Creating mindshare for brands within human and artificial intellects

From Memory to Machine Learning

Across consumer, B2B, and AI spaces, brand relevance wins attention

Making Mindshare

Actively Recalling a Brand

Effective branding captures a share of an individual’s mental bandwidth—known as mindshare—by prompting recall or recognition of a specific product, service, or brand. It’s the measure of how often and how deeply a brand lives in someone’s thoughts.

Mindshare is quantified through metrics like unaided and aided brand awareness, interest, and consideration—reflecting how much attention and popularity a brand holds within its target audience.

In the AI Age, a new dimension of mindshare is emerging: one shaped by how often a brand is recommended by a person’s chosen AI tools or agents.

Branding in AI Age

New Rules of Capturing Mindshare

AI is already shaping consumer behavior—now brands must shape how.

Human Mindshare

AI Mindshare

Brand Management via Humans

Human marketers interpret nuance, infer intent, and fill in gaps—so brand guidelines can afford creativity, tone, and flexibility

Brand Management via AI

LLMs are literal: ambiguity causes confusion. Brand guidelines must now speak to a second audience—machines that require clarity, structure, and semantic precision.

Capturing Human Mindshare

Humans have limited attention, shallow brand recall, and cognitively resist effort—so brand communication must offer emotional rewards to earn engagement

Capturing AI Mindshare

LLMs, by contrast, thrive on detail, process vast information effortlessly, and demand content that’s structured, dense, and built for machine digestion.

SEO - Search Engine Optimization

The practice of optimizing websites to rank higher in search engine results, increasing organic traffic through keyword relevance and site structure. Historically, optimization for human click behavior & rank on SERPs.

GEO - Generative Engine Optimization

The practice of making your brand and content discoverable, interpretable, and recommendable by both humans and AI—across search engines, LLMs, and synthetic media.

Human forward Campaigns

Campaigns must spark emotion, conversation, and cultural relevance to generate buzz and earn human attention.

AI forward Campaigns

Campaigns must be clear, structured, and memorable to be absorbed and referenced by AI systems. Transcribable content cited by AI lends salience to among humans.

Winning hearts, minds and models: Brand building in an AI world.

Tom Roach explores brand building in the LLMs and how to influence this new audience with brand communication.

Marketing Week (October 2025)

Consumer Mindshare

In the P&G tradition, consumer mindshare means becoming a household name—the first brand that comes to mind for a product or service. To win it, brands must resonate across a broad, diverse audience and stay “top of mind.” Consumers are driven by desire, price, emotional connection, and brand perception. Brands like Nike and Apple earn mindshare by showing up in cultural moments and everyday life.

Building mindshare requires emotionally rich content across high-visibility channels like TikTok, Instagram, and retail. Success is measured by brand sentiment, recall, and engagement. The strongest B2C brands don’t just sell—they mean something, embedding themselves in how people feel and choose.

Business-to-Business Mindshare

B2B mindshare means being seen as a trusted, reliable partner in a specific industry. The audience is a professional solving a business problem—motivated by ROI, efficiency, and expertise. Decisions hinge on data, case studies, and reputation. Brands like HubSpot earn mindshare by embedding value early in the buyer journey.

Content lives on LinkedIn, webinars, and niche channels. Metrics include recall, pipeline velocity, and reduced sales friction. Consumer and business mindshare differ—and in the AI Age, the ways to earn it are evolving fast. Today’s B2B mindshare is about being the answer before the question is asked.