Really interesting. I would frame it slightly differently. The main difference in my view is that everything is verifiable and comparable now. So promising some that some drink gives you wings, or some shoes make you a champion (even if it was always common sense) is now 100% verifiable. So brands need to be more honest.
But saying that people expect brands to be a service now is comparing brand with product and commodity. All three exist in the same space. A Birkin bag doesn't hold your goods 40X better than a Neverfull bag.
Sharing values as a brand was a new thing of the last decade. It was a slippery slope already then and it clearly is one still today. The best brands positioned outside of ideological values and became aspirational. Being "cool" is different from being "opinionated". That Patagonia became the uniform of some and Fred Perry the uniform of others is often outside of the brands control. In fact most brands try to avoid this pigeonholing as much as possible. Exceptions like Hublot exist - but it is a risky road for a brand.
Agree on Promise Making, this is the big change. In the age where everything is verifiable - honesty is king. And excellent brands work on that. Apple has done great here by avoiding the numbers-to-numbers game, staying honest but also aspirational. The risk with the "honesty" card is how to make it great without making it boring.
Terrific article, fantastic piece. As a strategist at a (the?) leading global brand consultancy this was both exciting and worrisome. Circulating to the entire strategy team. Simply phenomenal.
What an incredible and thought-provoking piece, Adrian. As a young strategist, in constant fear of "what's coming", I found this surprisingly exciting and left me full of hope. I also loved how you closed the article with your prediction of specific "roles" or "areas" that might come off the back of this evolution.
I'm interested to know whether you have any tips on how to slowly train/teach myself to evolve into those areas myself? It's sort of a chicken-or-the-egg situation in which I can see it and as a younger consumer, I can feel it deeply, but brands are probably not going to simply take my word for it? But at the same time, I can't train/put into practice as most brands are still working in the "old ways"?
It might be a case of learning on the ground, but then it's a risky position to be in if you end up working with the wrong brand... Keen to hear your thoughts on upskilling/re-training my practice. Thanks!
I'm in the same boat as you. Based on what he shared, there's no path or way to follow. We have to forge it ourselves.
This is going to require:
- Expanding our knowledge on tech and AI integrations
- Doing more detailed brand audits that cover service and value delivery (this is how we practice)
- Evaluate brands that are providing services and keep reviewing what's working and what is not
Pending when the opportunity does come, we could publish thought articles or practice proposals, the time will surely come when we can put things into implementation.
So great post Adrian. I think you captured a lot of what's happening in and around brand and product strategy. But I don't this this is a thing that has been driven by the digital transformation, it's just speed it up. And I really don't believe it's a 'one or the other' situation between a brand promise or a service layer, you need both (which you rightly point to further down the article, took me some time to get to it though :).
I have lots of examples of brands being built with a 'service layer' as part of the strategy, but the clearest is probably JetBlue. The promise of that brand was 'we're not an airline, we're a customer service company that happens to fly people around'. Except that wasn't some fancy marketing position, it was the value that drove the entire service layer that interacted with customers. Everyone believed it and everyone was empowered to bring it make it a reality (I saw this first hand). Point being, good brand strategy has always aligned with product strategy - if you don't, you end up with empty promises (which happen far too frequently).
I think the thing has has changed recently (last 10 years), is that lazy branding with no real connection to product reality is too easily found out. People just post about it. And if enough people post about it, you're done.
I think stories still have a role though. If we just reduce a brand to the utility it provides in a 'service layer', you lose the chance to make it relevant in a way that will endure well past the loss of that utility. You can build brands like this, but you have to pray someone doesn't come along and do what you do at a slightly cheaper price.
I would also argue that our desire for connections hasn't reduced at all, it's just morphed. There is a whole generation that instead of wowing to Nike ads for Michael Jordan are creating para-social relationships with online creators and buying things they recommend. Brands are borrowing those relationships, but they will create them also.
Again, great post. Tons to think about here, but this is a great way to try and bring it all together.
Great piece. Lots of good thoughts. Dove might not have a service layer, but it's still a $5 billion brand. Peloton does have a service layer and has seen its market cap fall from $50 billion in 2020 to $7 billion today.
Dove's $5B valuation is legacy equity built over 70 years when promise-based branding worked. But I think they've been spending it, not building it. Compare Dove vs. Fenty within skin/beauty. Fenty built service infrastructure and achieved near-instant cultural authority that Dove has been spending hundreds of millions trying to buy.
I'd argue that Peloton had a great service layer (connected classes, communities, data). But what destroyed their value were execution disasters, the COVID demand cliff, and hardware economics that never worked. Great service architecture, catastrophic everything else.
The framework isn't experience innovation that guarantees success—it's that experience innovation is how brands now differentiate. You can still fail with excellent service layers (Peloton) or coast on legacy equity without it (Dove). But if you're building new equity today, I'd argue that service is the battleground.
At one point I did think that would save Nike. The “Plus” service layer- the integrations with Apple, but I think brands have a hard time making these really sticky and truly differentiated. They’re easily copyable code and once Nike has one Adidas has one and you can’t really tell the difference. The people running them think brand differentiated messes with their metrics, so they optimize it out. I could go on….
Adrian, Thank you — This is one of, if not the best, articulations of this significant shift that I have read.
I saw this starting in the mid-90s, with the commercial internet and emerging behavioural patterns driven by the adoption of new ‘experiential’ technologies. A recent example of terrific service failure that came to mind while reading this was that of Sonos.
Based on my professional experience, I’d go one step further to say that, with new technological advances in manufacturing, such as additive manufacturing, we’re seeing the same shifts that make service innovation so valuable also extend to new product innovation across many categories. The traditionally long research and development cycle for bringing a new product to market, as practiced by Western businesses, is already being reimagined and applied in places like Shenzhen.
Your Sonos example is spot on: high-end product, strong positioning, but a terrible service failure. And, when your service layer breaks, you can't save yourself with a solid product or a creative brand promise.
Love your manufacturing insight as well. I hadn't thought of this, but I think you're right. If Shenzhen-style rapid iteration enables product parity to happen even faster than I said, service differentiation becomes even more important because it's the only value layer that can't be reverse-engineered in weeks.
You got me thinking. Where do you see the manufacturing speed enabling service innovation instead of just making products faster and cheaper? Tesla is the most obvious example (OTA updates keep making the product experience better), but I'd love to hear about other patterns you're seeing in this space.
Absolutely brilliant article. A lot to think about for sure and as technology advances and cultural changes accelerate I think this divide in terms of which brands tick the boxes and which don't will only widen.
The framework is compelling, but I'd push on one thing: the cost asymmetry between promise and delivery creates a real barrier for most brands. A failed campaign is recoverable. A failed service platform is not. That means only well capitalized brands can afford to make the bets this piece describes. For everyone else, the gap between 'knowing you need to deliver utility' and 'being able to build the infrastructure' might actually widen. The winners in this model get more defensible. Everyone else falls further behind.
Tashinga, you've put your finger on the critical tension in my argument—and I appreciate you pushing on it. Let me think the issue through more carefully.
You're absolutely right that the cost asymmetry between promise and delivery creates a real barrier. A failed campaign represents a significant expense. A failed service platform can be existential.
That's not a minor distinction—it fundamentally changes who can afford to compete in the way I'm describing. But I think there's a parallel question worth considering: Is the current capital asymmetry permanent, or are we at an inflection point?
What you're observing (and I didn't address adequately):
"Only well-capitalized brands can afford service-layer infrastructure. SMEs are locked out."
What I'm increasingly seeing in the data:
"The current capital asymmetry is real but temporary. Three forces—verticalization, modular assembly, and AI agent configuration—are compressing both cost and complexity. By 2028-2030, service-layer capabilities will be as accessible as email marketing is today."
Here's why I think the landscape is shifting faster than my article acknowledged:
1. Vertical-specific platforms are altering the unit economics for their respective industries.
Toast (restaurants), ServiceTitan (home services), and Shopify (e-commerce) are delivering 70% of what Starbucks built at 10% of the cost. Not because they're cheaper versions of the same thing—but because when you solve deeply for one vertical, you can pre-build the data models, integrations, and workflows that enterprises customize expensively.
A regional coffee chain with 50 locations doesn't need Starbucks Deep Brew's $100M+ comprehensive platform. They need the ONE capability that actually drives visit frequency—likely real-time personalized recommendations. A vertical platform can deliver that for $50K-$100K total investment instead of millions.
2. Modular assembly is becoming marketer-accessible
SMEs are starting to assemble service layers from best-of-breed APIs (Segment + Klaviyo + Intercom + Algolia) at $30K-$50K annual cost. What required engineering teams in 2020 is increasingly accessible through visual workflow builders and AI code generation.
It's not Nike Training Club. But it's personalized recommendations, contextual messaging, AI customer service, and behavioral loyalty—the core service-layer capabilities that create differentiation.
3. AI agents will compress implementation timelines
This is the 2-3 year horizon piece: companies like Sierra (Bret Taylor's new venture, $4.5B valuation) and emerging AI agent platforms are explicitly building tools that configure service infrastructure in weeks instead of months.
When implementation cost drops from $100K to $10K and the timeline compresses from 9 months to 3 weeks, suddenly 200,000+ mid-market companies become economically viable customers.
The pattern I see emerging:
2010: Only enterprises could afford CRM (Salesforce required $250K+ implementations)
2015: HubSpot democratized marketing automation for SMBs
2020: Shopify made e-commerce infrastructure accessible to solo merchants
2026+: We're at the inflection point for AI-powered service layers
Enterprise capabilities become SME-accessible within 5-7 years as platforms mature, costs compress, and implementation simplifies.
Here's where your comment/critique is reshaping my thinking:
For category leaders (2026-2028):
You're right that well-capitalized brands have a narrow window to build infrastructure that creates defensible moats. But the key insight is to identify what will become defensible as platforms commoditize service capabilities between 2028 and 2030.
The answer can't be "we built a service platform" because that's exactly what will become table stakes. It has to be:
- First-party data assets competitors cannot access (Nike's 100M users, behavioral patterns)
- Operational integration depth (Starbucks connecting AI to every espresso machine via IoT)
- Network learning effects that improve with scale
For SMEs (2026-2028):
Don't attempt to replicate what Nike built. Deploy best-of-breed platforms now (Freshworks, HubSpot, and Intercom at $30K-$60K annually), build proprietary data collection deliberately, and prepare for platform convergence when sophisticated service layers become accessible by 2028.
Your competitive advantage will be implementation excellence and unique data—not platform ownership.
For mid-market challengers ($50M-$500M):
SMEs face a genuine strategic choice: Build custom infrastructure now ($2M-$5M investment) or deploy platforms and invest savings in customer acquisition. The decisive factor: Are you in a competitive category where proprietary service infrastructure offers compounding advantages? (Usually no, unless you're in a category with extreme network effects.)
The question I should have asked in my article:
Not, "can all brands afford service-layer infrastructure?" but rather "what capabilities must category leaders build in the next 3 years that will remain defensible when platforms democratize service intelligence?"
Category leaders betting on permanent advantage through AI platforms are making the same mistake department stores made, assuming e-commerce required proprietary technology. The question isn't WHETHER service capabilities will democratize—it's WHEN, and what becomes defensible when they do.
Does any of this address your concern, or does it raise different questions about the timeline/inevitability of AI democratization?
I'm genuinely curious whether my "platform convergence" argument feels like rationalization or whether you're seeing evidence of these forces in your own work.
Martin, thanks for reading and responding in such a thoughtful manner.
This is a useful reframe. You're right that verifiable transparency is the forcing function. I'd argue we're saying the same thing in different ways: operational honesty (what I'm calling service delivery) is now required to earn the aspiration you're describing.
Your Apple example got me thinking that I'd missed something important. Granted, Apple doesn't have a Nike Training Club equivalent, but they do have Genius Bar (makes you better at using products), ecosystem integration (iCloud, Find My), and trade-in programs. It's service infrastructure, just not labeled that way. The behavioral lock-in comes from operational delivery, not messaging. I'm guessing, but I suspect this shows up as a key factor in Apple's high rates of repeat purchases.
Agree 100% on your Birkin Bag point—ultra-luxury operates differently where scarcity is the service. Your framework applies there; mine applies to mass/premium categories where differentiation can't depend on artificial constraint.
Where I think we differ: If I'm reading you right, you're reframing this as "be honest to stay aspirational." I'm arguing that service delivery is how you earn aspiration now. The boring risk is real if brands mistake utility for strategy. But brands that deliver new customer capabilities while maintaining cultural mystique (Apple, Spotify) prove you can have both.
Question on the "utility = boring" concern: Does utility kill aspiration, or does generic utility kill aspiration?
Three examples off the top of my head: A grocery ingredient brand shows you how to make that dish you've been wanting to try. A health insurer connects you to specialists for your specific condition in your area. Your favorite beer shows you which pubs in your neighborhood are showing your team's finals game.
Are these utilities boring? Is the real difference between a utility that feels like the brand and one that feels like a commodity?
What struck me here is the shift from narrative to evidence. Messaging used to manufacture legitimacy. Now delivery does. Cultural relevance seems to follow lived usefulness, not the other way around. That has implications far beyond marketing. It changes how brands structure operations, not just campaigns.
Yes, yes, yes. Recall metrics vs. behavioral integration gaps are killing brands right now.
Too many Fortune 500s have been running the same tracking studies for 20 years (awareness! consideration! preference!). They don't seem to recognize that their greatest competitive advantage lies in their ability to become a part of someone's Tuesday morning routine. I'd love to see a "morning breakfast ritual" metric on Quaker Oats' dashboard for instance.
The question I've been pondering is what needs to be broken to get brand teams to try to make this shift? Is the challenge getting leadership to recognize that the transition is occurring, or is it the difficulty of measuring behavioral moats when all your dashboards are designed for attitudinal health?
Posing this question because I'd love to develop a diagnostic framework to help CMOs figure out whether their service/AI investments are genuinely causing switching costs, or if they're merely embellishing traditional promises.
Really interesting. I would frame it slightly differently. The main difference in my view is that everything is verifiable and comparable now. So promising some that some drink gives you wings, or some shoes make you a champion (even if it was always common sense) is now 100% verifiable. So brands need to be more honest.
But saying that people expect brands to be a service now is comparing brand with product and commodity. All three exist in the same space. A Birkin bag doesn't hold your goods 40X better than a Neverfull bag.
Sharing values as a brand was a new thing of the last decade. It was a slippery slope already then and it clearly is one still today. The best brands positioned outside of ideological values and became aspirational. Being "cool" is different from being "opinionated". That Patagonia became the uniform of some and Fred Perry the uniform of others is often outside of the brands control. In fact most brands try to avoid this pigeonholing as much as possible. Exceptions like Hublot exist - but it is a risky road for a brand.
Agree on Promise Making, this is the big change. In the age where everything is verifiable - honesty is king. And excellent brands work on that. Apple has done great here by avoiding the numbers-to-numbers game, staying honest but also aspirational. The risk with the "honesty" card is how to make it great without making it boring.
Terrific article, fantastic piece. As a strategist at a (the?) leading global brand consultancy this was both exciting and worrisome. Circulating to the entire strategy team. Simply phenomenal.
What an incredible and thought-provoking piece, Adrian. As a young strategist, in constant fear of "what's coming", I found this surprisingly exciting and left me full of hope. I also loved how you closed the article with your prediction of specific "roles" or "areas" that might come off the back of this evolution.
I'm interested to know whether you have any tips on how to slowly train/teach myself to evolve into those areas myself? It's sort of a chicken-or-the-egg situation in which I can see it and as a younger consumer, I can feel it deeply, but brands are probably not going to simply take my word for it? But at the same time, I can't train/put into practice as most brands are still working in the "old ways"?
It might be a case of learning on the ground, but then it's a risky position to be in if you end up working with the wrong brand... Keen to hear your thoughts on upskilling/re-training my practice. Thanks!
I'm in the same boat as you. Based on what he shared, there's no path or way to follow. We have to forge it ourselves.
This is going to require:
- Expanding our knowledge on tech and AI integrations
- Doing more detailed brand audits that cover service and value delivery (this is how we practice)
- Evaluate brands that are providing services and keep reviewing what's working and what is not
Pending when the opportunity does come, we could publish thought articles or practice proposals, the time will surely come when we can put things into implementation.
However focus should be on mastery of this.
So great post Adrian. I think you captured a lot of what's happening in and around brand and product strategy. But I don't this this is a thing that has been driven by the digital transformation, it's just speed it up. And I really don't believe it's a 'one or the other' situation between a brand promise or a service layer, you need both (which you rightly point to further down the article, took me some time to get to it though :).
I have lots of examples of brands being built with a 'service layer' as part of the strategy, but the clearest is probably JetBlue. The promise of that brand was 'we're not an airline, we're a customer service company that happens to fly people around'. Except that wasn't some fancy marketing position, it was the value that drove the entire service layer that interacted with customers. Everyone believed it and everyone was empowered to bring it make it a reality (I saw this first hand). Point being, good brand strategy has always aligned with product strategy - if you don't, you end up with empty promises (which happen far too frequently).
I think the thing has has changed recently (last 10 years), is that lazy branding with no real connection to product reality is too easily found out. People just post about it. And if enough people post about it, you're done.
I think stories still have a role though. If we just reduce a brand to the utility it provides in a 'service layer', you lose the chance to make it relevant in a way that will endure well past the loss of that utility. You can build brands like this, but you have to pray someone doesn't come along and do what you do at a slightly cheaper price.
I would also argue that our desire for connections hasn't reduced at all, it's just morphed. There is a whole generation that instead of wowing to Nike ads for Michael Jordan are creating para-social relationships with online creators and buying things they recommend. Brands are borrowing those relationships, but they will create them also.
Again, great post. Tons to think about here, but this is a great way to try and bring it all together.
Great piece. Lots of good thoughts. Dove might not have a service layer, but it's still a $5 billion brand. Peloton does have a service layer and has seen its market cap fall from $50 billion in 2020 to $7 billion today.
Fair point, Ed.
Two thoughts:
Dove's $5B valuation is legacy equity built over 70 years when promise-based branding worked. But I think they've been spending it, not building it. Compare Dove vs. Fenty within skin/beauty. Fenty built service infrastructure and achieved near-instant cultural authority that Dove has been spending hundreds of millions trying to buy.
I'd argue that Peloton had a great service layer (connected classes, communities, data). But what destroyed their value were execution disasters, the COVID demand cliff, and hardware economics that never worked. Great service architecture, catastrophic everything else.
The framework isn't experience innovation that guarantees success—it's that experience innovation is how brands now differentiate. You can still fail with excellent service layers (Peloton) or coast on legacy equity without it (Dove). But if you're building new equity today, I'd argue that service is the battleground.
Thanks for reading and replying.
At one point I did think that would save Nike. The “Plus” service layer- the integrations with Apple, but I think brands have a hard time making these really sticky and truly differentiated. They’re easily copyable code and once Nike has one Adidas has one and you can’t really tell the difference. The people running them think brand differentiated messes with their metrics, so they optimize it out. I could go on….
Adrian, Thank you — This is one of, if not the best, articulations of this significant shift that I have read.
I saw this starting in the mid-90s, with the commercial internet and emerging behavioural patterns driven by the adoption of new ‘experiential’ technologies. A recent example of terrific service failure that came to mind while reading this was that of Sonos.
Based on my professional experience, I’d go one step further to say that, with new technological advances in manufacturing, such as additive manufacturing, we’re seeing the same shifts that make service innovation so valuable also extend to new product innovation across many categories. The traditionally long research and development cycle for bringing a new product to market, as practiced by Western businesses, is already being reimagined and applied in places like Shenzhen.
David, I really appreciate your insights here.
Your Sonos example is spot on: high-end product, strong positioning, but a terrible service failure. And, when your service layer breaks, you can't save yourself with a solid product or a creative brand promise.
Love your manufacturing insight as well. I hadn't thought of this, but I think you're right. If Shenzhen-style rapid iteration enables product parity to happen even faster than I said, service differentiation becomes even more important because it's the only value layer that can't be reverse-engineered in weeks.
You got me thinking. Where do you see the manufacturing speed enabling service innovation instead of just making products faster and cheaper? Tesla is the most obvious example (OTA updates keep making the product experience better), but I'd love to hear about other patterns you're seeing in this space.
Thanks for engaging. Really encouraging.
Absolutely brilliant article. A lot to think about for sure and as technology advances and cultural changes accelerate I think this divide in terms of which brands tick the boxes and which don't will only widen.
This was so unbelievably insightful! Might start researching more into the subject of service and how it can be applied! Thank you!
The framework is compelling, but I'd push on one thing: the cost asymmetry between promise and delivery creates a real barrier for most brands. A failed campaign is recoverable. A failed service platform is not. That means only well capitalized brands can afford to make the bets this piece describes. For everyone else, the gap between 'knowing you need to deliver utility' and 'being able to build the infrastructure' might actually widen. The winners in this model get more defensible. Everyone else falls further behind.
Tashinga, you've put your finger on the critical tension in my argument—and I appreciate you pushing on it. Let me think the issue through more carefully.
You're absolutely right that the cost asymmetry between promise and delivery creates a real barrier. A failed campaign represents a significant expense. A failed service platform can be existential.
That's not a minor distinction—it fundamentally changes who can afford to compete in the way I'm describing. But I think there's a parallel question worth considering: Is the current capital asymmetry permanent, or are we at an inflection point?
What you're observing (and I didn't address adequately):
"Only well-capitalized brands can afford service-layer infrastructure. SMEs are locked out."
What I'm increasingly seeing in the data:
"The current capital asymmetry is real but temporary. Three forces—verticalization, modular assembly, and AI agent configuration—are compressing both cost and complexity. By 2028-2030, service-layer capabilities will be as accessible as email marketing is today."
Here's why I think the landscape is shifting faster than my article acknowledged:
1. Vertical-specific platforms are altering the unit economics for their respective industries.
Toast (restaurants), ServiceTitan (home services), and Shopify (e-commerce) are delivering 70% of what Starbucks built at 10% of the cost. Not because they're cheaper versions of the same thing—but because when you solve deeply for one vertical, you can pre-build the data models, integrations, and workflows that enterprises customize expensively.
A regional coffee chain with 50 locations doesn't need Starbucks Deep Brew's $100M+ comprehensive platform. They need the ONE capability that actually drives visit frequency—likely real-time personalized recommendations. A vertical platform can deliver that for $50K-$100K total investment instead of millions.
2. Modular assembly is becoming marketer-accessible
SMEs are starting to assemble service layers from best-of-breed APIs (Segment + Klaviyo + Intercom + Algolia) at $30K-$50K annual cost. What required engineering teams in 2020 is increasingly accessible through visual workflow builders and AI code generation.
It's not Nike Training Club. But it's personalized recommendations, contextual messaging, AI customer service, and behavioral loyalty—the core service-layer capabilities that create differentiation.
3. AI agents will compress implementation timelines
This is the 2-3 year horizon piece: companies like Sierra (Bret Taylor's new venture, $4.5B valuation) and emerging AI agent platforms are explicitly building tools that configure service infrastructure in weeks instead of months.
When implementation cost drops from $100K to $10K and the timeline compresses from 9 months to 3 weeks, suddenly 200,000+ mid-market companies become economically viable customers.
The pattern I see emerging:
2010: Only enterprises could afford CRM (Salesforce required $250K+ implementations)
2015: HubSpot democratized marketing automation for SMBs
2020: Shopify made e-commerce infrastructure accessible to solo merchants
2026+: We're at the inflection point for AI-powered service layers
Enterprise capabilities become SME-accessible within 5-7 years as platforms mature, costs compress, and implementation simplifies.
Here's where your comment/critique is reshaping my thinking:
For category leaders (2026-2028):
You're right that well-capitalized brands have a narrow window to build infrastructure that creates defensible moats. But the key insight is to identify what will become defensible as platforms commoditize service capabilities between 2028 and 2030.
The answer can't be "we built a service platform" because that's exactly what will become table stakes. It has to be:
- First-party data assets competitors cannot access (Nike's 100M users, behavioral patterns)
- Operational integration depth (Starbucks connecting AI to every espresso machine via IoT)
- Network learning effects that improve with scale
For SMEs (2026-2028):
Don't attempt to replicate what Nike built. Deploy best-of-breed platforms now (Freshworks, HubSpot, and Intercom at $30K-$60K annually), build proprietary data collection deliberately, and prepare for platform convergence when sophisticated service layers become accessible by 2028.
Your competitive advantage will be implementation excellence and unique data—not platform ownership.
For mid-market challengers ($50M-$500M):
SMEs face a genuine strategic choice: Build custom infrastructure now ($2M-$5M investment) or deploy platforms and invest savings in customer acquisition. The decisive factor: Are you in a competitive category where proprietary service infrastructure offers compounding advantages? (Usually no, unless you're in a category with extreme network effects.)
The question I should have asked in my article:
Not, "can all brands afford service-layer infrastructure?" but rather "what capabilities must category leaders build in the next 3 years that will remain defensible when platforms democratize service intelligence?"
Category leaders betting on permanent advantage through AI platforms are making the same mistake department stores made, assuming e-commerce required proprietary technology. The question isn't WHETHER service capabilities will democratize—it's WHEN, and what becomes defensible when they do.
Does any of this address your concern, or does it raise different questions about the timeline/inevitability of AI democratization?
I'm genuinely curious whether my "platform convergence" argument feels like rationalization or whether you're seeing evidence of these forces in your own work.
Agree! Shared similar thoughts here https://substack.com/home/post/p-184564545
One of the most compelling things on brand strategy I’ve read in a while. Well done.
Phenomenal breakdown!
Martin, thanks for reading and responding in such a thoughtful manner.
This is a useful reframe. You're right that verifiable transparency is the forcing function. I'd argue we're saying the same thing in different ways: operational honesty (what I'm calling service delivery) is now required to earn the aspiration you're describing.
Your Apple example got me thinking that I'd missed something important. Granted, Apple doesn't have a Nike Training Club equivalent, but they do have Genius Bar (makes you better at using products), ecosystem integration (iCloud, Find My), and trade-in programs. It's service infrastructure, just not labeled that way. The behavioral lock-in comes from operational delivery, not messaging. I'm guessing, but I suspect this shows up as a key factor in Apple's high rates of repeat purchases.
Agree 100% on your Birkin Bag point—ultra-luxury operates differently where scarcity is the service. Your framework applies there; mine applies to mass/premium categories where differentiation can't depend on artificial constraint.
Where I think we differ: If I'm reading you right, you're reframing this as "be honest to stay aspirational." I'm arguing that service delivery is how you earn aspiration now. The boring risk is real if brands mistake utility for strategy. But brands that deliver new customer capabilities while maintaining cultural mystique (Apple, Spotify) prove you can have both.
Question on the "utility = boring" concern: Does utility kill aspiration, or does generic utility kill aspiration?
Three examples off the top of my head: A grocery ingredient brand shows you how to make that dish you've been wanting to try. A health insurer connects you to specialists for your specific condition in your area. Your favorite beer shows you which pubs in your neighborhood are showing your team's finals game.
Are these utilities boring? Is the real difference between a utility that feels like the brand and one that feels like a commodity?
What struck me here is the shift from narrative to evidence. Messaging used to manufacture legitimacy. Now delivery does. Cultural relevance seems to follow lived usefulness, not the other way around. That has implications far beyond marketing. It changes how brands structure operations, not just campaigns.
Begs as well - I don’t think they ever do
Yes, yes, yes. Recall metrics vs. behavioral integration gaps are killing brands right now.
Too many Fortune 500s have been running the same tracking studies for 20 years (awareness! consideration! preference!). They don't seem to recognize that their greatest competitive advantage lies in their ability to become a part of someone's Tuesday morning routine. I'd love to see a "morning breakfast ritual" metric on Quaker Oats' dashboard for instance.
The question I've been pondering is what needs to be broken to get brand teams to try to make this shift? Is the challenge getting leadership to recognize that the transition is occurring, or is it the difficulty of measuring behavioral moats when all your dashboards are designed for attitudinal health?
Posing this question because I'd love to develop a diagnostic framework to help CMOs figure out whether their service/AI investments are genuinely causing switching costs, or if they're merely embellishing traditional promises.