When great products become the baseline, brand becomes the moat

Today she leads the creative group inside Rituals' content studio, an in-house team of creatives and producers serving every market and touchpoint from in-store to print to out-of-home. Rituals has dedicated AI artists on staff and a clear line about where AI stops.

We got into what actually defends a brand when features get copied within weeks, why "everybody" fails as a target audience, what most companies misread about Gen Z, and how a mayonnaise brand became a story about food waste.

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Key takeaways

Why is brand a stronger moat than product features?

Because in the age of AI, features get copied within weeks, and memory does not. Very few companies own something genuinely patented and uncopyable, and tech startups launch features in a rush while copying each other constantly. What survives is the emotional connection and the memory structures a brand builds in its audience. Amanda calls this mental availability: when someone thinks about a category, does your brand occupy space in their mind? Say red and yellow and most people picture McDonald's before the sentence finishes. The most valuable brands in the world spend heavily on exactly this, because it is the one asset a competitor cannot ship next quarter.

Try this: name the two or three cues your brand owns outright. A colour, a shape, a sound, a phrase. If you can't name them, everything you have is copyable.

Why does targeting "everybody" make campaigns fail?

Because creative built for everybody connects with nobody. Amanda separates the two jobs cleanly: with media, every eyeball is desirable, so reach is the goal. With creative, you need what she calls the creative bullseye, one specific person you are actually talking to. Skip that step and the work goes vanilla. She describes the result as wallpaper communication, the kind of message people scroll past without registering it was there.

Try this: write down one real person your next campaign is for. If the honest answer is everybody, it will land on nobody.

What do most brands get wrong about Gen Z?

They plan for the media landscape their own leadership grew up inside. Leadership at most large brands is millennial, Gen X or boomer, and often their children aren't in the cohort either, which leaves a genuine gap in instinct about the audience being sold to. Gen Z arrived in a fragmented digital world where content is served already fitted to them. They will not buy a for-everybody message unless it carries a strong point of view, something distinctive, something unpredictable, or a real case for a better world. They are also too savvy to be sold to, and the hard sell reads as cringe. Amanda's version of the internal monologue: "Oh, cute. This old school brand is trying to sell me stuff."

Try this: put your next campaign in front of one person from the actual cohort before it ships. Not a focus group. One person who will tell you the truth.

How do you build a brand from scratch?

Amanda works through three questions in order: why, relevance, then credibility. Why does this brand exist, and if it disappeared tomorrow who would miss it? Relevance asks whether your product or service can actually deliver on that why, because a purpose you don't serve is just noise. Credibility is the long game, demonstrating over years that you deliver, through what you fund, sponsor and ship. Most brands have a strong answer in the first column and very little in the other two.

Try this: run your brand through all three columns this week. The empty one tells you where the work is.

How long does brand strategy take to show results?

Two to three years before the real result becomes visible, which is an uncomfortable number for anyone reporting quarterly. Amanda has verified this timeline across her own work, and can point to the moment things started shifting only in hindsight. In the meantime she watches leading indicators. For a smaller brand, sales is the clearest signal, and campaign effects are precise enough to pinpoint the day activity started against web traffic and search demand. Those signals tell you whether a campaign cut through the noise. Whether it built lasting memory structures is a question only time answers.

Try this: separate campaign metrics from brand metrics in your reporting. Judging one on the other's timeline is how good brand work gets killed early.

Which content metrics actually matter?

Watch time over follower count. Amanda's team at Swapfiets tracked the seconds people spent with a piece of content, averaging 8 to 10 seconds, which she considered strong. That number says something real about quality and resonance, particularly when much of the audience scrolls passively without liking or sharing anything at all. Follower count she treats as a vanity metric for brands, useful for individual content creators and far less meaningful for a business. Algorithms shift constantly, which makes reach-based metrics unstable to plan against.

Try this: replace one follower-count line in your next report with average watch time. See which number your team actually argues about.

How do you ship social content faster without losing control?

Set the guardrails once, then let the team move. At Swapfiets, Amanda often saw organic social posts only after they were already live. That worked because the groundwork happened up front: clear content pillars, agreement on which unique selling points the content should ladder up to, and an explicit conversation about how far the team could push. She built the capability by hiring one exceptional content creator and surrounding him with what she calls an army of interns, four people by the time she left. Every opening pulled around 300 applications in a single day, because the work was visibly good. When something missed, they took the video down, re-edited and put it back.

Try this: remove one approval layer from one channel this month. Agree the pillars first, then let people ship the same day something happens.

How should creative teams use AI responsibly?

Use it for ideation and production, and set your ethical line before a deadline sets it for you. At Rituals, AI accelerates concepting: prompting for an early vision or mood board makes an idea tangible fast, which helps non-creative stakeholders make decisions and prevents the misalignment that otherwise surfaces late and expensively. The company has dedicated AI artists on staff, and full campaigns get produced this way with a human directing. Their product assortment is large enough that photographing every new item would consume the calendar. The line they don't cross is human subjects and likeness. A hand within an AI composition is acceptable. Whenever there's a model, it's a real shoot with real people.

Try this: write your own AI line down now, while nothing is on fire. Vague principles collapse under deadline pressure.

Which brands will win in an AI-saturated content world?

The ones that are entertaining and know what they stand for. Volume stops being a differentiator once anyone can generate infinite content. Amanda returns to the same question in every company she joins: what are we fighting for, and what are we fighting against? Sales is a means to something bigger rather than a purpose in itself. She is direct about the alternative, describing a world where all advertising collapses into a packshot with a price on a plain background, which is a supermarket flyer rather than a brand.

Try this: ask your team what your brand is fighting for. If the answers don't match, you've found your next strategy session.

What should you look for when hiring creatives?

Talent, learning speed, and whether the person can get things done. Amanda's blunt version of the third: some people consistently arrive with reasons why they cannot. She looks for ownership, for people who will defend their own work, and for genuine care about craft. Perfection isn't the standard, forward motion is. Flexibility comes fourth, because someone rigid in how they think and work is very hard to shift, and creative teams change shape constantly.

Try this: add one question to your next creative interview. Ask for something they shipped that nobody asked them to ship.

How do you turn a functional product into a purposeful brand?

Find the problem your product already solves that nobody has named yet. Amanda's answer to what she is proudest of delivering is the Hellmann's work at Unilever. Mayonnaise is a condiment, and the team wanted to move the brand somewhere more purposeful. The insight was that Hellmann's adds taste to the food already sitting in your fridge that would otherwise be thrown away. That reframe opened the entire territory of food waste, a problem with a direct line to climate change. It became a behaviour change program that helped families across three continents waste 40% less food, activations redistributing supermarket food to families in need, and eventually the brand's first Super Bowl ad. Four years of work before it really moved. The line that carried it: make taste not waste.

Try this: list what your product already does that you have never marketed. The purpose is often hiding in the use case.

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