If you can’t say what problem your brand solves, AI won’t either

Customer journeys are collapsing into a single moment of evaluation. David Edelman recently described this shift as the convergence of behaviors that used to happen separately.

As decisions compress, brands need to be clearer about what they are trying to solve for the customer. Many organizations are increasing activity instead, without sharpening the underlying strategy.

The shift behind the compressed journey

Edelman’s argument, outlined in his March 2026 Think with Google essay, is built around a shorthand developed by Boston Consulting Group and Google: streaming, scrolling, searching, and shopping.

His central insight is that generative AI has snapped these four behaviors together so tightly that the old model — awareness, then consideration, then purchase, each in its own tidy lane — no longer describes reality. Consumers bounce between platforms, multitask, and shift fluidly between entertainment and intent.

The data point that stopped me cold: people are now asking AI-enabled search engines much longer, richer, more emotionally descriptive queries. Not keywords. Paragraphs. They share context, constraints, preferences, and urgency. 

The AI then breaks those queries into multiple search streams and synthesizes results in real time. What once required dozens of browser tabs — hours of work — now takes seconds.

Edelman draws two implications from this. 

• The fundamental unit of competition has changed. Brands are now evaluated as solutions to specific situations, not as products within a category.
• The familiar demand framework — create demand, capture demand, and convert demand — must be treated as simultaneous, not sequential. You can’t do them in order anymore because the journey doesn’t proceed in order.

Dig deeper: From searching to delegating: Adapting to AI-first search behavior

Enter Pogo — and Kelly’s uncomfortable truth

Walt Kelly gave us Pogo, the philosophical possum of Okefenokee Swamp, whose most celebrated utterance was the 1970 Earth Day poster declaration: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Kelly’s most persistent target was not any external villain, but the human tendency to mistake activity for progress. His characters were always busy — scheming, planning, campaigning, reorganizing — and almost never clear on why.

Another line often attributed to him captures it just as well: “Having lost sight of our objectives, we redoubled our efforts.”

Read Edelman’s argument through that lens, and the pattern becomes harder to ignore. He describes brands racing to keep up with compressed customer journeys — more content, more specificity, more “answer audits,” more presence across platforms and formats. The advice is sound. 

But without clarity about what a brand is actually trying to solve for the customer, more content and more channels are just Pogo’s swamp creatures running faster through the same mud.

Dig deeper: Why clarity now decides who survives

The compression trap: When speed substitutes for clarity

Edelman is right that the journey is compressing. But compression can serve two different masters. 

For brands with crystal-clear positioning — brands that genuinely know what problem they solve and for whom — compression is a gift. It helps a consumer build confidence faster. 

Warby Parker, which Edelman cites approvingly, is a clean example: its home try-on program, transparent pricing, and frictionless returns all express a single, coherent answer to a specific question: “Can I trust buying glasses without trying them in a store?” Every element of that brand experience is aimed at one objective.

For brands that lack that clarity — brands that have accumulated messaging layers over years of campaign-by-campaign marketing — compression is a disaster. The consumer’s AI-enabled query now synthesizes everything a brand has ever said across every channel, every format, every platform. 

If those signals are inconsistent, contradictory, or simply incoherent, the synthesized answer will be a muddle. The consumer will move on. In Pogo’s swamp, the creature that runs fastest without knowing where it’s going simply reaches the wrong destination sooner.

Edelman gestures at this when he writes that brand should be understood as “the sum of signals that make a company recognizable as a solution.” 

He’s right. But I’d push harder: the compression of the customer journey isn’t primarily a technological problem. It’s an objectives problem. 

Most brands can’t clearly articulate, in a single sentence, what specific situation they are the best answer to. If you can’t say it plainly, AI certainly can’t infer it.

Dig deeper: Why AI availability is the new battleground for brands

One of Edelman’s shrewder observations is that some of his clients have constructed a “false trade-off between brand and performance.”

Marketing departments argue over budget allocations between brand-building and demand generation as though they are fundamentally separate activities. This is, as Kelly’s characters would say, a very impressive argument that completely misses the point.

Kelly spent years satirizing exactly this kind of internal organizational warfare — committees forming to study committees, campaigns launched to counteract the confusion caused by previous campaigns. 

Organizations are often earnest and busy, and just as often distracted by their own processes. The brand-versus-performance debate is the marketing equivalent of explaining why two teams can’t collaborate because their mandates are structured differently.

In a compressed journey, brand is performance.

• The clarity of a brand’s positioning determines whether it surfaces as the right answer to a specific query.
• The quality of its content determines whether it captures demand at the moment of confidence.

These are the same thing viewed from two angles. 

The brands winning in Edelman’s compressed journey world — Nike, Glossier, IKEA, Warby Parker — don’t appear to be having this argument internally. They have simply decided what problem they solve and built everything around that answer.

Dig deeper: Brand perception: How to measure and shape it

The ‘answer audit’ is only half of the solution

Edelman recommends something he calls a “recurring answer audit”: examine what a consumer would actually encounter across social discovery, video search, retail listings, and AI assistants for their most common customer scenarios. Gaps and inconsistencies, he says, quickly become visible.

This is excellent advice. It’s also, if I’m being blunt in the spirit of Kelly, only half the medicine. An audit shows you where your signals are inconsistent. It doesn’t tell you what they should be consistent about. 

You can audit your way to a perfectly coherent set of messages that still fail to answer any real consumer question, because the messages were never designed around actual consumer situations in the first place.

You need to audit your objectives. What, precisely, is your brand the solution to? Not the product category. Not the feature set. The actual situation.

The specific tension in a person’s life that this brand, and not a competitor, is best positioned to resolve. Until that question is answered with unambiguous clarity, the answer audit is tidying the swamp without draining it.

Dig deeper: How to apply ‘They Ask, You Answer’ to SEO and AI visibility

What Edelman gets completely right

None of this is meant to diminish what Edelman has written. On the contrary, his framework for thinking about the compressed journey is the most coherent I’ve seen in years. 

Three of his observations deserve to be tattooed somewhere visible on the forearms, wrists, hands, necks, and behind the ears of every marketing professional.

‘Streaming and scrolling create possibility. Searching structures choice. Shopping happens wherever confidence peaks.’ 

That’s not just a description of a media landscape. It’s a theory of consumer psychology. Confidence is the triggering condition for a purchase. If you’re optimizing for impressions without asking whether those impressions build confidence, then you’re very busy going nowhere.

Brands must shift from ‘product language’ to ‘solution language.’ 

This sounds simple and is, in practice, revolutionary. The default mode of most brand organizations is to lead with what they make. 

Edelman says lead with the situation you resolve. That is a fundamental reorientation of how marketing is conceived and executed.

‘Are you the customer’s solution? Will they know it?’ 

Two questions. The first is a strategy question. The second is an execution question. Most marketing fails by answering the second question without having honestly answered the first.

Dig deeper: The authority era: How AI is reshaping what ranks in search

We have met the enemy

Kelly’s Pogo ran for 25 years, and the swamp never did drain. The characters were charming, the satire was sharp, and the folly continued because the creatures were incapable of distinguishing between effort and progress. Kelly found that funny.

Marketing history, filled with elaborate, energetic, and expensive campaigns from brands that no longer exist, is less amusing.

Edelman has given us a useful map of the compressed customer journey. It’s fast, complex, AI-mediated, and it rewards clarity above all else. What he understates — though it runs beneath the surface of his argument — is that compression is also a reckoning.

Brands built on accumulated momentum, legacy awareness, and category inertia will find that a faster journey exposes their vagueness more brutally than a slower one ever did.

The compressed customer journey demands better thinking. And better thinking, as Pogo understood, begins with recognizing that the problem isn’t out there in the swamp. It’s in here — in the planning meeting, the brand brief, the objectives slide that everyone in the room suspects isn’t quite right, but no one challenges.

With apologies to Pogo, “We have met the enemy of the compressed customer journey. And it’s our inability to clearly say what we are actually for.”