LiquidMind | Insights

Author: Bryan Smeltzer Most go-to-market plans fail in the first 90 days, and not for the reason people assume. It's rarely a bad product or a weak message. It's sequencing — teams trying to do everything from week one instead of building in the order that actually compounds. Here's the framework I use with clients launching into a new market, category, or segment. Days 1–30: Get the foundation unmistakably clear The first 30 days are not for campaigns. They're for certainty. Before a single ad runs or a single sales deck goes out, three things need to be locked: Who exactly you're for. Not a broad market — the specific buyer who has the problem acutely enough to act now. If your team can't agree on this in one sentence, nothing built downstream will hold together. What you're the only credible option for. Positioning isn't a tagline exercise. It's identifying the one claim your competitors can't make as convincingly as you can, and buildin...

Every CMO I talk to right now is running the same experiment: pointing a large language model at their brand and seeing what comes back. Most are disappointed. Not because the tool is weak, but because they're prompting for output when they should be prompting for identity. There's a real skill here, and it's not the one most teams are building. The gap between "sounds fine" and "sounds like us" Generic AI copy has a texture you can spot from across the room — competent, grammatically clean, and interchangeable with anything else the same model could produce for a competitor in the same category. It's not wrong. It's just not yours. The instinct is to fix this with adjectives. "Write in a bold, confident, friendly tone." That's not a brand voice — it's a mood board. A model given four adjectives will average them into the same bland register every other brand asking for "bold and friendly" also lands on. If your pr...