Operator Group Chat: How do you build a brand in a post-platform world?

Joanna Lord

Brand & Marketing Specialist; Former CMO at Spring Health, Skyscanner, ClassPass

In a post-platform world, brand building is finally returning to its fundamentals. For years, we mistook reach for resonance and let performance platforms convince us that impressions equaled brand. Meta and Google were incredible distribution engines, but they were never where belief or loyalty formed. 

The brands I’ve helped build (like ClassPass and Spring Health as examples) grew most durably in high-trust, high-context spaces: local fitness circles and micro-creators at ClassPass who brought us city by city, and internal ERGs or employee forums where people repeated the story in their own words. These environments created advocacy, not just awareness.

What works now isn’t going smaller – it’s going deeper. You design for participation, not promotion. At Spring Health, our most effective “brand marketing” wasn’t paid; it was clinical tools, manager guides, and mental-health glossaries that teams shared organically because they were genuinely useful. 

At ClassPass, our engine wasn’t ads; it was a city-by-city ignition model powered by studio owners, instructors, and micro-influencers with real pull. The same pattern shows up repeatedly: interactive formats, creator networks with authentic affinity, founder or expert POVs delivered through newsletters or private channels, and products or stories that travel naturally through communities – not because they’re optimized for a feed, but because they’re meaningful.

And the new technical layer is Generative Engine Optimization – where brand clarity becomes infrastructure. LLMs reward consistent narrative architecture, clear proof points, and owned content that shows up across channels. In practice, that means building a coherent messaging system, producing structured pillar content, and letting authoritative voices (founders, clinicians, creators as examples) repeat the story across formats. 

It’s less about hacking distribution and more about building a brand that’s so consistent, so useful, and so participatory that humans (and AI) can’t help but understand it, repeat it, and amplify it.

Naman Khan

Former CMO at Personio, Blend; VP Marketing at Dropbox & Salesforce

In this world of never-ending software solutions, standing out from the crowd is more critical than ever. A recent HBR study found that 90% of buyers choose a vendor that they “had in mind” before beginning their active search. This means a strong preference for known brands, where a basis of familiarity and trust is already established, rather than an unknown app which might even offer a superior solution. In a nutshell, brand is more important than ever.

Among the top reasons customers choose Personio is the brand and the community. The brand denotes a fresh, modern approach to solving HR challenges, and they value the peer community that they can engage with on various HR topics. It’s only when you have a strong brand foundation in place that you get the privilege of landing your product value.

The channels that matter today for brand building are clear but not as scalable, at first. These are community (online & in person), advocates & influencers, and owned social media. The steel thread that runs across all of them is “genuine messaging & content”, not packaged and professional-looking content brimming with buzzwords. In fact, lower production value content often performs better, as customers just want straight talk.

Tom Davies

VP Marketing at Yonder; ex-Monzo & Wise

If you’re panicking about new channels entering the market then you’re thinking too channel-first, rather than building an actual marketing strategy. We’re not in a post-platform world. Google and Meta remain the two largest advertisers on the planet. The idea that you choose between “old platforms” and “new channels” is false. You use all channels where your customers exist with messages appropriate to each context.

Nothing has changed because marketing has always been changing. Before Discord, it was Slack. Before that, Facebook Groups. Before that, forums. Community marketing is not a hot new way to grow, it has existed since the internet began. Channels change, the fundamentals are the same.

What has changed is that you can’t rely on a single platform for your entire funnel. You need scale channels for awareness and owned channels for conversion. The mistake is treating these as alternatives or competing strategies when they’re sequential and work together.

As for Generative Engine Optimisation, it’s rebranded SEO. Create the best answer to the questions your customers ask, structure it for machine parsing, build authority. Calling it GEO doesn’t change what you’re optimizing for. The argument again here is the wrong one. The goal shouldn’t be a good SEO strategy; it should be a visibility strategy that helps customers find you. It’s about tying your budget and activity to customer journeys, not bespoke plans for every channel. At Yonder we never touched Twitter/X because it didn’t fit our strategy.

The real issue isn’t platform fragmentation. It’s that some marketers build their entire strategy on one channel and get upset when that market or consumer behaviour changes and they can’t grow. If platform shifts cause existential panic, you never had a strategy.

Disagree with our Group Chat? We’d love to hear your response.