A longtime brand strategist who spends decades on Montana trout streams is urging AI and tech founders to abandon formulaic language like “AI‑powered” and treat branding like reading a river. He presents four practical actions — observe, position, practice, and explore — that aim to reduce wasted marketing spend and help teams break out of homogenous category language. The guidance is aimed squarely at AI teams and product builders trying to create distinct, durable identities in crowded markets.
The first action, “read the water,” asks builders to study audience feelings, cultural currents and latent needs before launching marketing. Rather than defaulting to product features, the strategist recommends careful observation of how audiences actually behave and what unspoken problems persist; those subtle signals, he argues, reveal where positioning can resonate instead of adding to the noise.
The second action centers on choosing positioning that matches the current moment. The author warns against launching with feature slides or adjective‑heavy promises and cites the archetypal line “We’re the AI‑powered platform for…” as an example of messaging that fails to elicit engagement. Positioning should respond to present user needs and cultural context, not to comfortable or familiar metaphors.
To explain crowded category dynamics he borrows a fishing analogy: famous holes draw more flies and fewer rises, just as popular product categories produce homogenous brands. Sectors like payments, cybersecurity and enterprise software often converge on the same metaphors; by contrast, Stripe reframed payments as a developer‑centric experience rather than borrowing traditional banking language. The strategist invokes John Gierach’s line that the best fishermen “make new and interesting mistakes and remember what they learned,” using it to stress iterative learning as the route to clearer, lower‑waste positioning.
Practical technical calibrations anchor the metaphors. “Choose the fly that matches the moment” translates to aligning product messaging and UX with immediate user needs. “Practice the cast until it disappears” maps to repeatable, disciplined design and messaging — illustrated by a traditional cast‑accuracy benchmark of dropping a fly into a Coke bottle at 35 feet. The essay points to Apple’s decades of small, consistent choices as an example of craft becoming invisible but persuasive to users.
Finally, the strategist urges builders to look for underfished water: pursue overlooked audiences or unconventional positioning instead of competing where everyone already plays. Concretely, that means seeking signals beneath surface metrics, walking further to find fresh opportunities, and treating brand as a practiced craft rather than an adjective. The net takeaway for AI teams is clear: observe carefully, iterate quickly, and invest in consistent, moment‑matching positioning to break category sameness.
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