In many of the companies that I work with, the notion of brand comes up regularly and people pride themselves on having a brand that has a strong preference by customers. A brand can indeed be a valuable moat against competition, but only as long as the ecosystem does not change in structure. For instance, when purchasing will be done by AI agents instead of humans, the brand promise will mean very little and the focus will simply be put on the total cost of ownership. And you don’t have to wait for the AI agents for that to happen: simply providing uptime guarantees and agreeing to fines if you fail the uptime SLA is already a first step towards eroding the value of the brand as you’ll be on the hook for lack of reliability anyway. The challenge here is not that a brand cannot be important, but rather that the factors that make you competitive today are likely not the ones that will keep you competitive tomorrow. And if you wait until your (ex-)customer explains the simple facts of life to you, you are for sure not in a good place.