Originally published in February 2015. Rewritten in July 2026, because AI changes marketing execution.
When I first became interested in design, I was obsessed with grids and patterns. Grids are sort of an invisible framework that guides designers, helping them keep proportions and spacing throughout their layouts.
Grids are effective because even in the negative space, your brain still wants to recognize a pattern. And the human mind is always searching for patterns.
I’ve probably read 10 books on grids, and I’m still intrigued by them. I think it’s the idea that successful graphic design can be decoded, and if one knows the formula, then success becomes repeatable.
Marketers chase the same idea. It’s why The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout is still selling more than 30 years after it was written. It promises a formula that can be applied to any company or situation. It says there are rules to the game.
When I first wrote this post in 2015, it ended with a warning: the grid alone isn’t enough. That’s still true, and I’ll get back to it. But after two decades of building brands, I’ll admit what I resisted saying back then. There is a framework. We use it on nearly every engagement. And AI has made it more necessary, not less.
Why most marketing strategy frameworks fail first
Most frameworks fail because they start with tactics. A website, a blog, a social calendar. A checklist with a beginning and an end. When the checklist is done, the marketing is “finished,” and six months later nobody can say what the company actually stands for.
A marketing strategy framework that works starts one level up, with the brand itself. Not a 60-page deck. One page. If your strategy can’t survive being written down in plain language, it isn’t a strategy yet. It’s a mood.
Then AI changed what the framework is for
Execution used to be the bottleneck. Writing the blog posts, drafting the emails, producing the assets took time and money, and doing it at all separated the committed from the casual.
Now execution is nearly free. Any company can generate competent content at machine speed, which means competent has become invisible. When everyone’s tactics are polished, the polish stops mattering. The only scarce thing left is a point of view worth repeating.
There’s a second shift that matters just as much. Your next customer increasingly meets you through an AI answer before they ever see your website. Those systems describe your company by reading what you’ve published and averaging it. If you’ve never written your brand down clearly, the machine writes it for you, and it writes the same thing it writes about everyone else in your category.
The fix for both is the same. A brand, written down, in language a human can defend and a machine can find.
The framework: write your brand down in eight lines
This is the same structure we use in client workshops, and it’s deliberately simple. Eight lines, each answering one question a real buyer would ask. Write them as full sentences a stranger could understand.
1. The claim. What are you, in one sentence? No buzzwords. If the sentence still works with your competitor’s name swapped in, it isn’t yours yet.
2. The customer. Who is this for? “Everyone” is the trap. The narrower the answer, the stronger everything downstream gets.
3. The position. Why you, instead of the obvious alternatives? Name the alternative in your head while you write it.
4. The promise. What does the customer get? An outcome, not a deliverable.
5. The proof. Why should anyone believe you? Numbers beat adjectives. Pick the clients, results, years and awards you can defend on a sales call.
6. The feeling. What should someone feel after meeting the brand? This is the line most B2B companies skip, and it’s why so much B2B marketing is interchangeable.
7. The persona. If the brand were a person in the room, how would it talk? This governs every headline you’ll ever write.
8. The move. What’s the one next action you want a prospect to take? Not five actions. One.
Eight lines. That’s the grid. The website, the content and the campaigns are all things you place on it.
The eight lines are a brief, not a poster
A framework only counts if people can actually use it, and this one earns its keep as the brief behind everything the company makes. Hand the eight lines to a writer and the voice holds. Hand them to a designer and the work has a point of view. Hand them to an AI tool and you get your brand at machine speed, instead of the category average at machine speed. Everyone has the same tools now. The input is what’s yours.
They also work as a decision filter, and honestly that’s where most companies feel the payoff first. Which conference, which product name, which partnership, which piece of content. The eight lines usually answer faster than a meeting does. The best professional services firms we’ve worked with run this way, with smart people across the organization writing and creating from a shared understanding of who the firm is, until marketing stops being a department and starts being a habit.
So when I say repeatable, I don’t mean a formula that runs itself. I mean a structure you reinvest in until it becomes who you are. The company shapes the marketing, and the marketing shapes the company.
The grid alone is not a design
So yes, there’s a framework, and you should write yours down this week. But the warning from the original version of this post still stands.
Somewhere along the way we got used to the idea that marketing is “taking a solution off the solution shelf,” a phrase I’ll borrow from branding author Marty Neumeier. That all the work has been done for you. That strategy can be outsourced, or now, generated.
It can’t. The grid alone is not a design. The framework alone is not a brand. What you put in it, and how often you show up to put things in it, is what makes it work.
The only thing repeatable is the effort.
Write yours down in about 10 minutes
We turned this framework into a free interactive tool. It asks the eight questions, grades each answer for the traps above (buzzwords, “everyone,” adjectives posing as proof) and gives you a one-page brand plan you can share with your team or feed to whatever tools you write with. Try the Brand Plan Builder. Or if you’d rather work through it with people who do this every week, let’s talk.
