If you can’t say what problem your brand solves, AI won’t either

Buyer journeys are collapsing right into a single second of analysis. David Edelman just lately described this shift because the convergence of behaviors that used to occur individually.

As choices compress, manufacturers should be clearer about what they’re attempting to resolve for the client. Many organizations are growing exercise as an alternative, with out sharpening the underlying technique.

The shift behind the compressed journey

Edelman’s argument, outlined in his March 2026 Think with Google essay, is constructed round a shorthand developed by Boston Consulting Group and Google: streaming, scrolling, searching, and shopping.

His central perception is that generative AI has snapped these 4 behaviors collectively so tightly that the outdated mannequin — consciousness, then consideration, then buy, every in its personal tidy lane — not describes actuality. Customers bounce between platforms, multitask, and shift fluidly between leisure and intent.

The info level that stopped me chilly: folks at the moment are asking AI-enabled serps for much longer, richer, extra emotionally descriptive queries. Not key phrases. Paragraphs. They share context, constraints, preferences, and urgency. 

The AI then breaks these queries into a number of search streams and synthesizes ends in actual time. What as soon as required dozens of browser tabs — hours of labor — now takes seconds.

Edelman attracts two implications from this. 

• The basic unit of competitors has modified. Manufacturers at the moment are evaluated as options to particular conditions, not as merchandise inside a class.
• The acquainted demand framework — create demand, seize demand, and convert demand — should be handled as simultaneous, not sequential. You possibly can’t do them so as anymore as a result of the journey doesn’t proceed so as.

Dig deeper: From searching to delegating: Adapting to AI-first search behavior

Enter Pogo — and Kelly’s uncomfortable reality

Walt Kelly gave us Pogo, the philosophical possum of Okefenokee Swamp, whose most celebrated utterance was the 1970 Earth Day poster declaration: “We now have met the enemy, and he’s us.”

Kelly’s most persistent goal was not any exterior villain, however the human tendency to mistake exercise for progress. His characters had been all the time busy — scheming, planning, campaigning, reorganizing — and virtually by no means clear on why.

One other line typically attributed to him captures it simply as nicely: “Having overpassed our targets, we redoubled our efforts.”

Learn Edelman’s argument by that lens, and the sample turns into more durable to disregard. He describes manufacturers racing to maintain up with compressed buyer journeys — extra content material, extra specificity, extra “reply audits,” extra presence throughout platforms and codecs. The recommendation is sound. 

However with out readability about what a model is definitely attempting to resolve for the client, extra content material and extra channels are simply Pogo’s swamp creatures operating sooner by the identical mud.

Dig deeper: Why clarity now decides who survives

The compression entice: When velocity substitutes for readability

Edelman is correct that the journey is compressing. However compression can serve two totally different masters. 

For manufacturers with crystal-clear positioning — manufacturers that genuinely know what downside they remedy and for whom — compression is a present. It helps a client construct confidence sooner. 

Warby Parker, which Edelman cites approvingly, is a clear instance: its house try-on program, clear pricing, and frictionless returns all specific a single, coherent reply to a selected query: “Can I belief shopping for glasses with out attempting them in a retailer?” Each component of that model expertise is aimed toward one goal.

For manufacturers that lack that readability — manufacturers which have gathered messaging layers over years of campaign-by-campaign advertising and marketing — compression is a catastrophe. The patron’s AI-enabled question now synthesizes all the pieces a model has ever mentioned throughout each channel, each format, each platform. 

If these alerts are inconsistent, contradictory, or just incoherent, the synthesized reply will likely be a muddle. The patron will transfer on. In Pogo’s swamp, the creature that runs quickest with out figuring out the place it’s going merely reaches the unsuitable vacation spot sooner.

Edelman gestures at this when he writes that model needs to be understood as “the sum of alerts that make an organization recognizable as an answer.” 

He’s proper. However I’d push more durable: the compression of the client journey isn’t primarily a technological downside. It’s an targets downside. 

Most manufacturers can’t clearly articulate, in a single sentence, what particular scenario they’re one of the best reply to. Should you can’t say it plainly, AI definitely can’t infer it.

Dig deeper: Why AI availability is the new battleground for brands

Certainly one of Edelman’s shrewder observations is that a few of his purchasers have constructed a “false trade-off between model and efficiency.”

Advertising and marketing departments argue over finances allocations between brand-building and demand technology as if they’re basically separate actions. That is, as Kelly’s characters would say, a really spectacular argument that fully misses the purpose.

Kelly spent years satirizing precisely this sort of inner organizational warfare — committees forming to review committees, campaigns launched to counteract the confusion brought on by earlier campaigns. 

Organizations are sometimes earnest and busy, and simply as typically distracted by their very own processes. The brand-versus-performance debate is the advertising and marketing equal of explaining why two groups can’t collaborate as a result of their mandates are structured otherwise.

In a compressed journey, model is efficiency.

• The readability of a model’s positioning determines whether or not it surfaces as the correct reply to a selected question.
• The standard of its content material determines whether or not it captures demand for the time being of confidence.

These are the identical factor seen from two angles. 

The manufacturers profitable in Edelman’s compressed journey world — Nike, Glossier, IKEA, Warby Parker — don’t look like having this argument internally. They’ve merely determined what downside they remedy and constructed all the pieces round that reply.

Dig deeper: Brand perception: How to measure and shape it

The ‘reply audit’ is simply half of the answer

Edelman recommends one thing he calls a “recurring reply audit”: study what a client would truly encounter throughout social discovery, video search, retail listings, and AI assistants for his or her commonest buyer situations. Gaps and inconsistencies, he says, rapidly turn into seen.

That is wonderful recommendation. It’s additionally, if I’m being blunt within the spirit of Kelly, solely half the medication. An audit reveals you the place your alerts are inconsistent. It doesn’t let you know what they need to be constant about. 

You possibly can audit your option to a superbly coherent set of messages that also fail to reply any actual client query, as a result of the messages had been by no means designed round precise client conditions within the first place.

It’s worthwhile to audit your targets. What, exactly, is your model the answer to? Not the product class. Not the characteristic set. The precise scenario.

The particular stress in an individual’s life that this model, and never a competitor, is finest positioned to resolve. Till that query is answered with unambiguous readability, the reply audit is tidying the swamp with out draining it.

Dig deeper: How to apply ‘They Ask, You Answer’ to SEO and AI visibility

What Edelman will get fully proper

None of that is meant to decrease what Edelman has written. Quite the opposite, his framework for serious about the compressed journey is essentially the most coherent I’ve seen in years. 

Three of his observations need to be tattooed someplace seen on the forearms, wrists, arms, necks, and behind the ears of each advertising and marketing skilled.

‘Streaming and scrolling create risk. Looking constructions alternative. Procuring occurs wherever confidence peaks.’ 

That’s not only a description of a media panorama. It’s a principle of client psychology. Confidence is the triggering situation for a purchase order. Should you’re optimizing for impressions with out asking whether or not these impressions construct confidence, you then’re very busy going nowhere.

Manufacturers should shift from ‘product language’ to ‘answer language.’ 

This sounds easy and is, in apply, revolutionary. The default mode of most model organizations is to guide with what they make. 

Edelman says lead with the scenario you resolve. That could be a elementary reorientation of how advertising and marketing is conceived and executed.

‘Are you the client’s answer? Will they comprehend it?’ 

Two questions. The primary is a method query. The second is an execution query. Most advertising and marketing fails by answering the second query with out having truthfully answered the primary.

Dig deeper: The authority era: How AI is reshaping what ranks in search

We now have met the enemy

Kelly’s Pogo ran for 25 years, and the swamp by no means did drain. The characters had been charming, the satire was sharp, and the folly continued as a result of the creatures had been incapable of distinguishing between effort and progress. Kelly discovered that humorous.

Advertising and marketing historical past, crammed with elaborate, energetic, and costly campaigns from manufacturers that not exist, is much less amusing.

Edelman has given us a helpful map of the compressed buyer journey. It’s quick, advanced, AI-mediated, and it rewards readability above all else. What he understates — although it runs beneath the floor of his argument — is that compression can be a reckoning.

Manufacturers constructed on gathered momentum, legacy consciousness, and class inertia will discover {that a} sooner journey exposes their vagueness extra brutally than a slower one ever did.

The compressed buyer journey calls for higher considering. And higher considering, as Pogo understood, begins with recognizing that the issue isn’t on the market within the swamp. It’s in right here — within the planning assembly, the model transient, the targets slide that everybody within the room suspects isn’t fairly proper, however nobody challenges.

With apologies to Pogo, “We now have met the enemy of the compressed buyer journey. And it’s our lack of ability to obviously say what we are literally for.”