An analysis by Digital Bloom found that comparative listicles are far and away the most-cited content format by LLMs. How-to guides and FAQs were frequently cited as well. Omniscient found that for branded prompts the bulk of LLM citations come from editorial sites, online forums, review sites and directories.
In other words, AI looks for facts, whether they are scientific facts or practical facts or asserted facts or discussion facts or evaluative facts or comparative facts. AI wants data related to performance and price. AI recommendations are rooted in those facts, not emotions.
There is a longstanding debate in marketing about heads versus hearts, or thinking versus feeling, as it is often described. Which is to say, facts versus emotions.
The importance of emotions had been on the comeback trail until AI exploded onto the scene in November 2022. Now, facts are ticking upward in importance as marketers scramble to ensure their brands are fully represented factually in online knowledge graphs and social forums.
With more and more consumers relying on AI answer engines for buying recommendations, many prognosticators have proclaimed the ascendence of facts over emotions as the future of marketing. Meaning structured information instead of creative content. No more emotions.
Maybe.
But then again, maybe not.
Giving up on emotions just because the latest technology is not a good fit with emotions is letting the tail wag the dog. It is capitulating the message to the medium, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, and not unfairly because this is what McLuhan meant.
Different media are experienced and processed in different ways, to the point that the medium is often itself the message taken away by the audience. McLuhan’s focus was linear print culture versus oral broadcast culture—print versus TV, or hot versus cool media, in McLuhan’s words.
AI is a new sort of media experience in which certain kinds of content work, and not others, and in which people are engaged interactively with chatbots mimicking the language and style of human interlocutors. It is feared that this leads inevitably to decisions made only on the basis of facts or the structured information AI relies upon.
This fear is reinforced by the intensity with which people have quickly become attached to chatbots. An MIT Media Lab study estimates one-in-five American adults have had an intimate encounter with a chatbot. The top use case for generative AI in 2025, according to Filtered.com, was therapy and companionship.
With such strong relationships to chatbots, consumers will rely significantly, if not wholly, upon what chatbots have to say, which means all the facts from LLMs. People find chatbots very persuasive. Research has found that chatbots can talk people out of their political opinions—even belief in conspiracy theories—in as little as 9 minutes. Chatbots are more convincing than ads, influencers and storekeepers, using only facts and no emotions.
But the conclusion that AI is all facts and no emotions is belied by the emotional connection between humans and chatbots. If this strikes you as peculiar, it is no more peculiar than brand love or brand superfans or brand evangelists, all of which are concepts about intimacy and passion between humans and commercial entities. Emotions are always present.
It is not that emotions have been lost with the rise of AI. It is that emotions have been displaced or shifted from brands to chatbots. The emotional connections that tie people to the marketplace no longer go just through brands. They now go through chatbots, too, and maybe only chatbots in the near future. But there are still emotions.
The biggest risk for brands is not the loss of emotions to facts, but the loss of emotional connections to chatbots. This risk will grow as AI evolves from shopping assistants to shopping agents.
As long as humans are making the final decision about what to buy, emotions will always be in the mix. Emotions will be lost to the process only when AI takes over decision-making. That won’t happen as long as AI provides only recommendations or assistance. However, it could very well happen when AI matures into self-directed agents that take charge of all decisions. No people, no emotions.
But this scenario presumes that emotions, and the emotional benefits people get from brands, are lost because they are not part of the information used by AI agents to compare and contrast brands. The further assumption implicit in this is that emotions are too sentimental and inexact to be represented as structured information for LLMs.
This underestimates marketing modelers. It just means that we don’t yet know how to code emotions into knowledge graphs. We will soon figure that out, guaranteed.
I feel confident saying this because we have figured it out before. My friend and colleague Josh McQueen figured it out with an emotional lexicon he developed for testing ads when he ran research worldwide for Leo Burnett.
My mentor and boss Kevin Clancy figured it out with the “Wheel of Emotions” he compiled from various social psychology sources to use in testing brand positionings.
Russ Haley, originator of attitudinal segmentation and popularizer of the five-point purchase interest scale, spent the last third of his career at the University of New Hampshire developing ways of measuring the intangible (often emotional) elements of ads that make them work.
Figuring this out for AI is only a matter of time. And given the speed at which AI is evolving, it won’t take long.
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LLMs are channeling emotional information already. LLMs rely heavily on discussion forums, Reddit and Quora especially. These are not emotionless online forums. All kinds of emotions can be found in online discussions. Negative emotions have gotten a lot of attention, but it’s a full range of emotions in the arguments and conversations people have online about every topic under the sun, brands included.
Emotions are thus part and parcel of what LLMs scan and learn. It is inaccurate to claim that facts have displaced emotions.
Many of these facts from online forums are emotionally laden and emotionally impactful on the nature and direction of the overall online discussion. To the extent that these facts comprise part of the corpus of surveillance for LLMs, emotions have an impact.
Not to mention that the AI future is likely to see a revival of emotionally-driven advertising and positioning.
Today, marketers are investing heavily to ensure their brands are part of the AI evaluation and recommendation loop. Once this initial surge of innovation and updating is completed, though, marketers will be faced with feedback loops hard to break into, creating the subsequent need for ways of breaking these loops.
I predict a renaissance of traditional media as marketers look to influence how people interact with AI. That won’t come from AI personalization loops. It will come from TV or billboards or live events or other non-AI connections outside the loops. The desired behavior will be different. Not consideration or buying; rather, telling AI to do something different or to focus on a particular brand. It’s back to the future.
However, the future of AI unfolds, emotions will be a part.
Emotions are still in the picture, forcing brands to compete for consumer passions with a new set of chatbot competitors. And emotions will be a big part of tomorrow as brands lean harder into every kind of consumer connection to sustain relationships in a new technological ecosystem. Which, of course, is what brands have done every time a new medium has come along. It’s never either/or with heads or hearts, nor will it be with AI either.
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider By Walker Smith, Chief Knowledge Officer, Brand & Marketing at Kantar
At The Blake Project, we help leaders turn brand into a disciplined driver of financial performance — strengthening pricing power, competitive position, and enterprise value. Email us to start a conversation about enduring profitable growth. For The EBITDA.
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]]>It’s not hypothetical. Across the Gulf and beyond, businesses and institutions are confronting something no communications strategy, no campaign, and no rebranding exercise can fully resolve: that narratives built on stability, safety, and global openness are more fragile than they appear. The fragility only becomes visible under pressure. Honest or calculated.
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The question isn’t whether this happens. It’s whether the organizations responsible for managing that identity are structured to respond when it does.
The shift from perception-led to reality-led brand building isn’t a Gulf story. It’s a global one. But the Gulf is where that shift is most consequential, most visible, and most instructive right now. What’s happening here is a masterclass in something every serious organization needs to understand. Because the gap between narrative and reality is a universal condition. The geography changes. The dynamic doesn’t.
The Gap Between Narrative And Governance
For the better part of three decades, many Gulf states have built sovereign brand narratives of genuine coherence. Safety. Openness. Global ambition. Progressive governance. These weren’t straplines. They’re backed by infrastructure, policy, institutional development, and a sustained commitment to being taken seriously.
It worked. Investor confidence grew. Talent relocated. Tourism numbers climbed. Multinational headquarters followed. The narratives held because the conditions sustaining them held too.
But narrative and governance aren’t the same thing. When external pressure arrives, economic, geopolitical, or reputational, the gap between them becomes visible in ways that are difficult to manage and slow to repair.
A nation’s brand isn’t what a government says about itself. It’s what every institution, every business, every interaction, and every decision communicates consistently over time. Which means every organization operating in the region has a stake in whether that coherence holds. When it fractures, communications can’t restore it. The rebuild has to start upstream. As we’re seeing.
The shift that matters (the one that’s taken three decades to land) is from brand as visibility to brand as an operating system. Not something organizations do. Something organizations are. When brand is treated as a leadership imperative, it changes how decisions get made, how resources move, and how talent orients itself. The organization becomes legible to itself, not just to the world outside. That’s what holds under pressure. And what doesn’t hold is always the first thing pressure finds.
What Pressure Reveals
External pressure does something useful, if uncomfortable. It shows which parts of an identity are genuinely held and which were always more aspiration than architecture.
Investor trust isn’t restored through investor relations. It’s restored through demonstrated coherence: decisions made under pressure that are consistent with values declared in calmer times. When they’re not, the gap’s immediately legible to the market.
The same applies to talent, diplomatic relationships, and the confidence of partners and customers. These are sustained not by narrative but by the organizational reality beneath it. When that reality’s fragmented, when entities pull in different directions, communicate inconsistently, or make decisions that contradict the stated strategy, pressure will find it.
This is the clarity problem. It’s considerably more common than most organizations are prepared to admit.
The First Conversation Is Never About Communications
When a brand narrative comes under pressure, the instinct is to reach for communications. To reassure. To reframe. To amplify the positive. Occasionally, that’s appropriate. But it’s rarely the conversation that matters most.
The first conversation is about governance. Is the organization coherent enough to sustain the narrative it’s asking the world to believe?
That requires honest questions. Where is strategic direction understood clearly, and where has it drifted? Where are decisions consistent, and where is misalignment quietly compounding? Where does external identity match internal reality, and where has the gap widened beyond what can be managed?
These are structural questions. They require structural answers. Not a new campaign, but a rigorous diagnostic of where the organization actually stands relative to where it says it does.
Only then does communications strategy become useful. Because communication without coherence doesn’t restore trust. It accelerates erosion.
What Needs To Be Built Before The Pressure Arrives
The most resilient organizations share a characteristic. They don’t treat brand as a communications function. They treat it as a leadership function, embedded in institutional structures, decision consistency, and the alignment between stated values and observable behavior. Brand, held this way, isn’t what the organization says. It’s what the organization is.
Bhutan is enlightening. Quite literally. A small, landlocked country with limited resources and real geopolitical exposure, it has built one of the more coherent sovereign narratives in the world. Not through communications investment, but through the genuine embedding of Gross National Happiness into policy, governance, and institutional decision-making. When pressure arrives, there’s something beneath the narrative that holds it in place. That something is leadership clarity. The gap between what is believed, what is decided, and what is done has closed.
The commercial proof of that clarity is Made in Bhutan, a provenance certification program that aligned national identity directly with consumer demand for authenticity, sustainability, and premium origin. In a world of economies of scale, Bhutan competed on coherence. The certification didn’t just protect Bhutanese products. It made them worth more. Nation brand governance, translated into commercial value.
This week, the UAE hosts Make it in the Emirates in Abu Dhabi, the country’s flagship platform for industrial transformation, converting national ambition into production and export at scale. The parallel isn’t incidental. Make it in the Emirates is provenance as strategy. It’s the UAE embedding its industrial identity into a governance framework that creates downstream commercial value for every business that calls this country home. That only works if the national brand it rests on is coherent, trusted, and structurally held. Which is precisely why the work of the moment — upstream, governance-led, clarity-driven — matters beyond the diplomatic and into the commercial.
The lesson is clear. Brand governance can’t be retrofitted in a crisis. It has to be built into organizational structure beforehand: in the alignment between entities, in the coherence of leadership communication, in the systems that tell you whether strategic intent is actually holding across the organization.
The Measurement Problem
Most organizations don’t know, with any precision, whether their internal alignment matches their external narrative. They have communications strategies, brand guidelines, and stakeholder plans. What they rarely have is a structured, ongoing measure of whether the organization is actually coherent, whether the clarity dimensions that determine resilience are holding or quietly coming apart.
Direction. Decisions. Identity. Behavior. Experience. Adaptability.
When these are aligned, narratives hold under pressure. When they fragment, even slightly, even invisibly, the narrative becomes vulnerable to whatever tests it next.
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The organizations that navigate pressure well aren’t those with the strongest communications functions. They’re those with the clearest internal architecture and the discipline to measure it before the world does.
That’s the work. And it begins not with a campaign, but with a question that every leader should be able to answer, and most can’t: do we actually know where our strategy is holding, and where it isn’t? More fundamentally, do we understand that this was never a communications problem? It’s a leadership one.
It would be remiss not to acknowledge what’s also visible in this moment: that Gulf leaders have responded to sustained pressure with a composure and strategic consistency that is itself a form of brand governance. Staying on-message when the message is under attack. Maintaining institutional continuity when disruption is the objective. Projecting stability not as a communications posture, but as a lived organizational reality. That can’t be easy. And it certainly doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the product of exactly the kind of leadership clarity this piece argues for. Built over years, not assembled in a crisis. The resilience we’re observing is, in part, the return on that investment.
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Dan Dimmock, a UAE-based board advisor and non-executive director focused on strategic clarity, governance, and institutional transition. Through Firstwater Advisory, he works with executive teams globally to improve decision quality, alignment, and leadership effectiveness during growth, complexity, and change.
At The Blake Project, we help leaders turn brand into a disciplined driver of financial performance — strengthening pricing power, competitive position, and enterprise value. Email us to start a conversation about enduring profitable growth. For The EBITDA.
Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project, a strategic brand consultancy focused on turning brand into pricing power, growth, and enterprise value.
]]>Somewhere in the back of every cabinet, I have multiple sets of those white CorningWare nested casseroles with the blue cornflower emblem, along with a multitude of Pyrex measuring cups, bread loaf, and baking pans. Post-World War II, with the panoply of new kitchen appliances and the 1945 Miss America Bess Myerson promoting the 1956 Frigidaire Imperial Cold Pantry refrigerator on TV, durable, attractive, one-step cookware generated all sorts of benefits. Tangible evidence of Eisenhower-Era efficiency and effectiveness.
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You may take it for granted, or find this tidbit irrelevant today, but Pyrex and CorningWare were considered miracles. Pyrex (1915) is heat-resistant glass; you could use it for baking, for example. Perhaps the measuring cup in your kitchen is Pyrex. CorningWare is made from a glass-ceramic that offers “extreme thermal shock resistance.” That is, you can take it directly from the freezer and put it in the oven or use it on the top of your stove. Because the items are attractive, you can place them on your table after cooking or defrosting.
The maker of Pyrex and CorningWare could have continued to make kitchenware. After all, Pyrex and CorningWare were winning brands. But the corporate brand, Corning Glass Works, had a different vision for its future. Corning Glass Works knew that its remarkable glass technologies could pave the way to a different future.
Corning Glass Works did not see itself as a household kitchen and dishware company. The Corning Glass Works consumer-facing business of kitchenware was small compared to its focus on industrial uses. Corning Glass Works, with amazing prescience, saw itself as a technology company focusing on ceramics, glass, advanced optics, such as display screens, and liquid crystal displays. Corning Glass Works, now Corning Inc., was, and remains today, a highly innovative, sometimes disruptive enterprise.
Similar to General Electric, Corning Inc. changed from being a consumer company to an industrial organization. Corning Inc. envisioned a future world in which it could win. The future was not making dishware. As successful as Pyrex and CorningWare were, Corning saw its future as bigger than the kitchen cabinet.
In 1998, Corning sold its consumer products division. (Previously, GE, also opting for an industrial vision, sold its small appliance business in 1984 to Black & Decker. GE sold its large appliance division (washers, dryers, kitchen appliances) to Chinese appliance company, Haier, in 2016.)
The Wall Street Journal reported on April 28, 2026, that Corning, Inc.:
“… posted a higher first-quarter profit, fueled by surging demand for its optical fiber products used in artificial intelligence data centers and continued growth in its new solar business.
“The company also said it entered into two more hyperscale agreements, each similar in size and duration to its recent multiyear deal with Meta to supply up to $6 billion in advanced optical fiber and cabling for U.S. data-center expansion.”
The Wall Street Journal’s story continued with this statement:
“Corning has become one of the biggest beneficiaries of the AI infrastructure rush as hyper-scalers race to build out data-center capacity to run their next-generation platforms. The company’s fiber optics business has been one of its fastest-growing.”
Corning, Inc, is a tale of staying relevant in an ever-changing technological environment. This is not easy to achieve. Corning, Inc. could have gone the way of Rochester-based Kodak, a 90-minute drive north of Corning in upstate New York.
Kodak lost its footing when digital film took over haloid. Kodak focused on defending its past. Recognizing that its Kodachrome moment had passed, Kodak turned to digital photography and digital printing. But it was too late. In 2012, Kodak filed for bankruptcy. After emerging from bankruptcy, Kodak aggressively focused on commercial digital photography and printing, as well as on motion picture and still film. Only recently has Kodak seen that its chemical approaches have value in the development of pharmaceutical materials.
Kodak fell into the troubling tendency that what worked yesterday will work today. If you just ride the coattails of the momentum you inherited, it is certain that the brand will eventually slow down and will struggle to grow. Corning, on the other hand, moved swiftly, understanding that its industrial customers had and would have increasing needs for its glass technologies (for screens) and its optical fibers.
Fuji, a Kodak competitor, also experienced the decline in haloid film. But Fuji saw that the company did not work on “film” per se; it worked with molecules and elements. By taking a broader view, its Chairman at the time, Shigetaka Komori, shifted the company’s focus away from film and into science, diversifying Fuji so it did not suffer the severe decline in photographic film. Fuji used the science of film in a skincare line. Fuji’s scientists understood that the gelatin used in film comes from collagen, and collagen is big business for youthful-looking skin. Additionally, Fuji created Ebola drugs, anti-aging potions, and stem cell research, all using the basics of its film technology.
HON office furniture is another enterprise that saw a more relevant future. Created to provide employment for returning WWII veterans, HON first manufactured metal tins for recipe cards, then segued into kitchen cabinets and, later, office cubicles, file cabinets, desks, and chairs.
The failure to innovate (or renovate) is a marker for trouble. Brands stay relevant and current through “news”—that is, tell the customer about the interesting things your brand is doing and offering. News is key because news generates frequency. News—any way you receive it—gets a customer in the door, onto the website, or into the app. Tell customers what is new and what is different.
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Whether Business-to-Business or Business-to-Consumer, never lose touch with the customer, the customer’s needs, their occasions, and their competitive sets. Never take your eye off how the world is changing. And, be anticipatory and flexible. Use R&D to see ahead and generate operational insights. Understand how your brand can stay relevant in a changing environment.
Unlike trust that takes time to rebuild, relevance can be renewed quickly. Relevance depends on news that makes sense for the customer and the brand. Staying relevant via innovation and renovation is an investment, not a cost. Corning’s investment in an intuitive understanding of how to create a future in which it could win is a clear example of the indispensable need to stay relevant and how that relevance is a road to enduring, profitable growth.
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Joan Kiddon, Partner, The Blake Project, Author of The Paradox Planet: Creating Brand Experiences For The Age Of I
At The Blake Project, we help leaders turn brand into a disciplined driver of financial performance — strengthening pricing power, competitive position, and enterprise value. Email us to start a conversation about enduring profitable growth. For The EBITDA.
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]]>An ethos of integrity is characterized by measured alignment to values and execution within them. It emphasizes honesty in design and in positioning. It inoculates an enterprise from the forces — including executive ego — that focus on story alone. It is born with values, yet exists when leaders enact it consistently through project execution and performance measurement. An ethos of integrity protects the enterprise against rash and reckless action that threatens steady growth and performance.
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There are four structural levers that help an organization advance its integrity and thus its brand: a rigorous strategic plan; a straightforward decision framework; unadulterated data; and a potent governance architecture. Pulling these levers is essential to keeping the organization’s stated ethos real and productive. Without them, resources devoted to the brand are largely wasted.
The Strategic Plan
The plan is the organization’s platform for action. A rigorous, board-approved strategic plan with defined objectives and key results (OKRs), resource allocation, and key performance indicators (KPIs) acts as an institutional anchor. Unilever’s Compass strategy, introduced in 2020, is an example of how this works. The Unilever Compass is based on the input of 40,000 employees and external stakeholders. The Compass states aspirations — yet it sets quantifiable targets across 15 priority areas with defined timelines. Capital allocation is made, trade-offs are agreed, and people are held accountable. There are time-bound roadmaps, with investment needs integrated into the business planning cycles and regular checkpoints at the top of the organization. The organization benefits from the whole might of the company and the sense of urgency with which the rest of the business is typically managed. The brand extrapolation is direct: Unilever’s purpose-driven brands (Dove, Ben & Jerry’s, Seventh Generation) are not marketing campaigns layered onto conventional products. They are the output of a strategic framework that requires every brand to have a defined social or environmental purpose connected to measurable targets. Success is measured through the Compass, which tracks both financial metrics, like underlying operating margin, and sustainability metrics.
The Decision Framework
The decision framework checks ideas for efficacy. It prevents mere whims and wishes from joining the pantheon of projects. When a manager wants to chase a pet project or redirect resources on an untested rationale, the decision framework forces a formal review. There are different options — RACI matrices (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed), the board investment committee, stage-gate processes — that help to document rationale, capture input from multiple functions, and define approval chains. Toyota institutionalized how decisions get made, removing the possibility of unilateral executive overrides. Nemawashi is the first step in the decision-making process — the sharing of information about decisions that will be made, to involve all employees in the process. The word literally translates to “going around the roots,” drawn from the practice of carefully preparing a tree’s root system before transplanting it. Toyota codified this in Principle 13 of the Toyota Way: decide slowly by consensus, considering all options; implement rapidly. The A3 report — which compresses all information needed for a complex decision onto one sheet of paper — forces structured thinking and documented rationale. Toyota’s brand is reliability. This is not a positioning statement invented by a marketing team — it is the direct output of the Toyota Production System showing up in the product. Through kaizen, Toyota implemented a new way of building cars, eliminating waste and implementing just-in-time manufacturing as well as giving workers the autonomy to stop the production line if a quality issue arises — fixing it at its source. Nemawashi, the A3 reports, the consensus culture — these internal practices produce cars that consistently top reliability charts. Toyota did not have to claim reliability in advertising and then hope the product delivered. The internal system guaranteed the external outcome. When the practices slipped, so did the brand. The pursuit of growth took priority, which led to the recall crisis of 2009-2010. The brand did not degrade because of bad marketing. It degraded because the internal system was compromised by growth pressure.
Data-Centric Workflow
Dashboards that pull data from financial as well as production sources depict undeniable reality, which should inform workflows — highlighting redundancies, areas for improvement, and cost savings. Source-based information that follows a direct flow immunizes the enterprise against data manipulation, especially when it comes across in real time. Danaher uses its Danaher Business System (DBS) to coalesce data, analysis, and insights that inform decisions and foster improvement. Every department, every operating company, every site, every platform runs to around seven different key performance indicators. They make problems visible rather than hide them. A policy deployment tool monitors strategy implementation. Because the data is standardized, visible, and updated daily, it becomes very difficult for any individual — including a CEO — to selectively curate what the organization or the board sees. As a B2B conglomerate, Danaher’s DBS is its brand — with a promise to deliver value, reliably, to partners, holdings, and institutional investors. These stakeholders sign on to the performance promise made possible by the operating system, in which employees have direct responsibilities.
Governance
A strong, independent board with real oversight authority sets a path to enterprise-brand cohesion. They govern performance to values and assert their responsibility when things do not line up. While formal committee structures are critical to distributing management, even more critical is the board’s vigilance to what is being put in front of them. J&J illustrates both the strengths and tensions of governance architecture. The company is governed by the values set forth in its Credo, which extend to its corporate governance practices and are reflected in its By-Laws and Principles of Corporate Governance. Structurally, all directors other than the Chairman and CEO are independent, and all committees other than the Finance Committee are comprised only of independent directors. J&J’s Credo, written in 1943, exemplifies how internal governance principles become the brand itself. It was written before company culture and corporate responsibility became buzz phrases, and it includes five key responsibilities: to doctors, nurses, hospitals, and mothers who use the products, and lastly to stockholders. That stakeholder ordering — customers first, shareholders last — is J&J’s brand identity. The Credo prevailed in 1982 with the Tylenol crisis. The Credo told them what to do, and the brand was strengthened by visible adherence to it. Yet without attention, everlasting immunity to misalignment is not a given, and there is always the risk of any credo being used to control others rather than check power. The role of the board is to pay attention to the signals, which often happen first in the gut. When they are ignored, the values become tools of internal delusion that cause serious damage to the brand — as exemplified in recent J&J litigation.
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Integrity And The Path To Brand Relevance
Sometimes a reputation issue becomes a catalyst for change. In the moments or eras when a brand sustains major damage, it is often because of a departure from the ethos of integrity. Erode the ethos and you erode the brand. Straightforward strategic action informed by early warning tools, measurement, and decisiveness strengthens the relationships that keep an enterprise productive and a brand relevant. An intact ethos of integrity uses strategy to constrain the weaker aspects of human leaders — instead of merely relying on the leaders to be good.
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Mary Trigiani, Performing at the intersection of strategy, narrative, and enterprise transformation.
At The Blake Project, we help leaders turn brand into a disciplined driver of financial performance — strengthening pricing power, competitive position, and enterprise value. Email us to start a conversation about enduring profitable growth. For The EBITDA.
Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project, a strategic brand consultancy focused on turning brand into pricing power, growth, and enterprise value.
]]>Nike’s turnaround will not be easy. The company remains a major global brand with a broad portfolio, but the market has changed significantly since the end of COVID-19. Strategies that worked during the pandemic era are no longer enough to drive growth, relevance, or competitive advantage.
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Nike’s CEO, Elliott Hill, indicates that the turnaround will be “multi-year.” The aim is to generate sales, regain market share, and resuscitate Nike’s formidable sports-performance innovation to compete with the popular, fashionable“must-have” brands Hoka and On. Currently, Nike is in its “stabilization” phase of the turnaround, aka, stop the bleeding.
Turnaround experts agree that the first “must-do” turnaround action is to “Stop the bleeding.” This means both stopping the financial bleeding and stopping the bleeding of the core customer base. The immediate goals are business survival and brand revival.
Reports in the online business press highlight key elements of the action plan, such as:
All of these actions are critical for a successful turnaround.
One of the key aspects of Nike’s turnaround is needs-based, occasion-driven segmentation of customers. Nike CEO Hill hopes to regenerate brand interest and preference by using segmentation to focus on customers. The main core business must be protected and cultivated. In a turnaround, focus energies on communicating, implementing, nurturing, developing, enhancing, and reinforcing the brand’s core purpose among its core customer base. Be the best at something relevant and differentiated. Never compromise quality in the name of efficiency or availability. Focusing on the customer affects the entire organizational structure.
In a CNBC interview (October 2025), the new CEO, Hill, said that previous Nike leadership, dealing with COVID-19, focused on Nike-to-consumer relationships and lifestyle segments rather than on performance and innovation. Walking away from Nike’s performance heritage scarred the brand. This is why the current segmenting of the core customer by their performance needs and problems is so relevant. Brands gain an incredible understanding of needs and problems through segmentation.
Summarizing the interview, CNBC wrote:
“Hill is also changing the way the business is segmented and returning it to its historical roots. Instead of dividing the company into women’s, men’s, and kids’, (previous CEO) Donahue’s strategy to drive lifestyle sales, Hill is reworking the corporate structure so the company’s departments are focused on individual sports.
“’They have small cross-functional teams in each of those segments, if you will, of business, and the idea is that the consumers in each of those segments and the competition in each of those segments is different, and so by having these small cross-functional teams … that’s really helped us get sharp in a couple of areas,’ said Hill.”
The relatively new competitors, such as On and Hoka, do not have the core performance credibility of Nike. By segmenting on performance problems and needs, as well as the occasions when these problems and needs arise, Nike can modernize its past into an enviable present and future.
If you think market segmentation is old-school, you are wrong. If you think AI can provide the same customer experience with the push of a button, you are jeopardizing the brand. Market segmentation requires creative insight and synthesis.
Market segmentation requires both craft and research skills. Contrary to what many academics, researchers, and consultants say, the output of a segmentation study does not reveal the truth. In fact, segmentation can – and should – raise more questions than you had beforehand.
If analyzed and synthesized with intelligence and creativity, market segmentation can provide insight into the following:
A proper market segmentation should help you answer these three key questions:
A market segment is a specific group of people who share common needs and problems in a common context. Product categories, channels, and price categories are not market segments. There is no such thing as the granola bar market, for example. There is a market for portable, quick, easy-to-eat nutrition. There is a market for an afternoon pick-me-up. There is a market for a healthy, attractive, fit body. There is a need for portable protein before or after strenuous activities. There is a need for a non-messy, vitamin-enriched gym-bag food.
Needs-based occasion-driven segmentation avoids price, industry, product, and channel segmentation, which provide generic manufacturers’ viewpoints rather than customer-driven realities.
The focus on customer needs was reinforced in the CNBC summary.
“Under Donahoe, Nike faced criticism for falling behind on innovation and losing market share because it was so focused on driving sales of classic styles, like the Air Force 1 and Nike Dunks. Changing the company structure is one of the ways Hill plans to reignite innovation because the teams will be squarely focused on the individual needs of different athletes, allowing them to create and deliver better products for those consumers.”
Whether Nike is actually conducting new research is unclear. However, one can assume that a brand such as Nike has conducted extensive research into its core.
During the 2003-2004 McDonald’s turnaround, which took the 2003 share price of $12 to over $75 a share in a year, global needs-based occasion-driven segmentation was a crucial element of success. No new segmentation study was commissioned. McDonald’s had decades of research on its customers, over 184 studies. All of that research was synthesized into an overarching view of the global marketplace. The new McDonald’s needs-based occasion-driven segmentation affected everything, including new product development, by setting the innovation bar high, beginning all product development with the customer’s problem or need.
Brand should strengthen competitive position, pricing power, and enterprise value. The Blake Project helps make that happen.
For example, in 2003, research indicated that moms with children visited McDonald’s to purchase Happy Meals, but were dissatisfied with the menu items for themselves. These moms bought a cup of coffee. They picked at their kids’ fries. They were not in the mood for a burger. These moms had a problem: there was really nothing that they wanted to eat. Their visits were begrudgingly undertaken to keep their children happy and fed. The 2004 introduction of Chicken Caesar Salad with Paul Newman dressing was the solution.
Marketing is profitably satisfying customer needs. Satisfying customer desires and understanding the occasions when these occur are the key differentiators between marketing and selling. Selling is about convincing customers to buy what we know how to provide. Marketing is about providing what we know customers want or might want, or that satisfies their problems. Superior understanding of consumer needs and occasions provides the basis for outstanding competitive advantage.
To find competitive advantage in our fast-paced, changing world, it is imperative that brands have the clearest understanding of consumers from all angles – what they buy, who they are, why they buy, how, when, and where they use. Great segmentation leverages this understanding.
Wall Street and its analysts, along with the financial finaglers, should understand that Nike is not only focusing on the brand’s short-term financial health but also taking actions that will make the brand a long-term financial play.
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Joan Kiddon, Partner, The Blake Project, Author of The Paradox Planet: Creating Brand Experiences For The Age Of I
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