Swimming upstream in the age of Agentic Endorsement

Needed to kill time last night. What better place than Bass Pro Shop? I love its tagline: We all live downstream. 

Marketing is downstream. It flows from the qualities of the product. All of us have spent too much money and effort and talent denying that fact. Say what is good about your product, and it will become evident. It won’t anymore. Social media, bloggers, redditors and search and good ‘ol journalism have been whacking at the lack of truth in advertising with ever-increasing potency for the last decade. Ai is in the process of completing the job. 

Because, with a few notable exceptions, you can’t buy your way into what I’m calling Agentic Endorsement. Yet.

 I had sore feet in Manhattan last weekend. I asked Chat what to do. It told me where I could find my favourite Converse in extra wide. And how far I had to limp to get there. This is a fine example of upstream product and downstream marketing that AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) works best with. The Agent knew my tastes in shoes; it knew my problem and went on its quest. No advertising would change its answer. If Converse didn’t make a wide version upstream, it would not have been the solution. The product had to (no pun) fit. The Agent endorsed a product. The marketing had created, over time, my preference for the brand downstream. Both working together to create Agentic Endorsement. 

This brings product and marketing people together at a crossroads. Products are usually a bundle of rational features designed to appeal to irrational decision making that is triggered by marketing. Agentic Endorsement leans more heavily into the rational, product-focussed and, to the delight of Jill and Joe Consumer, cuts through a lot of marketing-speak and horse poop.  

So, what to market? Agentic Endorsement calls for brands to discover their best, fix the bad stuff that they’ll get called out on by Ai agents and anchor their brand stories on real consumer features and benefits. This requires a lot of thinking. 

Enter Enterprise Ai. Enterprise Ai is a specialized team of agents assigned to look at competitive frames, emerging, current, viable and declining market segments, identify under and over-filled consumer market niches. They break down product and service feature and benefit comparisons between competitors in market categories. When all is said and done, you have the ability to super-tune your brand for a specific consumer and craft messaging that resonates on what’s really in it for them. You use enterprise Ai to build the perfect mousetrap for the perfect mouse and to know how to put out the perfect cheese. 

Consumers are increasingly putting their buying decisions on auto-pilot and asking Ai agents to make recommendations. The winners won’t be the products and brands that have the best ads, or even the best stuff, they will be the ones who score highest on Agentic Endorsement.