The Jevons Paradox In Marketing

The Jevons Paradox says: when efficiency improves, consumption rises.

It’s happening in marketing right now.

AI makes content cheaper, faster, easier.

However, instead of clarity, we get noise.

Efficiency doesn’t create signal. It amplifies chaos.

That’s why I’ve been working on something I’m calling The Narrative Advantage:

• Deep, authentic, data-driven storytelling.

• A clear, defensible narrative that turns efficiency into impact.

Without The Narrative Advantage: Efficiency just scales noise.

With The Narrative Advantage: Efficiency scales your story.

I’m getting ready to release the first version.

Want an advance copy? DM me over on LinkedIn, or fill out our Contact Us Form and I’ll share it with you.

Brand in the AI Era: 5 Practices Every Executive Must Master to Stay in Control

You’re not just marketing anymore. You’re programming belief into, and building trust within, an AI-driven world.

Generative AI has changed the mechanics of how your brand is perceived, repeated, and reshaped in the market.

The more AI is involved, the more your message depends on the systems, models, and prompts you feed it.

If you’re in the C-suite, you can’t delegate this entirely to marketing. The health of your brand is now a leadership issue. It’s about control, trust, and long-term market relevance. It’s about infrastructure strategy as much as messaging.

From our client work, we’ve identified five core practices that determine whether a brand thrives or drifts in the AI era.

Each one is actionable for your organization, starting right now.

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1. Build Your Narrative Infrastructure

Your story can’t just be in your team’s heads or your brand guidelines. It must live inside the systems that are now informing and/or generating your content and communications.

What it Means: Your tone, context, value propositions, and positioning need to be embedded in AI tools, CMS workflows, and marketing automation platforms so that whether it’s a human, a chatbot, or a summarization tool, your story doesn’t drift.

Action Steps:

• Audit every system that touches your content: CRM, email, chat, support scripts, sales enablement. Identify where narrative elements live (and where they don’t).

• Build an AI-ready brand guide that includes model-friendly instructions and example prompts.

• Train your internal teams on using these instructions across tools and how to address errors / issues when they (inevitably) arise.

Key Question: If I prompted every AI tool we use, would I get the same brand story every time?

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2. Establish a Content Chain of Custody

If you can’t answer who created a message, what data trained it, or how it was validated, you’re gambling with your credibility. Your hard earned trust is at risk.

What it Means: Chain of custody isn’t just for compliance. It’s central to trust. Audit logs and metadata about content creation, approval, and publishing must become standard practice.

Action Steps:

• Require all AI-generated content to include a creation log (who/what produced it and when).

• Track prompts, training data sources, and revisions for every significant asset.

• Create a validation step before publishing to ensure accuracy and brand alignment.

Key Question: If a customer challenged the authenticity of our latest communication, could we prove its origin?

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3. Develop Model-Aware Messaging

One voice everywhere? Dead. AI tools don’t behave identically. Your brand will sound different in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or a proprietary LLM unless you deliberately adapt.

What it Means: Your story must be consistent at the strategic level but tailored to the quirks, strengths, and constraints of each model your teams use.

Action Steps:

• Test your core messages in multiple models. Document differences in tone, completeness, and accuracy.

• Create model-specific “tuning” instructions to preserve brand voice.

• Review and refine regularly as models update.

Key Question: Do we know how our brand’s language changes between the AI tools we already rely on?

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4. Treat Strategic Prompting as a Brand Skill

Your best copywriters are now as proficient with prompts as they are with creating content. If they can’t lead the model, the model will lead your message … and you’re potentially cooked!

What it Means: Prompting isn’t just a creative task. It’s a brand defense mechanism. The right prompts, the right training data / content, help AI generate content that aligns with your voice and your story without needing heavy revision.

Action Steps:

• Train marketing, sales, and comms teams on brand-specific prompt frameworks.

• Maintain a library of approved prompts for high-value content types.

• Assign prompt QA responsibility to a senior team member.

Key Question: Who in our company ensures AI tools follow, not rewrite, our brand’s intent?

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5. Embed Trust-First Frameworks in Every Message

Clarity. Transparency. Consistency. These are today’s (and tomorrow’s) brand survival strategies.

What it Means: Trust-first frameworks build resilience into your communications so they hold up under scrutiny, fact-checking, and resharing.

Action Steps:

• Establish non-negotiable brand principles for accuracy, disclosure, and transparency.

• Review messaging against these principles before approval.

• Make trust a KPI in brand health reporting.

Key Question: Is trust something we hope to earn, or something we’ve systematically designed into every communication, every engagement?

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The Leadership Imperative

These five practices aren’t just marketing tactics. They’re operational disciplines for an AI-driven business landscape.

The risk isn’t that AI will get your messaging slightly wrong. It’s that without these systems in place, your brand becomes a series of unverified, inconsistent messages that compound very quickly over time.

If you want to own your narrative in the AI era, start here:

• Pick one practice.

• Assign ownership.

• Build a baseline this quarter.

Remember: Those who do it well won’t just cut through the noise. They’ll own the conversation.

If you’re ready to tackle this issue, we’re ready to help.

AI Is Marketing Infrastructure. Are Your Brand Systems Ready?

Last week, I shared AI Is Scaling. Trust Isn't. The second in my three-part series.

TL;DR Recap: Your voice doesn’t need to be the loudest. Just a clear one that people believe, and trust.

This week, in the final piece of the series stemming from my analysis of America's AI Action Plan, I highlight the five core practices I believe are critical for brand resilience in the AI era.

America is building the future of AI. Are you building the brand systems that can survive it?

The AI Action Plan calls for:

• Expanded energy grids and hyper-scale data centers

• Open deployment across government, defense, and private enterprise

• Global export of the American AI stack as a strategic asset

The goal is speed and scale. The risk is message collapse.

Here’s what brand leaders must understand:

• This isn’t just about power and chips. It’s about meaning.

• When AI becomes the default interface for how customers, employees, and partners interact with your company, your brand becomes a system function.

• If that system isn’t anchored in a coherent story, built with prompt-level safeguards, and governed across tools and teams—you’re not communicating. You’re broadcasting noise.

I believe brand resilience in the AI era depends on 5 core practices:

1. Narrative Infrastructure: Your story must scale across AI agents, not just people. That means brand rules, tone, context, and strategic positioning embedded in every system.

2. Content Chain of Custody: Who created this message? What trained it? How was it validated? You need answers. You also need audit logs.

3. Model-Aware Messaging: Your brand language must adapt to the constraints and quirks of each model you use. It’s not “one voice everywhere” anymore. It’s “one story, tuned to the platform.”

4. Strategic Prompting: Your best copywriters are now prompt engineers. Equip them to lead the message—not just clean it up after the fact.

5. Trust-First Frameworks / Playbooks: Clarity. Transparency. Consistency. These aren’t copywriting tactics. They are officially survival strategies.

You’re not just marketing anymore. You’re programming belief into an AI-shaped world.

And those who do it well?

They won’t just cut through the noise. They’ll own the conversation.

AI Is Scaling. Trust Isn’t. This is a Communications Crisis

What’s the point of brand awareness if no one believes what you say?

Last week, I shared The Invisible Risk in AI Policy: What Happens to the Brand?

TL;DR Recap: Whether we like it or not, AI is rewriting the rules of communication. So, unless we redesign the systems behind our brand voice, our story will drift. First quietly. Then suddenly

This week, I’m going deeper because the real problem isn't the speed just speed. It's scale without trust.

America’s AI Action Plan embraces a frictionless vision: de-regulate, open-source, deploy rapidly, and dominate globally.

It even mandates every federal agency ensure “to the maximum extent practicable” that employees use frontier models.

There’s a lot here. 28 pages to be exact. However, when I read it, I see a lot more missing than present including a plan to ensure these tools don’t distort truth, flatten nuance, or accelerate bias and confusion at scale.

These omissions affect every company, every brand.

Here’s what America's AI Action Plan means for company leadership, today:

Your narrative is no longer yours by default.

• As AI reshapes internal workflows, external campaigns, and public discourse, brands will increasingly sound the same.

• Speed will cannibalize your brand’s soul if you don’t deliberately preserve your voice and your POV.

The cost of inconsistency just exploded.

• Open-weight systems + no shared standards = messaging that shifts subtly across every platform and channel.

• Every hallucination, every off-brand phrase, every insensitive output now bears your logo.

• Moving fast and breaking things will only be an acceptable excuse for the most minor communications and positioning transgressions or mistakes.

To cut through the noise, and not be consumed by AI-driven brand voice, companies must:

1. Architect brand-safe AI pipelines: Treat your AI stack like your CRM or CMS. Every system that generates messaging must be governed, trained, and monitored against clear standards.

2. Train for narrative resilience: Don’t just chase trends. Develop a rock-solid core story and set of values. Train your AI pipeline on it and your teams to defend it, especially when generative tools push for sameness.

3. Position trust as strategy, not sentiment: Trust is not a soft metric. It determines message reach, brand recall, and revenue confidence in every market.

Remember, your voice doesn’t need to be the loudest. Just a clear one that people believe.

The Invisible Risk in AI Policy: What Happens to the Brand?

What happens when the systems that shape language, and generate content, no longer reflect the values of the brand using them?

America’s AI Action Plan reads like a blueprint for dominance: deregulation, infrastructure, and global distribution. It outlines a future where “whoever has the largest AI ecosystem will set global standards.”

What it doesn’t outline is this:

How do brands maintain trust when the tools they use to communicate are reshaping the meaning of communication itself?

For brand and communications leaders, this is not theoretical. It’s operational. Right now.

AI will soon touch, if not produce, every message, story, and campaign. Most importantly, if the foundational models your company relies on don’t reflect your brand’s values, you’ll lose message fidelity, erode audience trust, and create a growing disconnect between what you say and what customers experience.

For brand, marketing, and comms teams, this means your message is no longer just about what you say. It’s about how the tools you use say it.

That’s a new kind of brand risk.

So ask yourself:

• Who trains the systems you rely on to represent your brand voice?

• Do your AI-powered content workflows reinforce—or erode—your values?

• Are you ready to audit and govern messaging generated beyond human review?

Three things I believe every brand must prioritize right now:

1. Define brand values as AI constraints: Don’t just document your voice—codify what should and should not be generated in your name.

2. Audit every AI-touchpoint: Emails, product copy, chatbots, investor decks—your audience doesn’t care whether a human or a model wrote it. They expect consistency.

3. Establish prompt-to-publish oversight: Marketing operations must evolve. Governance isn’t optional. It’s infrastructure.

Clarity, not speed, is your real differentiator in the age of AI.