Why I Chose To Join Parsnipp After Years Of Building Brands
I spent nearly 13 years selling and building brands at Gallo — an experience that shaped me in more ways than I can count, through the people, the wins, the hard lessons, and the craft of brand management itself. Those years gave me something I couldn’t have manufactured any other way: experience building brands from market introduction to national scale-up. That experience showed me the gaps in brand marketing discipline that so commonly plague brands. They’re clear to me because I made those missteps myself. It’s not for lack of ambition — quite the opposite. Translating vision into a disciplined brand strategy, and executing that strategy consistently across channels, is where many brands, and the marketers behind them, misfire. I learned a tremendous amount from incredibly sharp operators during my time at Gallo, from people inside and outside the organization — but the pattern is real, and it’s the foundation my practice is built on. That’s why I’ve decided to take on the new challenge of building a brand management practice for CPG brands, enabled through AI tools and embedded inside Parsnipp.
Brand management consulting services aren’t new - the McElroy Memo was authored in 1931, and I’m sure consultancy emerged shortly thereafter. New channels have emerged that require brands to re-underwrite their marketing practice, though. Consumer AI tools, including LLMs (Large Language Models) like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, are becoming channels, and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the process of optimizing for those channels. GEO has the potential to become a preferred way for consumers and marketers to find, shop, and enjoy brands, shortcutting some of the time and heavy investment brands have historically needed to drive salience. Because LLMs gain such rich user context from consumers, they can make sharper recommendations by putting the right product in front of the right user at the right moment in time — evidenced by much higher conversion compared to other digital marketing channels. Here’s the catch: marketers must level up to be successful in this channel. The disciplined brands — the ones that are clear on their segmentation, targeting, positioning, and strategy — will win in this emerging channel. That meritocracy is exciting because it tilts the playing field slightly back from distribution scale that only the big players can achieve. These challenges, old ones around brand marketing discipline and new ones around GEO, are what I’ll be helping companies solve inside Parsnipp.
Breaking down why I’ve chosen to build my AI-focused brand management practice at Parsnipp:
AI will up-level our work, if we’re intentional about our approach to it.
The step change in productivity afforded by LLMs makes 2026 the best time in history to go from “I’m thinking about it” to “I’m doing it,” with so many barriers to entry lowered, though not removed. My consultancy is built on a simple premise: founders have superpowers that often don’t include brand marketing discipline. I seek to bring momentum to their vision through sound brand management and a network of amazing agencies, subject matter experts, and tactics. Equipping founders, brands, and my network with AI tools and practices that drive efficiency and effectiveness further supports this mission and reduces the capital intensity of building a brand, regardless of phase. Working alongside the Parsnipp team, which is quite literally shaping the state of the art of an emerging channel, helps me add more value to small and scaled brands alike.
AI can reinforce sound marketing practice and reduce boring work
An embedded brand consultancy in Parsnipp gives me the ability to translate client learnings into scalable solutions. No shocker here — the goal of all software is to replace repetitive work. But what if we made marketing fun again? PowerPoint font incompatibility, fighting with the template your agency produced two years ago, reiterating the same concepts into different decks to translate them to the commercial side of your organization, hiding slides to make copies shareable for outside agencies, monitoring version creep — all this busy work is friction in the system of sound brand management. If we gave ourselves this time back, how much more time could we spend closer listening to the voice of the customer, writing a better brief, or diagnosing our brand performance? What if the brief was built largely by an AI agent and laddered back to our marketing objectives? What if our mid-year pivots were aligned upon and the financial plan tied back to the tactical plan in real time? LLMs are reducing the importance of user interface building (decks) as the way organizations and brand teams translate information internally; let the model build the artifact and let the marketer focus on the thinking revealed by it. I’m seeking to solve this with clients who feel the same pain, and I’m backed by world-class developer talent at Parsnipp to help advance this effort within our services offerings.
AI can help organizations leverage the plurality of thought within them and refine the work before it ever sees the light of a meeting. It’s widely recognized that AI will amplify its inputs — not unlike an agency. Garbage in from the brand team, garbage out from the agency or the LLM. AI agents can be used to drive marketing discipline across organizations, drawing from organization-defined best practices and even leader-specific proclivities. The brand plan, the business review, and the brief can all get a once-over before they’re presented. These agents won’t have the final say, but they will help organizations catch unsound practice before it ever sees the light of a meeting. If I could have given my junior marketer this gift, I’d have a lot of time back and alleviated the stress that came before those meetings.
I’m betting on the people, myself included.
My last and most important reason for building this practice inside Parsnipp is that Andrew Higgins is a leader I’ve known, trusted, and called a friend for over a decade. He has given me license to run the practice by my design, while surrounding me with great technology and outstanding people to support my client work. I may very well be mowing a client’s grass as I get this practice underway; I haven’t had to write that SOW yet. Over time, our services and our products will converge, and I’ll have the opportunity to contribute to building products that will shape brand management and how consumers discover and transact with brands moving forward. So, I’m launching my consultancy, but I’ve been given momentum at the outset the same way I plan to build momentum for my clients. This is what I help brands solve and win. Let’s get started.
