I'm late, friends. My sincere apologies!
Hello, Brand Enthusiasts and Entrepreneurs! I am rolling right into your Wednesday morning. Please charge it to my calendar and not my heart.
My August showed up the way it always does…like it didn't care at all that I had plans to ease into the week. My inbox had opinions, and the to-do list had additions. This week, I am shifting gears a bit, and I hope that you will still cherish me the same after.
You know I love sharing the latest cool marketing AI updates and features with you. It’s my e-love language, but I wouldn’t be a true marketing and brand strategist if I didn’t also share upcoming challenges that may require your attention, or a shift in your brand model.
Stick with your long-winded typing friend. This is one of those issues where I think you'll find yourself nodding yes, a lot.
1. Houston, We Have A Customer Handoff Problem.
Last week, TheyDo CEO Jochem van der Veer published a piece that said something I've been trying to articulate to clients for years. A majority of companies don't have an issue with getting customer insights. Just look at the plethora of unsolicited comments on social media. They have piles of it: from survey results, satisfaction scores, operational data, dashboards that refresh automatically every Monday. What they're missing is clarity on who is actually responsible for doing something with any of it. Read the full piece here.
Why It Matters
As AI gets layered onto this situation, the tools get faster at identifying the gaps, but if nobody owns the gaps, faster identification just means faster confirmation that nothing is changing. That can be a costly oops to your business. The article makes a point that I think is really important. AI can tell you a problem exists, but it cannot decide which department should own it, how competing priorities should be balanced, or what accountability should look like.
What This Means for Your Business
You can pick one thing your customers bring up repeatedly, whether it’s the slow follow-up, the moment where they had to explain themselves twice, the thing that always seems to fall through. Now, if you can, name one specific person who is responsible for that moment. If the honest answer is "well, it kind of depends" or "we've talked about addressing that," you've just identified your actual problem, and no new software or AI platform is going to solve it until that ownership question gets answered.
L.A. Branding Perspective
More information will not improve the experience if nobody owns what happens next. This is a wonderful opportunity for leadership to have a conversation. And right now, a lot of organizations are hoping the technology will have that conversation for them. It shouldn't.
Your brand promise can get communicated clearly by marketing. And then somewhere between the sale and the delivery, the person handling delivery doesn’t quite understand the assignment. Your customers aren't separating their experience by department; they're just deciding whether your business feels like one consistent experience or a few different teams improvising independently. And they are making that call a lot faster than you'd think.
2. B2B Buyers Are Done Repeating Themselves
New research from Oraczen published this week makes the case that agentic AI is fundamentally changing what B2B sales looks like, and I think it has implications well beyond enterprise sales teams. The argument: traditional CRM logging gives you names, dates, and deal stages. What it misses is the nuance: the colleague who quietly influences the decision, the billing frustration that's been simmering, the comment dropped at the end of a call that signals the whole deal is at risk. Agentic AI systems are now monitoring for those signals constantly, in real time, and coordinating the right response without waiting for a rep to manually piece it together. Read the full piece here.
Why It Matters
Professional buyers are still people. They notice when they have to repeat themselves. They notice when the left hand doesn't know what the right hand promised. They notice when a warm, attentive sales process dissolves the moment the contract is signed, and someone new takes over. In a world where their consumer experiences are increasingly smooth and coordinated, B2B friction stands out more than it ever has.
What This Means for Your Business
After every important client conversation, send a short recap. What you heard. What happens next. Who owns it. When they'll hear from you. It sounds simple because it is, and almost nobody does it consistently. It takes ten minutes, and it is genuinely one of the highest-return habits I've seen in small service businesses. Not because clients need the information. They were there; they know what was shared; nonetheless, it tells them that you were listening and that what they said is being carried forward.
L.A. Branding Perspective
Responsiveness is evidence of something. Every time a client gets a specific, prompt follow-up from you, they're updating their sense of what it will feel like to work with you for a potentially bigger opportunity for your business down the line. This is some of the most effective marketing you will ever do. Trust me, this level of top-tier marketing doesn't happen in Canva. And this is coming from me, a Canva lover.
3. Creators are becoming a testing engine, not just an awareness channel
A round-up from NetInfluencer pulled together insights from 50 creator marketing experts on what brands should change heading into the second half of 2026. The consensus was pointed: stop using creator partnerships purely to buy impressions. Use them to learn. The brands that are getting the most value right now are treating creator content as a testing engine. They are watching what language resonates, which questions keep coming up, what objections the audience voices in the comments, and feeding all of that back into their owned content and conversion systems. Read the round-up here.
Why It Matters
A creator's audience will tell you things a focus group never would. How so, Lena? Because they're not in a room being asked, they're just responding to content they genuinely care about. The way they describe the problem, the language they use, the thing they keep asking- that is invaluable. And most brands are counting the impressions and leaving all of that on the table.
What This Means for Your Business
Before your next creator collaboration, decide what you want to learn from it, not just what you want people to see. Build a debrief into the process. What were the top comments? How did the audience describe the problem the product solves? What did they ask that surprised you? Take that language and put it back into your messaging. Your customers are telling you how to talk to them, and most brands don't even look at it.
L.A. Branding Perspective
The creator partnerships that teach you something are worth far more than the ones that just buy eyeballs you don't own. I've watched brands run creator collaborations, spend three weeks debating caption length, and then do absolutely nothing with the 600 comments where their exact target customer described their problem in their own words. Those comments are more honest than a survey, and you're paying for them either way. If your only post-campaign question is "what were the numbers," then you're leaving the most useful part on the table. The numbers will tell you what happened. The comments tell you who these people are. One of those things helps you run the next campaign. The other one helps you build a better business and experience.
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A Thought From Behind The Brand: Your Brand is in The HandOff |
My husband and I have been wanting to try this restaurant we’ve been scroll stalking on TikTok and Instagram for the past three months. Three whole months! I may have called to confirm my reservation twice in the same week. (He says it was three times. I maintain it was twice and I have no regrets.)
We were able to finally go, and from the moment we arrived, it was everything. The host said my name before I gave it to her. I still don't know how she did that, but for a quick second, I thought we too were being stalked. Shocking, but I can't lie, I had all of the feels as if I were a little princess.
Our server showed up within two minutes, knew the menu the way someone knows something they love, and by the time we ordered we were already having a genuinely great time.
And then she got pulled to handle something at another table.
A different server came to cover her. Friendly guy, warm smile, clearly competent. Zero context about us. He asked if we'd decided on appetizers yet. We'd already been eating them for twenty minutes. He brought our drinks to the table and had to take them back because they belonged to the next party across from us. He came to tell us that unfortunately, the fish was off the menu (insert the sads). That was my order. He was quick to apologize, but didn't suggest what I could potentially order instead.
The manager came by at the end, and she was pure joy. Warm, funny, comped our beverages due to the situation, and even gave us free desserts. We left having had a nice time overall.
But on the drive home, I couldn't stop thinking over this one thing: the beginning of that evening was a ten. The ending was a nine. And everything in the middle - the moments where one person passed responsibility for us to another person, without any context traveling along with it - that's where it dropped to a lukewarm five or six.
Let me say this clearly: nobody at that restaurant was bad at their job. The server who got pulled away was genuinely great. The cover server was trying his best. The manager handled it beautifully. But there was no system for "here's what matters about this table" to move with us through the evening. Every handoff started things over.
I see this in businesses all the time, including ones that are otherwise doing a really good job. A prospect has an exceptional first call; you listened, you got it, you made them feel like you built your whole business specifically for their problem. They say yes. And then the next person they interact with, whether that's a team member or an onboarding sequence or just a follow-up email, has no idea what made that first conversation work.
The things that made them feel understood don't travel forward. The experience resets as if it forgot them.
Your brand is not just what happens at the beginning. It's what happens at every handoff after. And most of the time, nobody is designing those handoffs at all. That's the part that's still up for grabs. Thankfully, it's not as complicated as it sounds. It just requires someone deciding that it matters.
It’s time to ask if the someone supporting these consistently elevated experiences is you, or another member of your team. Either way, your brand promise is not a sentence on a website. It is the pattern a customer experiences when the business gets busy.
Quick Tips & Tricks
Before your next client transitions from "prospect" to "customer," ask yourself: "Does the person or system taking over from here have everything they need to continue the very intentional experience I started?"
Write one paragraph about who they are and why they said yes.
No need to include the contract details, just the tone of the relationship. What they care about most. The specific thing that made them choose you. If that context lives only in your sent folder, it will not survive the handoff. A short internal brief before a project begins costs you fifteen minutes and pays back in the quality of every interaction after. I promise.
This Week's Dos & Don'ts
Do: Send a short, specific recap within 24 hours after your next meaningful client conversation. Include what you heard them say, what you're doing next, and when they'll hear from you. It takes maybe seven minutes and will support you and your team to signal everything a client needs to feel held.
Don't: Treat a broken post-sale experience as a customer service problem when it's actually a leadership decision that nobody has made yet. If the same friction keeps happening, the fix isn't a faster reply. It's deciding on a clear owner and a clear process going forward.
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If you're collecting customer feedback through interviews, discovery calls, support conversations, or intake forms and then doing nothing coordinated with it, Dovetail is worth taking a peek at. It's built to organize qualitative research, interviews, observations, and notes into searchable, tagged insights you can share across a team.
I've only been using it for a week, and I believe it would be particularly valuable for consultants, agency owners, and anyone who has a backlog of client conversations living in their brain or scattered across a dozen documents.
If your goal isn't to collect more data, but to identify patterns. This platform will help you find them without spending a weekend sorting through notes. Oh, before I forget: For those of you who run creator partnerships, this is an excellent hub to store what you learn from those comment sections and debriefs.
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Trend Worth Watching
This is my belief, and I am here, on my mountain, standing firm. So much so that you can quote me. “The next brand advantage is operational consistency."
We have become inundated with ads. People can and will forget what you said within three eye-blinks and a 10-minute scroll session on social media.
People will increasingly judge businesses by their ability to deliver the same quality of experience across every person, every touchpoint, and every moment of friction, including the moments nobody's managing closely.
AI is making those gaps harder to hide. Every tool that speeds up the delivery also puts a spotlight on the significant experiences where human handoffs aren't working.
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Community Engagement Corner
Where does your customer experience most often lose momentum? Is it at inquiry, when leads don't hear back fast enough? At onboarding, when the excited new client hits a wall of confusion? Somewhere in delivery, when expectations from the sale don't translate to the team doing the work? Or at follow-up, when the job is done and the relationship just... ends?
Hit reply and let me know.
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Remember...
“Your brand is not what you promise at the beginning. It is what still feels true after every engagement. Customers do not experience your strategy. They experience what happens next.” - Lena Anderson
See you next week!
Lena Anderson
Founder & Chief Branding Enthusiast, L.A. Branding
