Martin Weigel

An editor does not write the book. A consultant does not run the company. But what they both provide is the rigour of asking - what are you actually trying to do, and are you doing it? In this sense, the best editors and the best strategic consultants hold the client to the best version of themselves. The goal is never to make the book sound like the editor, or the brand sound like the consultant. It is to make each sound like the truest version of itself.

But an organisation with genuine clarity about who it is, where it is trying to go, and what decisions will get it there is not defenceless against that uncertainty. It is oriented inside it. It knows what signals to watch and which ones to ignore. It knows what a good decision looks like even when the data is ambiguous. It knows when to hold its course and when the signals that matter are strong enough to warrant a change of direction. It can move faster, waste less, and hold its shape under pressure in ways that organisations chasing certainty - commissioning the next round of research, waiting for the model to tell them what to do - simply cannot.

That is the job. It was always the job. It is the only honest account of what strategy can actually deliver. The work is not to make the uncertainty disappear. It never does.

That upstream narrative work cannot always be done from the outside alone, nor can it always be successfully delegated entirely within. Clarity and practical application often requires (particularly when conviction and direction have leaked from the organisation) both proximity and distance. But however they accomplish it, the organisations that do the work find that they become more deliberate and more coherent - not just in their communications, but in their decisions, their culture, their product, their conduct under pressure. The organisations that don't find that the activity never quite adds up to anything - and that consumers (and their own people) can feel the gap between the promise and the delivery. The infrastructure either gets built or it doesn't. The difference accumulates in both directions.

In the end, organisations don’t get the brand they advertise. They get the brand their decisions build. And those decisions either run on narrative infrastructure - or they drift.

AI removes the last remaining cover. In a world where everyone has access to the same generative capabilities, at the same cost, at the same speed, the only thing that differentiates one organisation’s output from another’s is the quality and specificity of the self-knowledge it was built from. If the model cannot clearly summarise what your brand stands for, what makes it different, and why someone should choose it, the issue is very probably not the model. It is usually that the brand itself lacks articulated clarity. So the good news is that AI will force marketers to answer the question it has spent the best part of two decades neglecting - "who are you?". You cannot prompt your way around the identity question, automate your way past it, or ask the machine to serve you an oven-ready answer. “Find out” - Dolly's instruction requires honesty about not merely what you said you believed, but what your decisions reveal you believed; what you could do and are choosing not to; and what you have become versus what you intended to be. 

There is much that is problematic with the theology of ‘insight’ as presented by the self-appointed members of its Inquisition. But even if one were to reject the various articles and tests of faith they demand and think more simply (heresy!) in terms of useful understanding, I have come to believe that as a way of thinking about our intended audience, it is still not quite enough.