Hey there,
The other day, I got one of those hopeless outreach emails. You know the type. Misnamed company, badly phrased offer, something about generating thousands of leads for £500 a month. The kind of thing that makes you wince.
A little bit later, I got hit by one of those retargeting emails from Amazon, asking if I was still interested in the thing I’d glanced at for half a second.
We’re surrounded by this nonsense – automated noise that fails the most basic of human tests. And yet, we’re constantly told that AI is about to change everything. That it’s coming for our jobs. That it’s going to transform how we work. And yes, there’s real power in some of it. Tools like ChatGPT are incredible at helping us get to acceptable faster.
But acceptable isn’t what anyone should be aiming for.
Here’s the problem. In the rush to embrace AI, we’re in danger of skipping the basics. All those friction points – the misfires, the tone-deaf messages, the laughably bad automation – they’re not small things. They aggregate to things real people notice. The things that quietly erode trust. And they’re everywhere.
In branding, like everything else, we’d be better off focusing on what we’re doing right now. If you can’t get a simple email right, why would I trust you with something more ambitious?
You can’t lead us into the future if you’re tripping over the present.
I don’t want 10X leads from a bot. I want one real person who wants to talk about a complex business challenge – and how another human might help solve it. That still matters. Maybe more than ever.
We have incredible tools at our disposal. Let's use them to make the present work better.
In other news…
🎙️ Our latest podcast episode dropped where we talk to guest and old client Teri Nicklin about what strong B2B branding looks like in practice (not just theory).
📊 Our B2B Tech Survey is still open – if you’ve not had your say, we’d love to hear from you.
✍️ And Stewart’s been at it again – his latest blog piece on brand v’s sales enablement is worth a read.
If any of this rings true, or you’re tired of the noise too, we’re always up for a real conversation.
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