"If you sell based on the value of the brand and the product, and people have very strong brand affinity, that brand affinity is going to exist regardless of whether people go to your website or whether they buy it agentically."
Important to note this is a sharp, logical, systems level thinker who is talking about brand marketing as the unfair advantage.
The core of his message:
The relationship matters more than the channel.
People who love your product will find it, whether they're on your site, in ChatGPT, or buying through an AI agent.
Brand travels.
Trust compounds.
That's a fundamentally different message than "optimize for the algorithm" or "be everywhere the customer is."
On the flip side:
"If your only value prop is aggregation and discovery within the current paradigms, you're going to have a lot of questions to answer."
Conversational search lets shoppers describe exactly what they want in ways keyword search never could - context graph (my last week’s post)
Collison thinks this could democratize discovery for lesser known brands, the counterintuitive upside of the shift.
AI companies are going global faster than any prior wave of SaaS or social media.
Brand affinity is the thing that travels with any consumer company through every channel shift.
Build the relationships and trust.
The rest follows.
This goes for B2C and B2B marketing.
DM me if you’re curious how we have helped other AI companies earn that trust and built for the long haul.
