Marketing is entering an unusual period. The tools available to businesses have never been more powerful, and the cost and time required to produce marketing activity are falling rapidly. AI can research, write, analyse, ideate, automate and increasingly participate in sophisticated marketing workflows that previously required considerable human resources.

It would therefore be easy to conclude that technology itself is becoming the competitive advantage.

We believe the opposite is happening.

As powerful technology becomes available to everyone, access to the technology becomes less differentiating. The advantage moves upstream, to the quality of the strategy directing it.

This thinking sits at the heart of what we are developing at OnePoint. Before discussing campaigns, channels or media, we want to understand what success actually looks like for the business. What commercial outcome are we trying to influence? What would need to change for the business to consider the strategy successful?

Once that is understood, the next priority is identifying who represents the strongest commercial opportunity. Not every possible customer should carry equal strategic weight. Businesses need clarity around their ideal customer and a deep understanding of the problem that customer is trying to solve.

At OnePoint, we frame this through a simple blueprint: Problem, Consequence, Solution and Why Us.

• What is the customer’s real problem?
• What is the consequence of leaving it unresolved?
• How does the business solve it?
• And, critically, why should that customer choose this business rather than an alternative?

Those questions sound straightforward, but answering them properly influences almost everything that follows.

The brand needs to reflect that proposition and connect with the ideal customer. The website, content, social presence, sales collateral and campaigns need to reinforce it consistently. Technology then needs to sit underneath those assets so customer behaviour can be tracked and performance measured. Customer journeys need to be deliberately designed so that the experience from initial awareness through consideration, conversion, retention and advocacy feels connected rather than accidental.

Only after those foundations are established should businesses seriously consider scaling media investment.

We think of this as the OnePoint Strategy Stack. Each layer supports the next. Clarity around commercial success leads to clarity around the ideal customer and proposition. That informs the brand. The brand informs the marketing assets. Technology connects and measures those assets. Intelligent customer journeys turn activity into a deliberate experience. Media then amplifies the entire system.

Starting at the bottom of the stack by simply buying more media is one of the easiest ways to waste money.

There is another discipline sitting underneath this approach. Regardless of how complicated the business challenge might initially appear, a good strategy should eventually be reducible to four things: Goal, Problem, Insight and Solution.

The goal establishes the outcome. The problem identifies what is preventing it. The insight reveals something that changes our understanding of the problem. The solution becomes the strategic choice we make as a consequence.

This distinction around insight is important. Businesses have access to enormous amounts of information, but information and insight are not the same thing. Knowing that customers are abandoning a website page is information. Understanding why they are abandoning it, what uncertainty is causing that behaviour and what needs to change is potentially an insight.

Often those insights are already sitting inside the business. They exist in conversations with customers, CRM records, sales calls, complaints, reviews, search behaviour, lost opportunities and the experiences of frontline staff. The challenge is having the discipline to look for patterns rather than immediately jumping to solutions.

This is where AI becomes particularly interesting.

We don’t believe AI should replace strategic thinking. We believe it can dramatically improve it.

Used properly, AI can become a strategic sparring partner. It can challenge an assumption, present an opposing argument, identify gaps in evidence, explore different interpretations of customer behaviour and pressure-test a proposed strategy before significant money is committed to it.

That is a very different use of AI from simply asking it to produce another piece of content.

The better the technology becomes, the more important this distinction will become. If every competitor can produce competent content, analyse information and automate marketing processes, simply producing more will offer diminishing advantage.

Competitive advantage will increasingly come from knowing what deserves to be produced in the first place.

There is considerable complexity behind good strategy, but the final strategic idea should normally be simple. It should give the organisation clarity about the customer it wants, the problem it intends to solve and the position it wants to own. It should then guide decisions across brand, marketing, creative, technology and media.

AI is making businesses capable of doing more than ever before.

Our view at OnePoint is that the next competitive advantage won’t belong to the businesses that simply do more.

It will belong to the businesses that think better.