Why can't AI create a brand’s voice? With Vikki Ross

Belonging is one of the oldest drivers there is: the tribal brain sorts us from them in under a tenth of a second, and will do it on the strength of a coin toss. Brands keep asking how to build some. This episode works through what that means in practice — why belonging sits between people rather than between a person and a logo, what it takes to show up credibly inside a tribe you didn't create, and how much easier the question gets once you accept that everyone belongs to several tribes at once. Bases, spaces and faces, why CRM might need renaming, and what all of it should really change about a marketer's objectives. Part one of two, as the argument will move next week to the worth of superfans.

Vikki Ross spent most of last year believing the headlines that said AI was coming for copywriters, pondering whether what she loved doing most could be automated. She started a podcast specifically to ask industry leaders how they were replacing creatives with AI, and got the same answer from every one of them: they weren't. She joins Shann and Lynette to work out what AI still can't do with words, what's stopping it from reaching that stage. Along the way: why Virgin Voyages' AI-written copy could have belonged to any brand, what has gone wrong with car advertising, and why "anything that feels really easy to read was probably really hard to write."

David Rock's SCARF model says five drivers shape behavior from childhood onward — status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, fairness — and Lynette maps each one onto the brands that built themselves on it. Shann thinks the framework is useful, and pushes for something more primal: our relationship to death, and what it quietly does to how we buy, travel, remember, and regret. They get there via a German supermarket Christmas ad, a Singapore government app nobody would download, school board fights over library books, and Bud Light.

Jennifer Fuqua has spent twenty years inside innovation — at frog, at Fjord, at Ogilvy Consulting, and now as Senior Director of Innovation at M+C Saatchi Consulting — and she's noticed the brief never really changed: faster, cheaper, more certain. This episode asks whether that was ever the right brief. We get into why the VAR argument was never actually about accuracy, why judgment is a skill you can only build by making decisions yourself, and what happens to a market that optimizes for convenience until people opt out of it entirely. Shann and Lynette disagree along the way about whether the extremes are worth listening to. Also: what a 25-year-old should be learning right now, and why the answer is "seemingly meaningless skills."

Mark Rukman joins Shann and Lynette to argue that marketing keeps overlooking its most useful lens: history. Drawing on cultural topography, pace layers, and a habit of thinking in thousand-year windows, Mark makes the case that the shift toward creator culture is less a fad than a rewiring on the scale of the printing press. The conversation moves through Cadillac's fall from grace, a Harley-Davidson boardroom, and why global brands are running out of room to stay global. It closes on a genuine disagreement about whether the tools are outrunning the craft — and what that means for anyone building a brand right now.

Why is the marketing industry still arguing about differentiation versus distinctiveness, a decade after Sharp and Ritson first drew the lines? Lynette makes the case for a simple split: differentiate the product, make the brand distinctive. Shann mostly agrees, right up until they get to a can of Liquid Death and down a rabbit hole about the role of marketing. Along the way: what Byron Sharp actually said versus what the industry heard, why telcos spend billions on a coloring competition, and a Samsung engineering team that folded a phone without knowing why. The conversation ends on a more important point: the fight isn't really about vocabulary at all.

Heather Watson has spent her career walking backwards through the behavioral funnel: attention and consideration at Ogilvy, the use phase at Dell, and now habit formation and AI adoption at Newmark Consulting Group. She makes the case that most companies treat behavioral science as a spice rack of biases to sprinkle on a stalled project, and explains what changes when you treat it as a research approach instead. We get into why AI mandates fail, why the real barrier is capability rather than motivation, and how a company can save 172 hours a month per employee and still get nothing back. Also: whether banning social media for teenagers does anything, and what happens when a behavioral scientist runs her methods on her own three sons.

Tom Goodwin joins the show, and for someone who's built a career as a "futurist," he spends most of the hour arguing for the things that refuse to change. We get into why marketing has quietly split into two industries that no longer speak the same language, why the obsession with measuring everything might be making us worse at the job, and whether a great marketer from 1915 would still run circles around us today. But we, ourselves, change too, and the conversation turns personal — parenthood, and what it does to how you see your customers.

This week we sit down with a very atypical guest: Michael Rudzena, founding pastor of The Good Shepherd in Gramercy Park. The conversation was fascinating. It started with the exploration of desire — where it comes from, who gets to have it, and what happens when an entire industry is built on stirring it up. Michael brings in René Girard's idea that all desire is borrowed, Walter Brueggemann's read on the scripts we live by without noticing, and a version of Christianity that treats the phone in your pocket as real competition for the soul. Marketing and ministry, it turns out, are running close to the same playbook: both are in the business of loading meaning onto want. Expect luxury branding, scapegoats, and an uncomfortable question about who's actually responsible for what the feed does to people.

Shann has a strong take on this one: strategists should never specialize by channel, and why a "TikTok strategist" makes him wince. Lynette pushes the conversation into David Epstein's Range, the split between wicked and kind environments, and why the deep-generalist path is its own kind of hard-won skill. They also get into the real career costs of staying broad, the hedgehog-versus-fox split, and where AI might change the calculus for both camps. Expect strong opinions, some career vulnerability, and a few Grey's Anatomy references.