Brand is your last defensiable moat
Let’s get this out of the way: the growth-hack era is over. The easy button broke. CACs are up, targeting is blunted, and consumers have fled the feed for private, ad-free spaces where your pixels can’t follow. Meanwhile, generative AI is turning your “differentiated” features into table stakes at the speed of a prompt. If anyone can clone your product overnight, what’s left?
BRAND
Not the logo or tagline — the living system of meaning, memory, and trust that buys you forgiveness in a crisis and pricing power in a boom. The thing competitors can’t download.
For a decade, performance marketing looked like magic: feed the machine, watch the dashboard rise. But the machine ran on cheap attention and abundant data. Both are gone. Privacy resets throttled tracking. Users are burned out, hiding in DMs, Discords, and closed communities where they don’t want to be interrupted — least of all by brands.
Yes, paid still works, but the curve is bending the wrong way: more spend, less impact. And when you cut brand to chase this quarter’s ROAS, you salt the earth that made those conversions possible. The compounding stops.
Now layer in AI. Features that once took quarters now take weekends. Moats built on code, UX, or data? Gone. When functionality reaches parity, emotion becomes the edge. In an age of infinite lookalikes, affinity beats feature matrices. Preference beats parity. That’s brand.
Warren Buffett didn’t say the key to success is funnel optimization. He said it’s pricing power — your ability to raise prices without losing customers. Translation: brand as a profit engine. Brand as insurance. Brand as the permission structure for margins. If a 10% price increase makes you nervous, your problem isn’t ops — it’s meaning.
Intangibles dominate enterprise value: IP, software, goodwill, and brand equity. Strong brands stabilize revenue, lower risk, and recover faster from shocks. Investors trust them. Customers forgive them. Talent chooses them.
“But brand is fuzzy.” Only if you treat it like a mood board. Marketing science is clear: broad-reach, emotionally resonant brand building drives long-term growth; short-term activation is the accelerant, not the engine. Get the balance wrong and ROI collapses. Get it right and your baseline rises — every performance dollar works harder because people already know, believe, and want you.
Brand also unlocks growth for what’s next. Want to launch a product, pivot a model, or open a new category? A trusted name buys you attention, trial, and patience. Without it, you’re shouting into the void, paying retail for every impression, every time.
Brand as Moat: Five Imperatives
Treat brand as capital, not cost. You wouldn’t strip a factory for scrap to hit Q3. Don’t strip mental availability either.
Measure what matters. Track salience, distinctiveness, and pricing power alongside CAC. Efficiency that erodes willingness to pay is fragility.
Build memory structures. Distinctive assets — colours, characters, shapes, sounds — create shortcuts in the mind that compound later as margin.
Invest through downturns. Share of voice becomes share of market on the other side. Going dark forfeits tomorrow’s compounding.
Make brand a C-suite sport. It’s not a department; it’s the operating system.
And yes, embrace AI — inside your brand, not instead of it. Use it to scale craft, not replace it. AI can automate pattern, but not point of view. Distinctiveness still requires a soul.
Because in the end, vanilla is not a moat. Distinctiveness is.
The companies that win the next decade won’t necessarily have the cheapest clicks or the flashiest features. They’ll have the deepest wells of meaning — the kind people defend at dinner tables and in group chats.
AI can copy your product. Ad platforms can rent you attention.
Only brand compounds. Act accordingly.
