Marlboro sold you a personality

In 1954, Philip Morris had a problem.

Marlboro cigarettes were marketed to women. Sales were dying. The brand was drowning in floral packaging and gentle messaging.

Then Leo Burnett had an idea that changed branding forever: forget the product, sell the identity.

They created the Marlboro Man. Rugged cowboys. Wide open spaces. Raw masculinity. Within a year, Marlboro became one of the best-selling cigarette brands in the world.

Not because the cigarettes changed, but because the meaning changed.

This was the moment branding became psychology. Marks on cattle became marks on minds. Strategists stopped asking "What do we make?" and started asking "Who do our customers want to become?"

You live in the world this created.

Every brand archetype workshop. Every "brand is a feeling" presentation. Every positioning sprint that maps emotional territories instead of functional benefits. It all traces back to this shift, from identification to identity.

And for decades, it worked beautifully.

Brands became religions. Apple wasn't selling computers, they were selling rebellion. Nike wasn't selling shoes, they were selling transformation. Patagonia wasn't selling jackets, they were selling values.

I’ve built a career on this. Helping companies find their "why." Crafting narratives that made people feel something. Creating brand worlds so rich that customers would tattoo logos on their bodies.

But the truth is, this model is collapsing under its own weight.

The internet gave everyone a voice. Social media turned every customer into a publisher. Transparency killed the ability to control narrative. And now AI is producing brand-perfect content at a speed that makes human strategists look slow and expensive.

The brand-as-identity model only worked when brands controlled the conversation. When they could broadcast their carefully crafted message and trust that most people would receive it unchallenged.

That world is gone.

Customers now know more about your brand than your brand team does. They can see through positioning in seconds. They've been sold "identity" so many times that they're numb to it. And they can get AI to generate your exact brand voice, your carefully crafted tone, your strategic word choices, your authentic-sounding vulnerability in just three seconds flat.

The thing you spent seven years mastering? A machine learned it in seven minutes.

This isn't about AI replacing strategists. That's the lazy analysis.

This is about AI exposing that brand strategy became a commodity the moment we made it a formula. Archetypes, frameworks, and tone matrices — they're all just recipes. And recipes can be copied.

And you can have a piece of that commodity too. If you're tired of watching marketing blame sales, sales blame design, and everyone blame "the funnel" while revenue flatlines, the problem isn't your team. It's that your brand isn't clear.

I built a 21-day email course that stops the blame game and gives you an actual strategy plus a 90-day action plan. You will receive real feedback from me, not a bot. It's $297, and it works.

Already 35-plus founders and markets have seen real results. Start building the brand strategy that actually makes your marketing tick.

Tomorrow, I'll show you what's happening in 2025 that's accelerating this collapse faster than anyone expected.

Reply and tell me: have you caught yourself using AI to do brand work? Be honest.

— Shashank 

P.S.

The strategists who are panicking right now are the ones who built their value on executing formulas. The ones who aren't panicking? They already moved to something AI can't replicate. (like learning actual strategy through brand engine)

More on Day 4.