This is an inflection point many successful family businesses eventually reach. The business has grown beyond what that approach was designed to do.

A marketing strategy for family business growth has to take what already works—your reputation, relationships, expertise, and customer loyalty—and turn it into something that can keep working as the company changes.

Why Family Businesses Reach a Unique Marketing Inflection Point

Marketing strategies to grow family businesses often develop differently. Nobody sat down 25 years ago and built a lead-generation strategy. Dad knew everybody in town and new customers came by word of mouth. The company did good work, picked up the phone, and kept growing.

That model can be remarkably effective, but it can also become dependent on a handful of people. That dependency becomes much more visible and can be a challenge during a transition. According to recent research, 40% of family businesses are either going through leadership succession now or expect to within the next 10 years. The next generation isn’t necessarily inheriting the same relationships, reputation, or way of doing business.

That raises some uncomfortable but necessary questions. Does your customer base trust the company, or primarily the founder? Does anyone besides the family know why customers choose you? Could your team explain your value proposition without saying, “Well, everyone knows us”?

Growth doesn’t require throwing away what made the business successful. Quite the opposite. The goal is to capture those strengths so they belong to the business, not just the people who built it.

The Referral Engine Has a Ceiling

Referrals are great. There are few better ways to win a new customer than having a happy one tell them, “You should call these people.” However, referrals shouldn’t go from being an advantage to being the entire marketing strategy to grow your family business.

You can’t tell your referral network that revenue needs to grow 20% next year and ask everyone to kindly send 20% more business your way. Referrals arrive when they arrive, often from the same circles where your company is already well known, which makes them difficult to forecast and scale.

Another complication for family businesses: people may be referring customers to a person, not the company. If Mom has spent 30 years building relationships throughout the industry, those relationships are enormously valuable. But what happens when she wants to work three days a week, or retire somewhere warm and stop answering her phone?

Instead of working on replacing referrals, set a goal to build another engine alongside them that can introduce the business to people who don’t already know your family.

Sustaining a Business and Scaling One Require Different Marketing

For years, marketing may have been something the business did when it made sense. You might have sponsored a local event, updated the website every few years, or sent an email to customers. Maybe someone remembered to post on LinkedIn every now and then.

Once leadership sets a specific growth target, though, marketing needs to help the company reach it. The business has to get clearer about who you want to reach and why they should choose you. Your message has to make sense even when the founder isn’t there to explain it. You need ways to consistently reach new customers, and understand which marketing efforts are actually contributing to sales.

None of this means you suddenly need to spend a fortune on marketing or show up on every channel imaginable, just that your marketing efforts must become more deliberate. It’s also important to get clear on who in the business should be responsible for making that happen.

Why Your First Move Probably Shouldn’t Be a Junior Marketing Hire

“We need marketing” often turns into “we need to hire a marketing person.” Fair enough, but who are you hiring?

A junior marketer can be great at executing a plan: managing social media, coordinating campaigns, writing emails, updating the website, or keeping outside vendors moving. What they generally shouldn’t be expected to do is walk into a family business, figure out where the company should grow next, determine which customers matter most, clarify decades of accumulated positioning, choose the right channels, set a budget, and tie everything back to revenue. In other words, the work of an entire marketing function.

Without clear direction, even a talented hire can end up doing whatever seems most urgent or visible so the company gets more activity, without a marketing strategy for the family business to grow. Before hiring someone to execute a plan, you need someone capable of creating it.

An Agency Isn’t Automatically the Answer Either

Need a new website? Paid search? SEO? Content? A good agency can bring expertise and capacity your team doesn’t have internally, but somebody still needs to tell them where you’re going. An agency typically owns its piece of the marketing puzzle. It doesn’t necessarily own your growth target or decide how all those pieces should work together.

Here’s a useful test: If you hired an agency tomorrow, could you clearly explain who you want to reach, why they should choose you, what you need marketing to accomplish, and how you’ll know whether it’s working?

If those answers are fuzzy, you more likely need marketing leadership to help your family business grow.

What Family Businesses Often Need to Grow at This Stage: Marketing Leadership

For many growing family businesses, fractional marketing leadership offers a middle-ground solution between hiring your first marketing coordinator and adding a full-time CMO to the executive team.

A fractional CMO brings senior marketing experience into the leadership team without requiring a full-time hire. More importantly, they start with the business problem rather than a predetermined marketing solution.

What are your growth goals? Where will that growth come from? Which customers should you prioritize? What makes your business meaningfully different? What needs to change in your marketing, and what should you leave alone?

From there, they can build the strategy and determine what resources are actually needed to execute it. That might mean hiring an internal marketer or bringing in an agency. Often, it’s some combination. The point is to decide what you need before you start buying it.

Growth Doesn’t Mean Leaving the Family Business Behind

Professionalizing your marketing to grow doesn’t mean turning a family business into something unrecognizable. Those relationships, reputation, customer knowledge, and years of experience are advantages. You just have to make sure they can continue creating value when the business expands, leadership changes, or the founder is due to retire.

So before deciding you need more marketing, ask whether the marketing approach that got you here can reliably get you where you want to go next. If the answer is “probably not,” your old approach hasn’t failed. The business has just reached a new stage.

If you’re trying to figure out what marketing should look like in that next stage, &Marketing can help you build the strategy, leadership, and team you need to grow without losing what made your business successful in the first place. 

The post Family Owned Business, Growth Goals: When the Marketing That Got You Here Won’t Get You There appeared first on &Marketing.

Your instinct may be to start fixing things. Resist it.

A new CEO marketing strategy should begin with understanding what you actually inherited before deciding what needs to change. That does not mean spending six months observing from the sidelines. It means using your first 90 days to separate what is truly broken from what is merely unfamiliar, identify where marketing can support the growth expectations now sitting on your shoulders, and make changes based on evidence rather than first impressions.

Your First Job is Not to Evaluate the People

When a new CEO arrives, the marketing team knows it is being evaluated. They may not say that out loud, but they know.

At least initially, though, your job is not to decide whether you inherited the “right” people. It is to understand the system they have been operating inside.

What is marketing actually expected to accomplish? How does that connect to the company’s growth strategy? What markets and customers matter most? Where is the money going? Who sets priorities? Who gets to change them halfway through the quarter? Those questions will tell you much more than an early judgment about the team itself.

A capable marketing leader can look ineffective inside a company with unclear priorities, bad data, constant executive overrides, or six different agencies all somehow “owning strategy.” On the other hand, a busy, well-liked team can produce an impressive volume of activity without producing much that matters to the business. Your first job is to figure out which version you inherited.

This is especially important if marketing has historically lacked a clear owner. In many growing companies, the CEO, head of sales, Integrator, or whoever happens to have the strongest opinion slowly becomes the de facto marketing leader. We have written before about why marketing needs clear strategic ownership rather than simply becoming another responsibility on the CEO’s plate, and a leadership transition is a good time to determine whether that ownership actually exists.

Days 1–30: Understand What Marketing Thinks Its Job Is

Begin with the strategy before diving into the scorecard. Ask your marketing leader and team to explain the current marketing strategy without creating a new presentation for the occasion. You want to understand the operating reality, not the version everyone had three days to polish. You should come away knowing:

• Who the company is trying to reach and why
• What makes the company meaningfully different from competitors
• Which products, services, markets, or customer segments matter most
• Where marketing is investing its time and money
• How that work is expected to contribute to growth
• What the team believes is working, what is not, and what they would change if they could

Then compare those answers with what you are hearing elsewhere in the business.

If sales says the company desperately needs more qualified opportunities while marketing believes its primary job is building brand awareness, you have an alignment problem. If the board expects rapid expansion into a new market but marketing’s priorities still revolve almost entirely around the legacy customer base, that matters too.

Neither situation automatically means the marketing team is failing. Sometimes the company changed and nobody told the marketing strategy.

For companies running on EOS, this disconnect can be easier to spot because marketing should have a clear relationship to the V/TO, Rocks, Scorecard, and Accountability Chart. If yours does not, our article on marketing’s role inside EOS goes deeper into what that should look like.

Days 30–60: Follow the Money, Then Follow the Evidence

Once you understand what the strategy is supposed to accomplish, determine whether the evidence supports it. This is usually the point where someone opens a dashboard. Traffic is up. Engagement is strong, and impressions look impressive. There may be several arrows pointing in encouraging directions. Fine. But is marketing helping the business grow?

At this stage, look at:

• Major areas of spend, including agencies, technology, media, contractors, and vendors
• What your internal team owns versus what has been outsourced
• Lead quality and conversion
• Customer acquisition trends
• Digital visibility
• Performance by market, segment, or product where the data exists
• Whether marketing activity connects credibly to pipeline, retention, market penetration, revenue growth, or another business outcome that matters

You don’t need perfect attribution, particularly if your company has a long or complex sales cycle. You do need something more useful than “marketing influenced this somehow.”

Then widen the lens. Your CRM can tell you what happened inside your own funnel. It cannot tell you whether a competitor has changed the buying conversation, customer priorities have shifted, your positioning has become less relevant, or the attractive new market everyone is excited about actually wants what you sell.

That is why we approach marketing consulting as a combination of internal knowledge and external evidence. If you are about to make an expensive decision, it is useful to know whether the assumptions underneath it are actually true.

Days 60–90: Decide What Actually Needs to Change

By this point, you should be seeing patterns rather than isolated symptoms. You may discover that the team is stronger than expected but has been operating without clear priorities. You may find that the strategy is sound but execution is scattered across too many channels, vendors, and side projects nobody remembers approving.

Maybe the company is still using positioning that made perfect sense three years ago and considerably less sense now. Or maybe there are genuine capability or leadership gaps that need to be addressed. The important thing is that now you know what problem you are solving. That distinction matters because “we need better marketing” is not a diagnosis. Neither is “marketing needs to perform.” Those are executive expressions of displeasure, which can be emotionally satisfying but are not especially useful as operating plans.

Do you need more demand from the right buyers? Better positioning? A clearer go-to-market strategy? Stronger leadership? Better execution? Better customer intelligence? Those problems may overlap, but they are not interchangeable. Solving the wrong one can easily burn six months and a ton of cash.

When to Trust the Team and When to Bring in Outside Perspective

A new CEO can make two opposite mistakes with an inherited team: 

1. Assuming the existing team cannot objectively assess its own work.
2. Assuming it absolutely can.

Your team has institutional knowledge  an outsider will not have. They know why certain decisions were made, which customers behave differently than expected, where internal resistance lives, and which “new ideas” have already been tried twice under different names.

But institutional knowledge can also become institutional assumption. If everyone has agreed for years that a certain customer segment is the priority, a certain channel is indispensable, or a certain message is what the market wants, eventually those assumptions start to feel like facts…and we all know what assuming does.

If the company is facing new ownership, aggressive growth expectations, a new market, a major product launch, or a changing competitive environment, some of those assumptions deserve to be tested.

That is where an external perspective can be useful. Your team is likely capable, and they don’t need someone to arrive with a 72-slide deck announcing that your website could be better. You need someone with no stake in defending the current budget, team structure, vendor relationships, or history to look at the evidence and tell you what it says.

Sometimes that work surfaces a meaningful problem. Other times, it confirms that the team is doing many of the right things and mostly needs clearer priorities, stronger leadership, or more support. Either answer is useful. The point is not to bring an outside perspective for the sake of adding another voice to the room. It is to get a clearer read on what is actually happening before you start reorganizing teams, replacing vendors, or redirecting budget.

A New CEO Marketing Strategy Should Create Clarity Before Activity

Ninety days is enough time to make meaningful decisions about marketing. It is not enough time to understand every campaign, customer segment, technology platform, vendor relationship, and historical disagreement the company has collected over the years. Nor should it be.

Your job is to understand whether marketing is aligned with where the company needs to go, whether the evidence supports the current strategy, and whether you have the leadership and capabilities required to execute it. Then you can change what needs changing and leave alone what does not.

&Marketing helps executive teams diagnose what is actually happening before committing to an expensive solution. You can discuss your challenge with our consulting team or explore examples of the work we have done with other organizations navigating growth and change.

The post New CEO, Inherited Marketing Team: What to Do in the First 90 Days appeared first on &Marketing.

Most CEOs know what they spend on marketing. Far fewer can confidently explain what it produces, where revenue is being lost, or who owns fixing it. Download the CEO Marketing Diagnostic to identify the gaps between activity, clarity, and accountable leadership. Then understand what kind of support your company actually needs.

The post The CEO Marketing Diagnostic: 10 Questions Every CEO Should Be Able to Answer About Their Marketing appeared first on &Marketing.

To be fair, it doesn’t always have to be “fractional CMO vs. marketing consultant.” Plenty of companies default to an agency retainer, promote someone internal, or bring in an interim executive instead. Each can work for a minute but don’t determine whether your marketing function works in twelve months and beyond. This article is about the difference between two senior level strategic marketers.

Fractional CMO vs. Marketing Consultant: The Distinction

Here’s a simple “fractional CMO vs. marketing consultant” table. Skim it if you’re short on time, and read the rest for the details.

Marketing Consultant: Decision-Ready Truth

A marketing consultant exists to answer one question: what should we believe, and how do we know? They won’t fix your entire marketing strategy “for good” — they’ll provide a credible, outside-the-echo-chamber answer before you commit to something you can’t walk back.

That’s a narrow job by design. Good consultants often publish their methodology before you ever get on a call with them, because if you can see how they think, you’re more likely to trust what they conclude. They run the audit, build the framework, and hand over case studies with baseline-to-result numbers attached rather than vague “we drove engagement” claims, and then they’re done.

This is the right choice when you suspect something’s not working and need someone credible to confirm it, or when you’re stuck and need clarity without hiring a full-time employee.

Fractional CMO: Accountable Ownership

A fractional CMO answers a completely different question: who is going to own this and move it forward?

Instead of offering recommendations to achieve one specific campaign goal, a fractional CMO sits in your leadership meetings, owns the marketing budget, manages your team and the agencies and freelancers you’ve accumulated, and gets evaluated on revenue. If marketing underperforms, that’s now their problem too, which is a different incentive structure than anyone who leaves once the contract ends.

This is a good choice when the founder is still approving every campaign (you know who you are), when the team is executing tactics without a guiding strategy, or when true accountability and ownership of that strategy are required.

Why Choosing Wrong Is Expensive

Fractional CMO vs. marketing consultant is rarely a one-person decision. Challenger’s research puts the average B2B buying group at nearly 12 stakeholders, and Gartner found that 74% of those groups experience real, unhealthy conflict before making a decision. 

Hiring the wrong type of help costs the credibility of whoever championed the decision internally and adds another data point to the pile of “we tried marketing help and it didn’t work.” Getting the category right before you pick a person is how you avoid becoming the cautionary tale someone else cites later.

Fractional CMO vs. Marketing Consultant: Which One Do You Need?

Most companies are in one of these positions:

• You’re the founder, still personally approving campaigns, and your team is busy but uncoordinated: Fractional CMO
• You just went through a PE recap or acquisition, and the board wants someone accountable for marketing, immediately: Fractional CMO
• You’re the Head of Marketing and need outside validation before a leadership meeting: Consulting
• You run on EOS or a similar operating system and need a diagnostic that fits your cadence, not a personality hire: Consulting
• You’re a PE operating partner sizing up a portfolio company and need board-ready facts before anyone commits investments: Consulting

If you read that and thought you’re a little of both, that’s normal, and it’s why we keep these as two separate service lines instead of one vague “marketing help” page that tries to be everything to everyone.

A Note on Doing Both

Plenty of the smartest companies don’t pick one and stop there. They use both, just not interchangeably.

A consulting engagement can come first when the business needs an outside read on the market, customer, competition, positioning, or current performance before deciding what kind of leadership is required. In that case, the consultant helps define the problem clearly enough that the company can make a better decision about what comes next.

A fractional CMO can also bring in a consultant later for a specific, bounded question: a competitive intelligence sprint, voice of customer research, market validation, positioning work, or a diagnostic before a major investment. In that setup, the fractional CMO still owns the marketing function. The consultant is there to pressure-test a decision, add external evidence, or bring specialized expertise without creating confusion about who is accountable.

That’s the key. Doing both works when the roles are clear. It breaks down when a company expects a consultant to quietly become the marketing leader, or expects a fractional CMO to be the unbiased third party on every strategic question while also owning the day-to-day outcome.

The point is to match the right kind of senior help to the right problem at the right time.

Pick the Conversation, Not the Service

If you need to know whether something is worth doing before you spend money on it, that’s a consulting question. If you need someone to run marketing so it stops landing back on your desk every week, no one-time audit or analysis alone  is going to fix that. You might want to start with that to get the lay of the land, but you ultimately need the strategic ownership a fractional CMO provides. We can help you figure out which questions you need to answer so you know which choice is right.

The post Fractional CMO vs. Marketing Consultant: Which One Does Your Business Actually Need appeared first on &Marketing.

We had just presented our quarterly  competitive benchmarking findings for their business,  a Global Fortune 500 energy and technology company navigating one of the most disruptive moments in their industry’s history: AI of course. 

The company’s internal metrics looked strong. The team was smart. The brand had credibility. On paper, there was plenty to feel good about. But leadership had a nagging suspicion (the kind that keeps sharp CMOs up at night) that they were measuring too much against themselves and not enough against the market around them. The question nobody could answer with confidence was not, “Are we doing fine?” It was: “Are we actually ahead, or do we just feel ahead because we’re big?” That is exactly the kind of question good marketing consulting should answer honestly. 

The Transparency Problem Nobody Talks About

They have dashboards, reports, fancy analytics platforms, internal meetings, agency updates, campaign recaps, and enough spreadsheets to make everyone feel either productive or mildly trapped.  The issue is that most internal data only tells part of the story. It tells you what happened inside your own ecosystem. It tells you how this quarter compared to last quarter and whether campaigns improved, traffic shifted, leads increased, or conversion rates changed. That information matters, but it does not always tell you:

• whether your competitors are moving faster
• whether buyers are forming opinions before they reach you
• whether your category narrative is being shaped by someone else
• whether your brand strength is masking a visibility problem

Those are harder truths to surface internally. People inside the organization are also navigating priorities, politics, legacy decisions, budget realities, executive preferences, and the very human desire not to be the person who walks into a leadership meeting and says, “The market does not see us the way we see ourselves.” That is where an outside perspective becomes valuable.

We outsiders are not magically smarter.  We also overuse tabs, lose track of Google Docs, and occasionally underestimate how long it takes to untangle a “simple” tracking issue. What we are, though, is  not attached to last year’s plan, this year’s budget, or the internal logic that got the company here. Our job is to look at what the market is actually doing and say what needs to be said, even when it complicates the story. That is the work we were doing for this client when we kept telling them things they didn’t want to hear. 

When Internal Confidence Meets External Reality

Here’s the pattern we see repeatedly, across industries and company sizes: leadership assumes they’re winning because the internal signals say so. That client came to us because they wanted an unbiased, third-party view of the competitive landscape across several priority markets. A company can be performing well by its own historical standards and still be losing ground in the places that shape future demand. It can have strong brand awareness and still be underrepresented in the searches, conversations, and decision moments where buyers are forming early preferences. It can have meaningful proof points and still fail to make those proof points visible when they matter most.

We built a foundational competitive benchmarking model that translated a complex, rapidly shifting digital landscape into a consistent view of category performance. Across the client’s defined competitor set, we looked at visibility, messaging, positioning, content footprint, paid presence, regional consistency, and the signals that indicated which companies were building authority versus simply relying on brand recognition.

The goal was not to embarrass anyone or create a “gotcha” deck. The goal was to replace assumptions with clarity. Leadership needed to know where the company had leverage, where it had exposure, and where the market was moving faster than internal conversations had acknowledged.

There were real strengths in the findings. They had meaningful brand credibility, strong technical proof points, and places where its visibility was moving in the right direction. The client  also had a broader story to tell than many of its competitors, because its value was not limited to one product, one campaign, or one market conversation. They hold all of the qualities to position themselves as the most comprehensive partner in their space. Unfortunately, some competitors were doing a better job turning their own strengths into a story the market could easily repeat. They were showing up with sharper messaging, more consistent content, clearer proof, or a louder presence in the conversations shaping buyer perception. Basically, some of our client’s  biggest  advantages just need to be packaged, amplified, and  connected more clearly and loudly online.

Leadership needed a readout that said, “Here is where you are genuinely strong, here is where the market is not yet giving you enough credit, and here is where competitors are turning similar or smaller strengths into louder market signals.” That is the kind of clarity good consulting should create—an unbiased, transparent view of where the company has leverage, where it has exposure, and what it needs to do next.

The Real Value Is Not the Report

At &Marketing, we’re brought in when leaders need an honest external view — of their market, their customers, their competitive position, or their own messaging. The work is different every time, but the commitment underneath it is always the same: we tell you what you need to hear, not what will make this quarter’s review easier to sit through.

That means surfacing blind spots. It means delivering conclusions leadership can act on, not reports that raise more questions. It also means being willing to say the uncomfortable thing, because the only version of this work that’s actually worth doing is the honest one. Plenty of firms can package familiar observations in a polished deck. Plenty of agencies can show you what happened last month and call it strategy. Plenty of vendors will happily validate the decision that keeps the next invoice moving. The work is helping leaders see clearly enough to make the right call.

We laughed over our response to that CMO, but what we said was true. The only way we stop telling clients things they don’t want to hear is if they stop asking us to look. And the only reason to stop asking is if you’d rather feel confident than be confident.

The Question Worth Sitting With

Who in your organization is paid to tell you what you need to hear rather than what you want to hear? If the honest answer is nobody, or we have reports that nobody reads, or we rely on internal metrics and assume the rest — that’s the gap. In a digital market being reshaped by AI, shifting buyer behavior, and competitors who move faster than your planning cycle, that gap has a cost.

We built our consulting practice for exactly this reason. If you want an outside perspective that’s actually willing to use it, that’s a conversation worth having.

Our competitive benchmarking approach gives leadership teams the unbiased, outside perspective they need to pressure-test assumptions, track what matters, and act before gaps widen.

The post Why Good Marketing Consulting Should Make You Uncomfortable appeared first on &Marketing.

The rise of AI search has had a greater impact than we’ve seen in quite some time as many sites see a 15-25% drop in organic traffic and some reporting drops as low as 60%.  It is changing how people find information, how they evaluate credibility, and how much they actually need to click before forming an opinion. That does not mean SEO is dead (because apparently we have to keep saying that every few years), but it does mean the old visibility playbook is getting a lot less predictable.

For business leaders, this makes the top of the funnel harder to understand. Traditional metrics are being disrupted, attribution is getting murkier, and “we rank well” no longer guarantees the same level of attention, traffic, or trust. The companies that will struggle most are the ones with vague positioning, inconsistent messaging, and content that sounds like it could belong to any competitor with a thesaurus and a Canva subscription.

The fundamentals of market positioning strategy still matter. In fact, they matter more. When AI search is pulling signals from your website, third-party content, reviews, social platforms, PR mentions, and the broader digital ecosystem, your positioning needs to be clear, consistent, and specific enough to survive outside the neat little walls of your homepage.

Now is the time to revisit the fundamentals and understand how to adapt before the market starts defining your company for you.

What Is Market Positioning?

Market positioning is all about how your customers see you relative to your competitors. What do they expect from you that they may not expect of others? What makes them choose you instead? 

How does market positioning strategy differ from other marketing activities? 

Your market positioning strategy should be the foundation for all your marketing activities.

• Positioning vs. Messaging: Messaging is how you communicate your market positioning.
• Positioning vs. Value Proposition: Positioning is about competitive differentiation, while your value proposition is the specific benefit you promise.
• Positioning vs. Differentiation: Differentiation identifies what makes you unique, while positioning is how you strategically use that uniqueness.
• Positioning vs. Branding: Branding is the creative expression and identity of your brand, again built on the foundation.

Market Positioning Strategy vs. Brand and Product Positioning

It’s easy to lump market positioning, brand positioning, and product positioning together because they all sound like cousins at the same very crowded marketing family reunion. But they do different jobs, and mixing them up is how companies end up with messaging that feels polished but doesn’t actually help anyone understand why they should care.

Market positioning is about where your company or offering fits in the competitive landscape. It answers the bigger strategic question: Why should this market choose you instead of the other options available?

Brand positioning is about the space your brand occupies in your audience’s mind. It shapes perception, trust, personality, and emotional association.

Product positioning is about how a specific product or service is differentiated. It gets more tactical, focusing on the audience, use case, pain point, and proof behind that particular offer.

Market positioning is the umbrella strategy. Brand positioning brings the company’s identity and perception into focus. Product positioning translates that larger strategy into specific offers people can understand, compare, and buy.

In other words: if market positioning is weak, the rest of the messaging stack gets shaky fast. You can have a beautiful brand and a well-written product page, but if the market does not understand where you fit or why you matter, you have a bad foundation.

What’s Changing: How AI Search Is Disrupting Traditional Visibility

Zero-click search is exactly what it sounds like: the user gets an answer without clicking through to another website. That used to happen mostly through featured snippets, knowledge panels, and other search result features. Now AI Overviews and AI-powered summaries are accelerating the shift by giving users more complete answers directly on the results page.

Research indicates that around 80% of consumers rely on zero-click results for at least 40% of their searches, which helps explain why so many sites are watching organic traffic drop even when search demand has not disappeared. The audience may still be searching. They may still be finding answers. They just may not be visiting your website to get them. Annoying? Yes. Surprising? Not really.

This hits top-of-funnel informational content especially hard. When someone searches a straightforward question, AI can often summarize the answer well enough to satisfy the user in the moment. That makes basic educational articles, definition posts, and generic “what is” content more vulnerable to traffic loss.

Lower-funnel content is a different story. Searches tied to evaluation and decision-making often still require more digging. Buyers want proof, nuance, credibility, and context before they make a decision. AI can summarize the landscape, but it cannot always replace the deeper work of comparing options, validating trust, and figuring out which company actually knows what it is talking about.

That is why AI search does not make positioning less important. It makes lazy positioning easier to expose. If your content is generic, interchangeable, or built around surface-level answers anyone could summarize, it is going to be easier for search engines to bypass. If your positioning is specific, consistent, and backed by real expertise across your digital ecosystem, you have a much better chance of showing up as a credible answe even if the user doesn’t click.

The Challenge

Because of this, traditional SEO metrics like click-through rate and ranking position don’t provide as clear a view, and the top of the funnel becomes more difficult to track. Without the click, there are fewer opportunities for brands to capture first-party data and leads. You may also lose control over how your brand is presented, as AI may reformat or rephrase your content.

The Opportunity

Building zero-click search visibility undoubtedly strengthens brand awareness, authority, and trust that influences later buying decisions. Competition for AI search visibility will only grow from here, meaning it will never be easier to win than it is right now. Brands that adapt quickly will find it easier to establish and maintain their authority in the long term.

What Still Works: Timeless Positioning Principles

In times of disruption, revisiting the fundamentals of market positioning strategy and reviewing what still works can provide direction for moving forward. Core positioning principles, such as the 5 P’s, will always be non-negotiable. If your customers can’t see a clear differentiation from competitors, a demonstration of expertise and authority, consistent messaging across all touchpoints, and a deep understanding of their needs, you won’t stand out in their minds as a confident choice. 

AI cannot replace emotion or judgment, and it doesn’t offer reliable decision support. Content quality and your brand’s unique personality are keys to building a genuine connection with your audience so they remember and internalize your messaging. Trust is still earned through consistent quality and authentic expertise, and both will improve your chances of gaining AI search visibility.

There is still a desire for content that demands clicks. Charts, step-by-step instructions, personal experiences, opinions, and judgment calls that require credibility and human expertise remain high-value, click-driving options. But don’t focus too hard on bottom-level funnel content, neglecting top-level needs because they are murkier to navigate. Instead, adapt your market positioning strategy for AI search.

How to Adapt Your Market Positioning Strategy for AI Search

We recommend four steps to begin adapting your market positioning strategy for AI search.

Get Help AI-Proofing Your Market Positioning Strategy

Your brand’s foundation, your market positioning strategy, is more important than ever, but the execution needs an upgrade. The new customer journey is evolving, and the longer you wait to adapt, the more difficult and expensive it will be. If you want high-quality results without the wait, our team can audit your search strategy.

Read this case study to see how we help one client keep up with AI search positioning on a quarterly basis. Reach out to our team below if you have any questions about your marketing strategy or approach to AI search! 

The post  Market Positioning in the Age of AI Search: What’s Changing and What Still Works appeared first on &Marketing.

A global energy management and residential electrical solutions company was preparing to launch a new circuit breaker product designed for modern residential applications, including HVAC systems, EV chargers, pool equipment, and other high-demand residential loads.

The product had a strong technical foundation and clear internal rationale. It was built for a market where residential electrical demands are changing, code requirements are evolving, and contractors are being asked to support more complex home power needs than ever before. Their team needed to turn that technical value into a message electricians, contractors, distributors, and channel audiences would actually understand.

The launch team had several potential product benefits to emphasize. Each had a role in the product story, but it was not yet clear which benefits would resonate most, which required more education, and which claims could create confusion if framed the wrong way.

Before going to market, the company needed to validate its assumptions with the people closest to the work. They needed to understand how electricians would interpret the product’s value, what language felt credible, what pain points were most urgent, and how the product should be positioned across sales, channel, packaging, and education materials.

&Marketing was brought in to conduct voice-of-customer research that could pressure-test launch messaging, clarify the strongest path forward, and help the team move into launch with more confidence.

&Marketing’s Approach

&Marketing designed and conducted a voice-of-customer research initiative focused on understanding how electricians think about product adoption, code changes, installation challenges, nuisance tripping, diagnostics, and breaker selection.

The work included 21 structured phone interviews with electricians across multiple U.S. regions. Participants included both company-provided and independent contacts, giving the team a broader view of how the market understood the category and where messaging could gain or lose traction. The research was designed to answer several critical launch questions:

• Which product benefits matter most?
• How familiar is everyone with upcoming requirement and code changes?
• What language feels clear, credible, or confusing?
• How do they evaluate new technology?
• What objections or adoption barriers could slow market acceptance?
• Which applications should be emphasized in launch messaging?
• What information would help them understand the product faster?

&Marketing analyzed the interviews to identify recurring themes, pressure-test internal messaging assumptions, and translate electrician feedback into practical recommendations for launch strategy, sales enablement, packaging, and channel communications.

Results

The research gave the launch team a clearer, more practical path for bringing the product to market.

&Marketing found that electricians were less motivated by technical innovation on its own and more focused on code compliance, reliability, fewer callbacks, and practical jobsite value. That insight helped shift the product story away from feature-heavy language and toward messaging that connected the technology to real installation and service concerns.

&Marketing’s voice-of-customer research gave the launch team a clearer, more defensible path to market before the product entered a high-stakes launch window.

The work helped the client move beyond internal assumptions and understand how electricians actually evaluate new products in the field. Instead of relying on the way the product was described internally, the team gained a customer-backed view of which benefits were most compelling, which claims needed more explanation, and which messages could create confusion if they were not translated into more practical language.

The research also clarified the messaging hierarchy for the launch. &Marketing helped the team distinguish between the product benefits that should lead the story, the supporting points that could strengthen the case, and the technical details that needed to be simplified for sales, channel, and education materials.

Just as importantly, the work surfaced potential adoption barriers before launch. The client gained a sharper understanding of where electricians might need more education, where skepticism could emerge, and how messaging could better connect product innovation to real-world jobsite priorities.

As a result, their team walked away with:

• A clearer, customer-backed messaging strategy for launch
• Stronger language for sales, channel, packaging, and education materials
• A better understanding of which product benefits mattered most to electricians
• Practical guidance on how to translate technical differentiators into field-relevant value
• A sharper view of potential objections, education needs, and adoption barriers
• Greater confidence that the launch story was grounded in buyer reality, not internal assumptions

The project helped the team move into launch with greater confidence, stronger customer-backed messaging, and a clearer understanding of how to position a technical product in a mature, code-driven category.

If your team is preparing for a product launch, entering a new market, or trying to turn complex technical value into messaging buyers actually understand, &Marketing can help.

The post Voice-of-Customer Research Sharpens Product Launch Messaging appeared first on &Marketing.

Download the &Marketing consulting one pager to see what senior-level clarity actually looks like.

When the business is shifting (whether that’s thanks to AI, new ownership, new competition, or a growth target that just got moved up), the last thing you need is a six-month engagement that ends with a deck full of things you already suspected and a six-figure invoice.

You need someone who will tell you what’s actually true, surface what your internal team can’t see, and hand you something you can act on.

&Marketing works with executive teams at the moments when the cost of being wrong is real. We pressure-test assumptions, uncover blind spots, and deliver the kind of insight you can stand behind in front of your board, your PE firm, or the rest of your leadership team.

The post Make Confident Decisions During Moments That Matter appeared first on &Marketing.

A Global Fortune 500 energy and technology company is facing massive industry disruption due to the rapidly changing AI boom that is both changing their business and reshaping their product offers and strategic focus. Their global CMO was concerned they might be assuming they were winning simply because they are a massive, established industry authority and they have a formidable competitor making considerable “noise” in the industry (through PR, product launches, events, etc). He needed a clear perspective to understand the landscape and a roadmap on where to focus resources.

In a category (and a digital landscape) being redefined by AI, fast-moving competitors can gain ground quickly. Leadership wanted an unbiased third-party view of the full competitive landscape to pressure-test assumptions and answer questions like:

• Where do we truly stand vs. the fast moving competitors shaping this category right now? (their existing benchmarks were largely internal)
• What does “good” look like today in a world where performance is changing quickly across SEO, AI search, paid, and fragmented channels?
• Who is building real category authority (not just brand awareness), and how?
• What should we track quarterly so we can see shifts early and act decisively?
• What content should we be creating that will be found via online search and resonate with our target decision makers?

They wanted a credible baseline and an executive-ready view of the landscape—both globally and by country — that is clear enough to guide decisions, and structured enough to refresh quarterly.

&Marketing’s Approach

We designed a foundational competitive benchmarking SEO and AI Search model that translated a complex digital landscape into a consistent, trackable view of category performance and positioning.

Across five priority markets and a defined competitor set, we built an apples-to-apples baseline spanning:

• Category visibility: whether the brand shows up when buyers research the topic
• Messaging and positioning: how competitors define the category, what claims they lead with, and which proof points they use (partnerships, innovation narratives, outcomes)
• Content footprint: who is educating the market vs. only describing products, and the impact
• Paid presence: whether anyone is actively capturing high-intent demand with category-specific messaging
• Regional consistency: how the competitive landscape changes across regional markets

We packaged this into a report their executive team could make near real time decisions that included:

1. a benchmark framework built for quarterly updates
2. a clear narrative: what the market is rewarding, which competitor is shaping perception, and where the client is exposed or advantaged—across SEO + AI search visibility dynamics.
3. a roadmap of recommendations by priority, including a content calendar, messaging inputs by decision maker, and technical / website updates to simplify the user journey.

Results

This benchmark replaced internal assumptions with measurable, decision-ready data that surfaced several high-impact realities leadership could act on.

• A smaller competitor was consistently outranking the client on core, non-branded category online searches. In our tracked set, that competitor held the #1 position for 3 of the 4 highest-volume category terms, and top-three placements on the majority of the category terms we monitored, meaning they were becoming the default discovery brand.
• The client’s brand was most present in searches closest to purchase, but not leading at the moments that shape preference (earlier in the funnel). The client ranked on most of the tracked category terms, but frequently outside the top 5, where visibility and click-through fall off sharply and buyer impressions get set by whichever brand appears first.
• The benchmark revealed real leverage the client can capitalize on quickly. The client already has strong proof points (capabilities, innovation story, ecosystem credibility); the issue was making those proof points discoverable and cohesive within the buyer journey.
• Category-specific paid competition was essentially absent. Across the competitive set, estimated category-specific paid activity was minimal, even though several category terms carry $5+ cost-per-click—a rare indicator of high-intent demand with minimal bidding pressure.
• Leadership gained a way to measure visibility quarterly. The team left with a repeatable scoreboard tied to category visibility, message consistency, and competitive momentum—so they can spot fast movers early and respond before gaps widen.

The impact: This client gained category-specific clarity on where they’re winning, where they might be exposed, and where to aim both their strategy and tactics to own this growth segment in an increasingly AI-altered landscape. They are currently in the process of implementing our roadmap of content, website, and localization recommendations, the results of which we will continue to track in future projects.

Want to know if a focused competitor is passing you by in the category you’re betting on next?

&Marketing’s competitive benchmarking approach gives you an executive-ready baseline, a repeatable quarterly scoreboard, and a clear roadmap for building category authority in a world where SEO and AI search are rewriting the rules.

The post Quarterly Competitive Analysis of Category Leadership in an AI-Shifting Market appeared first on &Marketing.

A long-established, mission-driven supplier with over $100MM in annual revenue serving highly-regulated stagnant institutional markets was seeking new paths to overcome flat growth with the long term aspiration of growing the business by 7x. Leadership had targeted one of the largest and most attractive categories but lacked confidence in where real opportunity existed.

Internally, the organization had developed market sizing and share estimates that suggested meaningful upside. However, the market had no syndicated data sources, so those estimates were built on partial data, legacy assumptions, and fragmented sources, which were difficult to validate or reconcile. The internal hypothesis was that the internal market sizing estimate was off by at least 20%.

The leadership team faced several unresolved questions:

• What is the true size of the market—and how is spend actually distributed?
• How much demand flows directly to institutions versus through indirect channels?
• Where does the company genuinely over- or under-index relative to competitors?
• Which factors truly influence contract wins and losses?

Without a defensible market view, the organization risked misallocating resources and pursuing growth based on incomplete assumptions.

&Marketing’s Approach

&Marketing was engaged as a strategic consulting partner, tasked with bringing rigor, transparency, and insight to a market clouded by complexity and incomplete/incorrect data.

Rather than starting from scratch, the team took a challenge-and-validate approach by pressure-testing existing models, integrating external data, and documenting every assumption to ensure leadership confidence and internal alignment.

Key elements of the approach included:

• Market model validation and refinement: Existing market sizing and spend assumptions were tested against population data, consumption patterns, channel dynamics, and proxy markets to determine where models held—and where they broke down.
• Channel and consumption analysis: The team clarified how products are actually purchased and consumed, distinguishing between directly purchased items and indirect purchasing channels that materially reshaped market dynamics.
• Competitive landscape assessment: Competitors were analyzed across pricing, positioning, portfolio mix, and relative scale to establish where the client was advantaged, exposed, or competing on uneven ground.
• Decision-driver identification: Early customer and market signals were used to rank the factors that most influence purchasing decisions—moving beyond assumptions to evidence.
• Methodology transparency: All data sources, assumptions, and limitations were explicitly documented, enabling leadership to defend conclusions internally and act with confidence.

Project Results

The engagement reshaped how leadership understood both the market opportunity and the company’s true position within it.

1. A materially different market reality

• Total category size proved to be significantly larger than previously assumed – 2.5x the assumed market size
• Annual consumption per capita was substantially underestimated – it was actually double that of previous internal models
• Indirect purchasing channels were revealed to be almost double the direct institutional spend, reframing growth opportunities and potential risk

2. Clearer share and performance context

• The organization’s position in core direct markets was stronger than believed, making the client the number one direct supplier
• At the same time, key indirect channel providers were challenging market dynamics and stealing share from direct suppliers (including our client)
• Competitive pricing analysis showed that the client was being squeezed on pricing by large indirect suppliers who had scale and smaller direct suppliers who were lean and/or willing to absorb lower margins
• Channel communications from client and competitors were very similar, creating a sense of “sameness” in the market despite the client’s clear competitive advantages

3. Sharper strategic focus

• Leadership gained clarity on which markets and channels deserved focus, and which did not
• Decision-making shifted from assumption-driven to evidence-backed
• Growth planning for the following year was grounded in a defensible, shared view of reality

4. Immediately actionable recommendations/tactics

• The analysis uncovered approximately $25-40 MM in targeted sales opportunities, providing almost immediate ROI to the commercial team
• Further, based on customer insights, &Marketing was able to provide input to better communicate the client’s unique value proposition in the face of intense competition and a cluttered marketplace
• &Marketing also identified opportunities to improve operations, consolidate product offerings, and sell current products into the larger indirect channel – all focused on cost efficiencies and revenue growth

Most importantly, the organization moved forward aligned and equipped with a market perspective it could trust, explain, and act on. This work gave leadership a shared, actionable understanding of where the opportunity truly lies and how to pursue it.

&Marketing’s consulting practice exists for moments like this: when the stakes are high, the data is fragmented, and leadership needs insight. If you’re facing a similar inflection point, let’s have a conversation!

The post Category Market Analysis Drives More Confident Growth Decisions appeared first on &Marketing.

Business Challenge Summary

With a leadership team preparing the company for expansion, our client partner looked to conduct a market sizing and opportunity analysis for the hiring market for professional drivers in the United States. They faced a lack of empirical knowledge and internal resources to conduct the analysis, so they turned to &Marketing for resources, intelligence and strategic tools to help make an informed decision to how to grow within the hiring market for drivers, which faced strict regulatory requirements, high turnover, and a myriad of new entrants.

&Marketing’s Approach

Through a data-driven approach, &Marketing was able to provide an insightful analysis of the transportation sector in order to empower this client to better understand which pockets of the industry were growing, what types of companies made up the industry, examples of companies in each sub-sector, and the basic needs of each group of potential employees.

The &Marketing team conducted internal client interviews, mined publicly available data sources, and searched through the subscription-based service Statista to gather data and create a revenue model. The goals were to showcase:

• The overall size of the market (number of drivers)
• How the market subdivided itself based on the need for driver certifications & qualifications, types of drivers, and other factors
• The distinct composition and unique needs of each segment of drivers

This analysis also included customer lists for each segment, major trends surrounding them, and a revenue model to calculate potential client opportunity. &Marketing concluded this market research and analysis by delivering a recommended pilot program for a specific business unit, displaying the market potential and paving the way for the rest of the business units.

Results

The comprehensive data and segmentation &Marketing provided equipped the client partner with the research results and confidence they needed to present this market opportunity to their investors. In parallel, our client partner is in the process of rolling out a go-to-market strategy in the transportation industry uncovered through this analysis and is specifically approaching the companies most likely to benefit from their unique offer. Further, &Marketing assisted in improving their investor presentation so it told a clear story and was visually impactful.

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Researched Data on Market Size and Employee Trends

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Created Market Segments Based on Qualification Criteria

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Identified Target Companies in Each Segment and Their Hiring Needs

The post IT Client Uses Market Research & Analysis to Generate Funding for Growth appeared first on &Marketing.