AI is walking every brand to the middle of the beach
In 1929 an economist explained why two ice cream sellers on a beach end up standing side by side. AI is doing the same to brands, only faster, and the customers it leaves behind are where the growth is.
Picture a mile of beach with sunbathers spread evenly along it, and two ice cream sellers. The sensible arrangement puts one seller a quarter of the way along and the other three-quarters of the way, so nobody walks more than a quarter mile for an ice cream.
That arrangement doesn’t last. Each seller notices that by edging toward the middle, they pick up some of the other’s customers without losing any of their own. The other seller does the same, and soon they stand back to back at the center. Now the people at either end walk half a mile, and some stop bothering.
Where the two sellers serve the beach best
Longest walk: a quarter mile
Where competition pushes them
Longest walk: half a mile
Where AI on its own starts every brand
Before anyone has moved
The economist Harold Hotelling described this in 1929 in a paper called “Stability in Competition.” It helps explain why rival airlines schedule flights at the same times, why gas stations cluster on the same corner, and why so many categories have a crowded middle and empty edges.
AI starts every brand in the middle
Hotelling’s sellers at least had to walk to the center. AI starts there. Models are built to give the most likely good answer, and the most likely answer to a brief sits at the center of everything already written about the category.
In our tests, AI on its own repeated an idea it had already written for the same brief 64% of the time, and rival AIs from different companies wrote many of the same ideas. Two competing brands using AI on its own start at the same spot on the beach before anyone has held a meeting.
The pull gets stronger as more teams use the same tools. A competent campaign idea used to cost a strategist’s week or an agency’s first round. Now it’s free and unlimited, for every brand at once, and when something becomes free its value moves to whatever is still scarce.
Who’s waiting at the ends
The people at the ends of the beach didn’t stop wanting ice cream. They stopped being served. In a category, they are the customers the leader’s approach doesn’t suit: the ones writing angry reviews, the ones on Reddit asking whether anything else exists, the ones who buy reluctantly because there’s no alternative.
Many of the fastest-growing consumer brands started there. Liquid Death sold water to people who found water brands earnest and dull. Dollar Shave Club sold razors to men tired of paying for blades locked in a plastic case. Neither set out to win the middle of its category. Each walked to one end of the beach and found people waiting.
AI can help a brand get there, but only if it starts somewhere other than the middle. An AI that knows what the customers at the ends are saying, about you and about your competitors, gives your team ideas aimed at them. AI on its own gives them the center, the same as everyone else.
The most useful question to ask of any AI plan is where on the beach it starts your team.
Get in touch
We build AI for consumer brands that starts from what customers say about them and their competitors. Name the competitor you watch most, and we’ll show you what their customers think.
steph@ill.studio
