The short version: You can use AI to pull apart the marketing strategy of any brand you admire in about 40 minutes, for free, and turn it into a plan sized for your actual budget. What you can’t do is copy their strategy wholesale and expect it to fix a weak offer, because the brand work was never the thing making them money.
Worth reading next: How to Use ChatGPT to Create Photo Editing Prompts for Your Brand.
Everyone is already doing this badly
Every second LinkedIn post now says some version of “I asked ChatGPT to analyse [big brand]’s marketing strategy and here’s what I found.” Then you get a bullet list of things like “they build community” and “they have a strong brand voice,” which is about as useful as being told a Michelin restaurant “uses good ingredients.”
The problem isn’t the idea. Feeding a brand’s website, ads and reviews into AI and asking it to find the pattern is a good use of an afternoon. The problem is that most people stop at the surface level output, print it out, feel inspired for a day, and change nothing that touches their sales numbers.
I run this exercise with clients, and I’ve learned where it works and where it quietly wastes people’s time. Here’s the version that gets used, not filed.
Pick brands you envy, not brands you compete with
Don’t start with your direct competitor down the road. Start with a brand outside your industry whose customer experience you envy. When I do this exercise with clients I usually point them toward Airbnb’s marketing strategy for how they turned strangers’ spare rooms into “belong anywhere,” toward Away’s marketing strategy for how a suitcase company built a whole content world around travel rather than luggage, and toward Ahrefs’ content strategy for how a technical SEO tool became the most trusted teacher in its own category.
None of those three businesses are in your industry, probably. That’s the point. You’re not copying their sector, you’re copying their mechanism, the specific decision that made strangers trust them faster than the competition.
The actual step-by-step process (do this in one sitting)
Here’s what I run with clients, start to finish, usually inside an hour with a coffee going cold beside the laptop.
- Step 1, gather the raw material (10 minutes). Copy the homepage text, the About page, three product pages and the last five blog posts or Instagram captions from your chosen brand. Paste all of it into a single document. Don’t summarise anything yet, just collect it.
- Step 2, ask for the mechanism, not the vibe (10 minutes). In ChatGPT or Claude, paste the material and ask: “What is the one specific belief this brand is trying to change in a first-time visitor’s head, and what three techniques do they repeat to change it?” This forces the AI past adjectives like “authentic” and into something you can copy.
- Step 3, map the emotional sequence (10 minutes). Ask it to lay out, in order, what a new visitor sees, feels, and is told in the first 60 seconds on the site, then again on page two. Most brands you admire have a very deliberate sequence, doubt, then relief, then proof, then a small low-risk first step.
- Step 4, translate to your budget (10 minutes). This is the step almost everyone skips. Ask the AI directly: “This brand had [X] in funding or [Y] years to build this. I have a laptop, £200 a month and three hours a week. What is the smallest version of this same emotional sequence I could build in the next 30 days?”
- Step 5, turn it into a calendar (10 minutes). Ask for a 90-day content plan that recreates that sequence using only your existing photos, testimonials and product shots. No new budget, no photoshoot.
That’s it. Five steps, under an hour, and you walk away with a document that’s specific to your business rather than a generic “be more authentic” slide.
A real one: the studio owner and the Away obsession
A client of mine runs a small fitness studio in Berkshire, twelve members deep, one instructor, her. She kept telling me she wanted her brand to “feel like Away,” the suitcase company, because she loved how they made travel feel aspirational rather than transactional.
We ran the exercise on Away’s site and her competitors’ sites side by side. The AI pulled out something she hadn’t consciously clocked, that Away almost never talks about the suitcase itself in their early content, they talk about the trip you’re about to take. Every studio in her town, meanwhile, was talking about the workout itself, reps, classes, timetables.
So we rebuilt her next 90 days of Instagram captions and emails around the life after the workout, the 6am confidence, the school run without dreading the stairs, not the burpees. Same photos she already had on her phone. No new spend. Her email open rate went from around 19 percent to 31 percent over eight weeks, and three new sign-ups specifically mentioned “the way you talk about mornings” when asked how they found her. That’s the mechanism transferring across industries, not the budget.
The part nobody wants to say out loud
Here’s the uncomfortable bit, and it’s the reason I make people do step 4 above rather than skip it. Airbnb had Y Combinator backing and years of runway before “belong anywhere” meant anything. Away raised roughly $9 million in seed funding before most people had heard of them. Ahrefs is privately funded and has spent over a decade and a large content team building the trust you now see in five minutes on their blog.
AI will happily hand you a beautiful, confident brand strategy document modelled on any of these, and it will read as if it belongs to a business with a marketing department and a seven-figure ad budget. It has never once spoken to your actual customer, never seen your actual conversion numbers, and it has no idea your website currently gets 40 visits a week. If your offer is weak, a beautifully mimicked brand voice will just get more people to look at the weak offer faster.
This is where I disagree with a lot of the “AI brand strategy” content out there. Brand work is not the fix for a business that isn’t making money yet. If you don’t have a clear, sellable offer, go and read Alex Hormozi’s approach to offers before you touch tone of voice. Brand is what you layer on top of something that already converts, not a substitute for it. I’ve seen clients spend three weeks perfecting a “voice guide” while their landing page bounce rate sat at 68 percent, because the beautiful new copy was still selling the wrong thing to the wrong person.
Where the interactive stuff earns its keep
Once the mechanism is sound, the fastest way I’ve found to lift engagement without spending on ads is to give people something to do rather than something to read. When I helped a client add an interactive calculator to a services page, time on page nearly tripled because visitors were putting in their own numbers instead of skimming someone else’s case study. That’s the same emotional sequence Away and Airbnb use, get the visitor doing something small before you ask them to buy, just built with a tool instead of a paragraph.
You can use AI here too. Feed ChatGPT your pricing structure and ask it to draft the logic for a simple calculator, “how much are you losing by not doing X.” You still need someone to build it, but the logic and the copy around it can come from a 20 minute AI session.
Definiteness of purpose beats a perfect swipe file
There’s an old idea in Napoleon Hill’s business lessons that gets mocked for being dated but is worth sitting with here, the idea of a single definite purpose driving every decision. The reason the reverse-engineering exercise above works on Airbnb, Away and Ahrefs is that each of them picked one belief to change and repeated it relentlessly for years. Airbnb wanted you to trust a stranger’s home. Away wanted you to see luggage as part of the trip, not before it. Ahrefs wanted you to trust a tool company more than an agency.
Most small businesses I work with haven’t picked their one belief yet, so when AI reverse-engineers a big brand for them, it hands back three or four competing ideas because there’s nothing definite to sharpen it against. Before you run the five steps above, write down, in one sentence, the single wrong belief your ideal customer currently holds. Everything the AI gives you afterwards should be tested against whether it changes that one belief. If it doesn’t, cut it, no matter how good the sentence sounds.
When to bring someone in instead of doing this alone
This whole process is designed to be done solo, at your kitchen table, for free. Where it stops being a DIY job is when you’ve run it two or three times, you’ve got a clear mechanism and a real content calendar, and your numbers still aren’t moving. At that point the issue usually isn’t the brand strategy, it’s the underlying systems, your funnel, your follow-up, your pricing, or how the AI tools are wired into your workflow day to day. That’s a different conversation, and it’s usually where working with an AI consultant for small business is worth the spend, because someone external can see the gap between your strategy document and your actual weekly output far faster than you can from inside it.
I’d rather tell you that honestly than sell you a strategy session you don’t need yet. Run the five steps first. Most people find the gap themselves once it’s written down in plain English rather than buried in a brand deck.
Frequently asked questions
Which AI tool is best for reverse-engineering a brand’s marketing strategy?
ChatGPT Plus or Claude both work well for this because they can hold a large amount of pasted website copy at once and reason across it. Neither costs more than about $20 a month, and you don’t need a paid plan at all for the basic version, the free tiers handle the five steps in this post fine.
Is it legal to copy a brand’s marketing strategy?
You’re copying a mechanism, an emotional sequence and a decision-making pattern, not their copy, images, or trademarks. Never lift actual sentences, headlines, or visuals from another brand’s site. What’s legal and useful is studying why a pattern works and rebuilding it with your own photos, your own words, and your own customer proof.
How long does this exercise take?
Under an hour for the analysis itself, following the five steps above. Turning the output into finished content, emails, captions, a landing page, typically takes another two to three hours spread across a week, which is realistic for someone running a business solo or from home.
What if my business is nothing like the brand I’m studying?
That’s the point. Studying a brand in a completely different industry stops you copying surface details like colour palettes or product photography, and forces you to focus on the underlying mechanism, the belief they’re changing and the sequence they use to change it, which is what transfers across industries.
Related reading: Impossible Foods Marketing Strategy: How They Built a Brand That Wins and Business Lessons from Reed Hastings.
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