A Conversation With Dr. Derrick Daye on Positioning, AI and the Brand Work That Matters.
Dr. Derrick Daye has spent more than two decades helping leadership teams connect brand strategy to business performance. As founder and Managing Partner of The Blake Project and Publisher of Branding Strategy Insider, he has advised more than 250 B2C and B2B brands and organizations across more than 40 industries, including Abbott, Coca-Cola, Intel, Nestlé, Deloitte AI, EA Sports, Southwest Airlines, FootJoy, J&J and the Utah Jazz, as well as extending to some of the world’s most recognized cultural icons and institutions, including advising Dr. Bernice King and helping shape the brand strategy for the Statue of Liberty.
His career has followed a distinctive progression. As a broadcaster, he saw himself as a communicator—making ideas clear, relevant, and compelling. As a marketer, he became a strategist, using ideas to shape perception, influence choice, and create value. Today, he sees himself increasingly as a connector, bringing together ideas, disciplines, people, and opportunities in ways that create new possibilities and new value.
Daye also holds an Executive MBA from the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business and a Doctor of Education in Organizational Change and Leadership from USC Rossier. That combination of communication, business, and organizational change shapes his view that brand cannot be separated from the larger enterprise.
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At a time when AI is dramatically accelerating execution, categories are converging, and differentiation is becoming harder to sustain, Daye believes the role of brand strategy is expanding.
I spoke with him about the business consequences of brand strategy, why positioning must evolve with the market, what leaders often misunderstand about brand value, and why judgment, clarity, and organizational alignment matter even more in the AI era.
BSI: You’ve argued that brand strategy needs to solve the problems limiting business growth. Is that a departure from the traditional role of brand strategy?
Dr. Derrick Daye: It expands the mandate.
We still need to answer the classic questions: What do we stand for? Who are we for? Why should someone choose us? But CEOs are dealing with bigger problems. Growth is slowing. Pricing power is weakening. Portfolios have become confusing. Sales is telling one story while marketing tells another. Acquisitions are creating complexity. Customer expectations are changing.
Those can all be brand problems.
The question I increasingly ask is: What will be different in the business because we did this work?
If brand strategy doesn’t change a decision, a behavior, the customer experience, or an economic outcome, we probably haven’t gone far enough.
Brand should do more than make the business easier to describe. It should help make the business more valuable.
BSI: What makes brand work consequential?
Daye: Consequential brand work changes the economics of choice.
Let’s unpack it. It might create pricing power, increase preference, improve conversion, make a complicated portfolio easier to buy from, strengthen retention, or give sales a more compelling reason to win.
Sometimes the greatest value comes from identifying what the company should not do. Preventing a multimillion-dollar investment in an opportunity the brand has no credibility to pursue can be more valuable than creating a successful campaign.
That is why brand belongs much further upstream.
David Packard famously observed that marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department. I think the same principle applies to brand. Marketing may steward it, but leadership creates it through decisions about products, people, pricing, experience, acquisitions, investment, and behavior.
BSI: For decades, positioning has been described as securing a distinctive position in the customer’s mind. Do you still believe that definition works?
Daye: Absolutely, but I think it needs to evolve.
My mentor, Jack Trout, coined the term “positioning” and, with Al Ries, helped establish one of the most important ideas in modern marketing: competition ultimately takes place in the mind. That thinking had a profound influence on me and on the work we have done at The Blake Project.
The enduring lesson is choice. You cannot mean everything to everyone. You need to establish a clear and valuable idea relative to the alternatives.
What has changed is the idea that positioning is a fixed coordinate.
Markets move too quickly now. Technology changes what’s possible. Competitors copy features. Categories converge. Customer expectations move. AI is beginning to influence discovery, comparison, and recommendation.
So I increasingly think of positioning not as a destination. But a direction.
A strong position still defines what you want to mean. But it also tells the organization where to go next—what to build, what to improve, what to acquire, what experiences to create and which opportunities to reject.
I sometimes describe it this way: Positioning is no longer a coordinate. It is a vector.
It provides both meaning and direction.
BSI: Doesn’t that risk making brands less consistent?
Daye: Only if we confuse consistency with sameness.
Distinctive brand assets should remain relentlessly consistent. This is where the work of Ehrenberg-Bass around mental availability and distinctive assets has made an important contribution. Recognition compounds over time.
But the strategy cannot become frozen.
The direction can remain constant while the expression and the business evolve. Think of it as a compass. The terrain changes, but you still know which way you’re heading.
That is a very different idea from reinventing the brand every few years.
BSI: Can you point to a client example where changing the positioning changed the business opportunity?
Daye: FootJoy is one of my favorite examples because this wasn’t a struggling brand. FootJoy was, and remains, the number-one shoe and glove brand in golf, with extraordinary credibility among serious players.
That strength also created a challenge.
Some of the brand’s historical meaning suggested that FootJoy was for the accomplished golfer. That was powerful if you saw yourself that way, but it risked narrowing the brand’s relevance in a category that was changing.
Nike, a distant third in golf footwear at the time, was increasingly becoming the default choice for golfers who measured their game less by handicap and more by participation, style and identity. In effect, Nike was helping redefine who counted as a golfer.
That exposed the opportunity for FootJoy. We needed to preserve its authority and leadership while broadening the invitation.
The positioning came through in the tagline we created: “FJ: The Mark of a Player.”
You didn’t have to be a scratch golfer or a club champion. If you played the game, respected it and saw golf as part of who you were, you could see yourself in FootJoy.
We didn’t weaken the brand’s authority to make it more accessible. We used that authority to make the brand more inclusive.
That is what consequential positioning can do. It does more than change the language around a brand. It changes the size and shape of the opportunity available to it.
BSI: What have the difficult engagements taught you?
Daye: That the hardest brand problems usually aren’t creative problems. They’re organizational problems.
You interview the CEO and hear one company. You talk with sales and hear another. Marketing has a third interpretation. Employees have learned from experience that something entirely different is rewarded. Then customers experience another version altogether.
At that point, the work extends beyond words. It is about alignment, incentives, history, politics, and change.
My doctoral work at USC Rossier focused on organizational change and leadership, and it reinforced two things that years of consulting had already taught me: first, a strategy is only as valuable as an organization’s ability and willingness to act on it.
That is where technically correct strategies often fail.
Second, every problem is an education problem. Somewhere, somebody doesn’t understand something they need to understand for the desired behavior to occur. It might be the customer, the employee, the sales force, the board, or even the leadership team.
That doesn’t mean information alone solves the problem. Education is broader than information. It is helping people see the situation differently enough that they make a better choice.
BSI: Where does brand culture fit? Can you really build a brand from the inside out?
Daye: You have to.
Marketing can make a promise. Employees prove or disprove it.
That’s why I see brand culture as the operating system behind the external brand. People need to understand not only what the brand stands for, but what it asks them to do differently when they’re designing a product, solving a customer problem, hiring someone, or making a difficult decision.
We’ve seen this across very different organizations. At the University of Iowa, we articulated the brand and developed a network of storytellers who could bring it to life across the institution. With B2B organizations such as UCX and Glen Raven, the work involved creating greater alignment and brand cohesion across teams and stakeholders. And with consumer-facing brands such as EA Sports and Luminox, the strategy had to become more than a market position—it had to give people inside the organization a clearer understanding of the customer, the promise, and the decisions required to deliver it.
That is what brand culture really means. The strategy has to become useful to the people responsible for making the brand true.
Inside-out brand building closes the distance between what you promise and what people actually experience.
BSI: Your own career began in broadcasting. How has that shaped the way you approach brand strategy?
Daye: I’ve thought about my career as an evolution from communicator to marketer to connector.
I started as a broadcast journalist. That taught me to find the important idea, understand an audience, and communicate with clarity. Marketing taught me that communication has to influence choice and behavior.
Today, much of what I do is connecting.
Connecting customer insight to business strategy. Brand strategy to financial performance. Culture to customer experience. An underused asset to a new revenue opportunity. One idea from one industry to a problem in another.
That is increasingly where I think new value comes from.
AI makes that even more interesting because information is becoming abundant. The advantage is less about having access to information and more about seeing connections others don’t.
BSI: How is AI changing brand strategy?
Daye: AI is dramatically lowering execution costs.
We can generate concepts, research hypotheses, prototypes, customer experiences, and content faster than at any point in my career.
That’s extraordinary. It’s also dangerous.
When everyone has access to extraordinary production capability, production becomes less differentiating. The scarce resource moves upstream to judgment.
What problem is worth solving? Which insight matters? What opportunity deserves investment? What should the brand refuse to do? What is genuinely differentiated rather than merely well generated?
AI can give an organization more possibilities faster.
It cannot relieve leadership of the responsibility to choose.
BSI: Are you seeing this change the way The Blake Project works?
Daye: Yes. We describe our approach as human-led, AI-enabled very deliberately.
We’re using AI to speed up the process from diagnosis to testing to action, but we’re not outsourcing judgment.
One example is The Blake Project’s Brand Performance Lab, which helps leadership teams identify where brand may be creating or constraining growth, pricing power, customer confidence, and enterprise value.
The objective is to give leaders better evidence, better questions, and better ways to pressure-test consequential decisions before they become expensive.
BSI: Branding Strategy Insider has explored competing ideas about differentiation, distinctiveness, loyalty and acquisition for nearly two decades. How should executives navigate all the conflicting advice?
Daye: Stop looking for one universal rule.
There are important lessons in all of those schools of thought. Brands need to be remembered and recognizable. They need broad enough availability to grow. But they also need reasons for people to prefer them, trust them, stay with them, and sometimes pay more for them.
The right question is well beyond, “Which marketing theory wins?”
It’s: Where is the economic constraint in this business?
If not enough buyers know you, solve that. If they know you but don’t understand why you’re different, solve that. If customers buy once and disappear, solve that. If you’re constantly discounting to close the sale, understand why.
Best practices are useful.
They become dangerous when they replace diagnosis.
BSI: What do leaders most often get wrong about brand?
Daye: They start with the deliverable instead of the problem.
“We need a rebrand.” “We need a campaign.” “We need a new purpose.” “We need an AI strategy.”
Maybe.
But those are proposed solutions.
I would rather start with: What is preventing this business from becoming more valuable?
Sometimes the answer is positioning. Sometimes it’s culture, architecture, customer experience, pricing, sales enablement, or portfolio strategy. Sometimes the best advice is to leave the identity alone.
The discipline needs to become much more comfortable solving the problem that exists rather than selling the deliverable we happen to know how to make.
BSI: Has your definition of a strong brand changed after working with more than 250 brands and organizations?
Daye: Yes. I used to think primarily about meaning. Today I think about productive meaning.
Meaning has to cause something.
Customers choose you, trust you, search for you, recommend you, stay longer or pay more. Employees make better decisions because they understand what the brand requires of them. Partners want to associate with you. Leadership sees opportunities that weren’t obvious before.
That is a much higher standard than awareness.
But it explains why brand can be such an extraordinary business asset.
BSI: What does the next era of brand strategy look like?
Daye: Faster execution, more intelligence, more personalization, and far more machine-mediated choice.
Paradoxically, all of that makes clarity more valuable.
The winning organizations won’t be those with the most AI. They will be the ones that know what they’re trying to become and can use technology to move there faster.
That brings us back to positioning.
The brand becomes the compass. AI can increase the speed. Data can improve visibility. Technology can expand what is possible.
But leadership still has to choose the direction.
The best brand strategy makes that direction valuable to customers, actionable for employees, and difficult for competitors to follow.
BSI: What advice would you give leaders trying to protect and grow a brand today?
Daye: First, recognize that brands are never finished.
I think of a brand as a river, not a pond. A pond can sit still. A river has to keep moving while remaining recognizably the same river.
Markets change. Customers change. Competitors change. Technology changes. Culture changes. What people value changes. The danger is believing that because a positioning worked for the last ten years, the job is done.
That doesn’t mean constantly reinventing the brand. In fact, continual reinvention can destroy enormous accumulated value. It means understanding what must remain enduring and what must continue evolving.
The strongest brands preserve their essential meaning while continually finding new ways to make that meaning relevant.
That’s particularly important now because AI is accelerating almost everything around the brand. Leaders will have more information, more possibilities, and more pressure to act quickly. The discipline is knowing what should change and what absolutely should not.
And executives should remember what is actually at stake. For many companies, the brand is one of the most valuable intangible assets they own. It may not appear on the balance sheet at anything close to its real economic value, but it influences preference, pricing power, customer acquisition, retention, talent, partnerships and ultimately enterprise value.
You wouldn’t casually neglect a factory, a patent portfolio or a distribution network worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Leaders shouldn’t treat the brand that way either.
BSI: Have you ever seen leadership underestimate the brand and pay a price for it?
Daye: Absolutely, and those are some of the most frustrating situations because the damage is often avoidable.
I’ve been in situations where the marketer responsible for the brand understood exactly what was happening. The research was pointing to a problem. Customers were telling us something was changing. The brand strategy identified the risk and the work showed leadership what needed to be protected.
But the executive team didn’t really value the marketer, and because they discounted the marketer, they discounted the brand work as well.
The conversation became, “That’s marketing.”
That phrase can become extraordinarily expensive.
The business made decisions based primarily on short-term operational or financial considerations. Elements of the brand that customers valued were weakened. Differentiation began disappearing. The organization gradually became more dependent on price and promotion to create demand.
Then everyone wanted marketing to fix the problem.
But by that point, marketing wasn’t being asked to build demand around a differentiated business. It was being asked to compensate for decisions that had made the business less differentiated.
That’s a much harder job.
The painful lesson is that brand erosion rarely announces itself as brand erosion. It first appears as slightly lower preference, more discounting, greater acquisition costs, declining loyalty, weaker differentiation, or salespeople needing more incentives to close.
Eventually those small signals become financial outcomes.
This is why I believe marketing is too important to be left only to marketers. But the inverse is equally important: marketing is too important for executives to dismiss as ‘only marketing’.
The strongest leadership teams understand that the marketer often sits at a unique intersection of customer behavior, competitive intelligence, culture and commercial performance. Ignoring that perspective can be very expensive.
BSI: You describe brand as an intangible asset. What does that change about how executives should manage it?
Daye: It changes the standard.
If brand is an asset, management’s responsibility extends beyond communicating it to increasing its productive value.
That means continually asking whether the brand is becoming more or less valuable.
- Is it easier for customers to choose us?
- Can we command a premium?
- Are we more differentiated than we were three years ago?
- Does the brand give us permission to enter new markets?
- Does it make acquisitions easier to integrate?
- Does it help us attract better talent?
- Does it reduce the amount of money we have to spend convincing people to consider us?
Those are asset-management questions.
And they force a very different conversation from, “Do we like the new campaign?”
One of the mistakes companies make is treating brand investment as an expense whose value disappears when the campaign ends. Much of the best brand building works in exactly the opposite way. It accumulates.
Recognition accumulates. Trust accumulates. Distinctive assets accumulate. Reputation accumulates. Customer memory accumulates.
That accumulated advantage is one reason strong brands can produce extraordinary economics.
So I would encourage CEOs and boards to stop asking only, “What are we spending on the brand?”
Ask instead:
“What are we doing to increase the value of one of the most important intangible assets we own?”
Paul Friederichsen is a partner and brand strategist at The Blake Project.
At The Blake Project, we help leaders turn brand into a disciplined driver of financial performance — strengthening pricing power, competitive position, and enterprise value. Email us to start a conversation about enduring profitable growth. For The EBITDA.
Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project, a strategic brand consultancy focused on turning brand into pricing power, growth, and enterprise value.
