Clients pay me 6-figures for strategy. Here's what I'm telling them right now.

Executive Summary

Alex M H Smith argues that business conditions are changing quickly: it is easier to launch products and companies, but harder to create lasting value, earn attention, and stand out. His central recommendation is to shift effort away from producing more or making incremental product improvements and toward building scarce advantages—such as brand, distribution, relationships, trust, and distinctive ways of operating.

He presents seven strategic briefings:

1. More supply is eroding value. Lower barriers to entry have led to an influx of businesses, products, and content while demand and customer attention remain limited. Instead of only trying to increase demand through more marketing, companies should ask how to become harder to substitute or replicate.

2. AI makes many capabilities abundant—and less valuable. Research, writing, design, software, and expertise may still be useful, but when they become cheap and widely available, their commercial value can fall. Companies should distinguish utility from scarcity-based value and reassess which assets still give them an advantage.

3. AI and algorithms drive companies toward sameness. Popular online advice and AI-generated answers tend to converge on familiar, average recommendations. H Smith says competitive advantage often comes from having a different perspective, not simply a more polished analysis. Use AI for clearly defined tasks, but retain human judgment for open-ended strategic choices.

4. Attention is scarce, so easy marketing is less effective. More content and advertising compete for a limited audience. H Smith recommends marketing that competitors cannot easily copy: original research, events, personal relationships, live demonstrations, physical presence, and credible, costly signals.

5. Complacency leaves established industries exposed. Ambitious operators may target industries that have historically been stable or unexciting. Companies should not assume that long-standing competitors or a slow-moving sector mean the business is safe; they should raise their own ambition and prepare for more aggressive entrants.

6. Break the “sacred rules” of the category. Competing by doing the same thing slightly better can reinforce commoditization. Companies should identify unexamined industry conventions—such as pricing, sales channels, customer definitions, or product features—and test what happens if they discard or reverse one.

7. Put attention before product in the business model. Product quality still matters, but H Smith argues that for many businesses it is increasingly easy to copy. The customer journey may begin with attention, then build desire through brand and story—or relieve an urgent problem through relevance and accessibility—before the product is presented.

Frameworks and Practical Playbooks

Reassess Business Assets for Scarcity

• Divide the company’s sources of leverage into assets that are becoming easier to replicate and those that remain difficult to build.
• Examples of potentially depreciating assets include technology, expertise, intellectual property, and aspects of products or services.
• Examples of potentially strengthening assets include brand, distribution, proprietary data, trusted relationships, and scarce physical assets.
• Ask: “Is this still valuable? Is it still scarce?”
• Direct investment, talent, and attention toward one or two durable advantages.

Use AI Selectively

• Delegate closed problems with specific answers, such as summarizing, checking, or modeling.
• Avoid outsourcing open problems that require choosing a strategic direction.
• Diversify sources of insight through books, experienced practitioners, and people with unusual perspectives—not only algorithmically promoted content.

Make Marketing Difficult to Copy

• Build on distinctive advantages such as reputation, a strong track record, expert understanding, notable associations, real relationships, artistry, demonstrations, and offline presence.
• Consider “exhausting” tactics competitors may avoid: original research, events, frequent speaking, travel, or handwritten outreach.
• Use the test: “If this marketing move cost ten times more, would we still believe it would work?” If not, it may be a fragile tactic or hack.

Stress-Test Complacency

• Ask leadership: “What are our chances of tripling in the next 18 months?”
• Imagine a highly ambitious, technology-enabled team entering the industry tomorrow. How would it attack the business, and what would it expose?
• Use these questions to identify whether the company needs a new business model or new sources of value, rather than just operational improvements.

Challenge Category Conventions

• List the industry’s “sacred cows”: pricing models, customer assumptions, channels, features, and standard ways of delivering service.
• Examine areas where the company is weakest or has least to lose.
• Ask: “What if we stopped doing this—or deliberately became worse at what everyone else competes on?”
• Treat unconventional answers as hypotheses to explore, not automatic prescriptions.

Build Around Attention

• For discretionary purchases, turn attention into desire through brand, story, content, and association.
• For urgent or non-discretionary purchases, turn attention into relief through relevance and easy access.
• Ensure the product delivers on the promise, but consider whether the business should operate more like a media or audience business with a product attached than a product business with marketing attached.

Metrics and Examples Cited

The figures below are those quoted in the video; they are presented as the speaker’s evidence rather than independently verified here.

• App supply: In the first half of 2026, roughly 560,000 new App Store apps were released—about double the prior level—while downloads reportedly rose only 2%.
• Music supply: Daily uploads to streaming platforms reportedly rose from about 40,000 tracks in 2019 to 150,000. On Deezer, about 44% of tracks were said to be AI-generated.
• Business formation: Americans filed a record 5.67 million new-business applications in the prior year, reportedly 60% above 2019.
• Electric vehicles: China reportedly had about 129 EV brands, with only 10–11 profitable, and 156 new models expected in the second half of the year.
• Chegg: The speaker says revenue fell 39% in one year, from more than $600 million to about $377 million, after ChatGPT offered an alternative to its paid homework-help service. He also says its stock was about 99% below its peak.
• Generative AI returns: A study attributed to MIT reportedly found that 95% of organizations saw no tangible benefit from their generative-AI projects.
• Search and attention: The speaker says 68% of US Google searches ended without a click in the first months of the year; the first organic result’s click-through rate reportedly fell 58% when AI summaries appeared.
• Marketing costs and volume: Meta advertising prices reportedly rose 14% in the prior quarter, and 23% in the US and Canada in one quarter. Global email volume was cited at 392 billion messages per day.
• Profit concentration: A McKinsey analysis was cited claiming the top 10% of the world’s largest companies earn 80% of economic profits, while the middle 60% earn very little.
• Garage-door industry: KKR reportedly agreed to buy A1 Garage Door Service for about $2 billion. The company’s founder began with a van in 2007 and grew by operating at a level beyond the industry norm.
• Savannah Bananas: The baseball team challenged the usual priority of winning games and focused on entertainment and the fan experience. The speaker says it sold out in more than 50 cities, drew 81,000 spectators to one college football stadium, and planned a 70-stop tour at major-league stadiums.
• Build Design Studio: The Birmingham, Alabama, design agency challenged the assumption that agencies must control clients’ brands. It instead helped small and midsize businesses manage their brands themselves; the speaker says its income doubled in a year and its profit margin increased tenfold.
• Nintendo Switch: The speaker cites Nintendo’s decision to prioritize portable, social gaming over console power as an example of sacrificing a conventional advantage to create a differentiated position.
• Strategy ambition benchmark: The proposed leadership question is whether the company could triple within 18 months—a diagnostic to force thinking beyond incremental efficiency gains.

Bottom Line

H Smith’s recurring principle is to build advantages that become more valuable as generic production gets cheaper: scarcity, difference, trusted distribution, relationships, and attention. He urges businesses to compete through distinctive choices and hard-to-copy execution rather than relying on more output, standard best practices, or small improvements that competitors can quickly match.

Presenter/source: Alex M H Smith.