, let's go nuclear." Yeah. It's like, what? Wait a minute, right? And it's like that's a… It's so, you know, wherever you stand- Yeah on the issue, it's like I've just noticed a lot of people have suddenly switched their position on nuclear power very strongly because it's aligned with their profits, right? Right. And it's like Microsoft just bought part of Three Mile Island, and talk about bad branding. Nobody, no one even got sick from Three Mile Island, but we think of it like Chernobyl.
Nobody actually got hurt, let alone died. Right. But we all think of it, I still think of it as a disaster, right? But that's why it's called a Three Mile Island incident. It's actually a great testimony to a success because they had a meltdown and nobody got hurt. That's a, that's a win. It's like, not how I remember it, though. But we are seeing these shifts where brands kind of are like doing things that are not in alignment. It's like, you know, they're
taking a lot of water away from like farms to put into AI things, and like I'm not sure I love that. You know, like- Yeah … you know, it's like, should AI cau-cause food prices to go up? Not really cool. Should it cause energy prices to go up? Not really great. But it's like we're kind of seeing this where it's such a fast-moving market, we're seeing things that are causing brand inconsistencies. And if I'm noticing it, then other people are probably noticing it too,
and it's like, well, I thought you stood for this, and now it's like suddenly, well, now we have AI. And the thing I worry about a lot is that we're outsourcing certain elements of our, whether it's decision-making or customer-facingness to brands. Like, I always say that like social media is like the warning sign before something goes bad. So like- Right … if you are, if you have an AI watching your social media, 'cause that's where a customer will state, post their complaint first, wouldn't
you rather catch it before it goes viral when they complain the first time? Wouldn't you rather find out? Like, sometimes customers will email me, "Hey, this link is broken," or, "This page on your website is down." I'm always grateful because for every person who tells you, 10 or 20 don't. I'd rather fix it for everyone, 'cause I've now fixed it for everyone else in the future. So if you're missing those messages, you might start messaging when your messaging is shifting off because you're not paying
attention because the AI is doing it. You have it Kind of filling this gap. Yeah. And those are things that we're at. Same thing with customer support. It's like every-- I ask everyone who wants to have AI customer support. I go, "Okay, great. Let me ask you a question. You've called customer support before. Have you ever talked to an AI chatbot and had a positive experience with someone else's AI chatbot?" And they're like, "No." I'm like, "Okay, so but you wanna do that to other
people." Let's golden rule this one. Right. Let's just do the same. And it's a, it's a chat 'cause it's so cool, it's so tempting, but then it's like everyone who calls customer support is already somewhere on the angry spectrum. Nobody calls customer support because they had a great experience, 'cause they're happy, right? They're upset about something, and so all you're doing is kind of making it worse and worse. And so these are some of the things I worry about, which is that we're
replacing communication with AI, which is actually the most important part. There's so many other things you can optimize, right? And it's like, no, use that because this is important, 'cause exactly like you're saying, 'cause what if your message is drifting from your customers- Yeah or they think you're not sticking to your brand, and you don't notice for a while? Yeah. You know, I think when we're talking about AI, it's, it's, you know, with, with respect To, to brand and marketing in and of itself, right?
There's so many different… I- at the end of the day, the sweet spot is AI plus human. AI scales human, human, humans give it soul, right? You don't wanna lose the soul of anything. At the end of the day, we're humans talking to humans. I don't care if it's a B2B type business that you're concerned about, or a B2C, and I would argue that the world is now a, a C2B because consumers are making deep decisions and, and influencing, if you will, the future of brands,
you know, more than ever, right? Partnerships, influencers, those types of things are becoming more and more important. So your soul, your brand, becomes the guiding principle for everything you do. And all of us want to be more efficient. All of us want more time in our lives. All of us want to automate what should be automated, and data is a great example of that. And you talk a lot about data on your show, and it's just a wonderful tool for your compass.
But if you're not, don't have a human synthesizing it into insights and creative pathways, which are developed through a solid transformational brand strategy within your company, I'm speaking to company owners, founders, then you've got essentially a day-to-day marketing plan, right? You're just optimizing for who opens what or who does anything. I think performance marketing, if it taught us anything, it's that chatbots and, you know, programmatic advertising and social has the potential to be hollow, but engaging, right? So there's some awareness opportunity,
but there's not a whole lot of recognition or retention because you're not reaching the heart and mind of your consumer or your business with whom you wanna do business, and with whom I presume you would wanna do business with over time. So it's really, really important to go back to this idea that the sweet spot is AI plus human synthesis, so that you can allow the tool to help you optimize, save time, and scale while you're making the decisions and being the soul of the brand,
for lack of a better way to say it, right? So that you're behaving and communicating it, delivering value in that type of a consumer-led world. Yeah. I think that's so important because when we start to outsource decision-making or we're not paying attention, right, when we're like, "When the cat's away, the mice will play," that's when you start to get caught up in the day-to-day, and you start to post things that get engagement rather than give value, and you don't.
You get a short-term gain for a long-term thing, and that's why companies It seemed like to get around forever disappear is that we make this mistake. And I think when I think of branding, I think of like… I ran into someone one time. I was like, "Oh, it's nice to meet you," for the first time. He was like, "We've met before." And he was so mad, and I was like, "Maybe you should be more memorable." Like, maybe it's not my fault I've-
Right … forgotten your brand. Maybe it's your fault that you haven't done something that's unique or interesting. And one of the things we see a lot is everyone, like, chases trends. So if everyone else is doing it, we should do the same thing, right? If everyone else has a social cause, we'll have a social cause. It's like, well, that's not the same, right? It's like- Yeah … that's not the same meaning. It's like, well, if everyone else, right,
for every one you sell, we give one away. You see a bunch of companies, right? One-- I forget, I think it was a shoe company or glasses or what's hard, and then everyone else copied it. And it's like, well, it doesn't mean the same thing because it's like you're doing it because everyone else is doing it, not because you really believe it. And so you have this, like, hole in your branding, which is trend branding, and it can work in a short term.
And we're seeing this, a lot of businesses, right? They have a flash in the pan, but it's like if you wanna be remembered, I think this is a critical lesson. I think this was an amazing episode because our audience is all startup founders and angel investors and large brands and large companies that are thinking, "How can we stay memorable when the rules are changing?" Mm-hmm. When people are searching differently, people are using short-form video, and they're using AI, and now they're talking to their watches.
So the way we're behaving is differently. And it's like, well, if you can remember the core C, right? The rest of that stuff is just like you said, day-to-day or just strategy, but the mechanics, right? Yeah. I think it's like- I think to start your-- You start at-- Y- I think you always, if you're, if you're a leader, you have your mission, your vision and your values, and if you don't, you should. Most large corporations do. I would encourage smaller companies to do the same thing.
Mission, vision, values. I think you just talked about one. I just wanna respond to one. The, um, and I think it's Warby Parker that does the buy a pair, give a pair, right? I think they launched that as part of their early vision or their early mission to give back to the community. There's some authenticity to that. You actually have credibility to back that up. Nothing wrong with campaigns that fuel authenticity or genuine action. What we're talking about, what I think
you were talking about as well, which is exactly right, which is this idea that people are out there kind of coming up with ideas to give back to the community, or short-term community-driven projects, or sort of signature style programs that, that, that run hollow because they're not, you know, they don't, they don't last a long time, or they get pulled out of the market real quick, and people see through that. In a consumer-led world, and particularly with this big bubble of
Gen Z and Gen Alpha behind it coming forward, they are used to this. They grew up in a technology-fueled world. They understand analytics. They understand data. They understand social. They're a technology-driven generation, but they also can see right through businesses that are throwing things against the wall to develop some sort of- CSR positioning. What I would argue is if you can do one thing, do it well, and go back to why you were starting this business in the first place, and
you'll be able to make messaging and, and invest in things and create a meaningful brand in the market that, that has more value to this generation than you will by just brainstorming community-driven projects that come in and come out, and come in and come out. And, and I think that, um, getting back to AI, AI can help you with the correct discipline, bring your mission, vision, values through the lens of who you are and what you do and why it
matters To a community that, uh, in a much more efficient way because you're going to do all the things that you need to do in order to get out there and generate awareness and recognition, but you're gonna do it with discipline. You're gonna do it through the prism of you, you're gonna have more time for creativity. So this is my optimistic view, uh, of, of AI. I do think it will, for the right people who are concerned with, you know, a disciplined approach to marketing, to
branding their products or services, I do think it will create more time. There are more tools, there are more ways in which we can get our, our products and messages out into the market. But it will also be really, really important not to let it get out of control, at least for now, and be, uh, be human with it and be disciplined. Amazing. That's such a great place to end. Thank you so much for being here, Ed. For people who wanna learn more
about what you do, maybe even kind of see if you can help them tighten up their branding, where's the best place for people to find you online? You can find me, I work for Newport LLC, which is a small boutique advisory with all C-suite walked in your shoes people who are concerned with growing and accelerating businesses. We do it bespoke. We don't have any junior staff, so we're very focused on working in the business with you, not on the business, but in the business.
And we are also available with thinking around growth realization. So when it's time to exit or sell your business, we have people who have done that and can come in and help you with selling your business or exiting over a timeline that's reasonable for you and getting you prepared for that. So on the growth acceleration side, we can help you grow. We can spot things in your business that, uh, where we've got finance ex-CFOs, and CMOs, and CEOs, people who've walked in your shoes.
We've also got people who are investment banker background who can help you sell and exit your business if that's the case in the next two or three years. So we're versatile, we're bespoke, and we're small and agile. So call me if you'd like or contact me at newportllc.com. And my name's Edward Farley. You can also find me at edward.farley@newportllc.com. Amazing. We'll put all that in the show notes and below the video for everyone watching. Thank you so much for being here
today, Ed, for an amazing episode of The Artificial Intelligence Podcast. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of The Artificial Intelligence Podcast. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss another episode. We'll be back next Monday with more tips and strategies on how to leverage AI to grow your business and achieve better results. In the meantime, if you're curious about how AI can boost your business' revenue, head over to artificialintelligencepod.com/calculator. Use our AI revenue calculator to discover the potential impact
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