The holidays are a great time to catch up on some of the big ideas we’ve covered on the podcast this year. And one of the biggest is the notion that “Your brand is the prompt.” That idea is even more important now that ChatGPT has opened access for any business to release their own app on the ChatGPT platform.

Once businesses start taking advantage, your biggest problem won’t be getting ChatGPT to find you. It will be getting them to show you instead of the millions of other businesses who also want ChatGPT to show them.

If only there was a way that companies could stand apart. If only there was a way to ensure customers found you, every single time.

Oh, wait. There is. It’s called building a brand.

I’ve studied how we can build brands beyond Big Tech for over 20 years. That’s the core of what my book Digital Reset is all about.

Building a brand that works in the age of AI is exactly what “your brand is the prompt” really means for your business. And it’s what this Best of the Show episode of the podcast is all about.

We hope you’ll enjoy revisiting this topic. We’ll be back with new episodes after the holidays. In the meantime, here are the show notes for you.

Best of the Show: What ‘Your Brand Is the Prompt’ Really Means for Your Business — Headlines and Show Notes

Show Notes and Links

What ‘The Brand Is the Prompt’ Really Means for Your Business (Episode 474)

Tim Peter’s quick thoughts about ChatGPT opening apps to all on LinkedIn

OpenAI opens ChatGPT to third-party travel apps • Hospitality.today

Developers can now submit apps to ChatGPT | OpenAI

In the Age of AI, Brand Isn’t Everything. It’s the Only Thing (Episode 472)

Are ChatGPT’s Apps Good for Your Business? (Episode 471)

Mark Schaefer on the most important "soft skill" in the AI Era where he talks about Amazon limiting the number of books that a person can self-publish to three per day.

The Brand is the Prompt (Thinks Out Loud 465)

My original post about “The Brand is the Prompt” on LinkedIn

Will Agentic AI Kill Your Content Marketing? (Episode 470)

The New SEO? (Episode 469)

AI and Zero-Click Search: The Real Story (Episode 467)

Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech

Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today.

Past Appearances

Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset"

Free Downloads

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you.

Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including:

Customer Focus

Strategy

Technology

Operations

Culture

Data

Best of Thinks Out Loud

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Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks

Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud

Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 22m 09s

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Transcript: Best of the Show—What ‘Your Brand Is the Prompt’ Really Means for Your Business

 2025 reinforced many of the lessons from my book, Digital Reset. One of the biggest revelations is the idea that “your brand is the prompt.”

In the book I talked about why your brand is a moat that protects you from competitors and gatekeepers alike. Well, news from ChatGPT highlights exactly how important this is.

You see, just last week ChatGPT announced that it’s opening up its app store to essentially anyone. I’m going to have a full show about this after the holidays, but I think we’re overlooking one key point when we only look at the upsides of ChatGPT making apps available to any business.

Turns out that there are almost a billion websites in the world, roughly 200 million of them actively updated. If we assume that even one-tenth of those actively updated sites makes their content available as an app, that would create essentially 20 million apps within ChatGPT’s App Store. That’s 20 million apps that ChatGPT would have to index and curate and expose when customers asked for the services or needed the services that those apps provide.

That’s not going to be managed by human beings. It’s going to be managed algorithmically. There will be — there will have to be — some form of “app store optimization” that you or your team will need to learn for you to have any chance of potential customers finding your app.

Don’t believe me? Well, that’s how showing up in Apple and Google’s mobile app stores works today and they only have roughly two and 4 million apps, respectively.

Put another way, visibility today depends on an algorithm when we’re talking about a scale, roughly one-tenth the size of the apps that ChatGPT will likely have.

Now in our best of show episode that we’re revisiting today, I shared a story from my friend Mark Schaefer, who noted earlier this year that,

Amazon has limited the number of books that a person can self-publish to three per day.

As I said at the time:

Three books per day?!? I’m an author. I wrote a book. Imagine how tough it is for my book to be seen when a single AI “author” — and I’m using that term loosely — focused on my topic can “create” — again loosely — then upload roughly 1,100 books per year. And that’s only one person. If a thousand people do this, that’s essentially 1.1 million books every single year.

This isn’t only about books. Extrapolate that to every piece of content that you create for your brand:

Every webpage

Every blog post

Every social media post

Every email

Every SMS.

That’s what I said at the time. What I didn’t share then was ChatGPT apps, or those on any other AI platform, because mostly they didn’t exist at the time. Sure, we knew they were coming. But most of the business implications were largely hypothetical.

Well, they’re here now and it is time to take those hypothetical implications seriously.

The good news is that there’s an easier way to ensure you get found among ChatGPT many, many, many apps, and that is that “your brand is the prompt.”

When you create a brand experience that customers and clients and guests love so much, they’ll seek you out by name. And “your brand is the prompt” is the topic of today’s Best of the Show episode.

We’ll discuss what your brand is the prompt really means for your business. I hope you enjoy it.

AI slop is here today. exists. Mark Schaefer’s story about Amazon limiting the number of books that a person can self-publish to three per day illustrates the point perfectly. Almost all of those books are, to use a technical term, crap. They’re just absolute garbage. But they’re garbage that every decent quality book has to compete against just to be seen. So you’d think that’d be the doom, that’d be the end of books, right?

If you look at Amazon’s best-selling book list, though, you won’t see a whole lot of AI slop. You’ll see well-known, well-regarded books by authors we’ve all come to know and trust. Hmm. That sounds important, don’t you think? These are authors who’ve built reputations good enough that their readers ask for them by name.

Cool. Keep that in mind.

Now let’s shift this discussion to AI answer engines and agents. We know that technology shapes customer behavior. Customers are starting to use AI agents and AI answer engines differently than the way they’ve traditionally used search engines. They’re having more robust, more detailed, more personal, more intimate conversations than simply a search query.

As a result, lots of folks are focused on teaching you how to show up when your potential customers have these conversations with their favorite AI tool. And that’s a good thing, by the way. Sometimes I’m one of those folks. You should 100% do the work to show up in those contexts. No two ways about it. What’s also true, though, is that we need to flip this idea on its head. Because customer behavior also shapes the technology.

For instance, tech that doesn’t meet customer expectations doesn’t get adopted ever. History is littered with great technology that failed in the marketplace because it didn’t meet its customers’ needs.

Supposedly, Betamax was a better videotape format than VHS, which won in the marketplace. AOL got everyone on the internet and then promptly vanished. Blackberry was a smartphone before anyone called them that. MySpace was social media before Facebook came along. Google Glass was smart glasses before Ray-Ban’s Meta AI glasses. And, you we’re gonna have to see if those will stick around.

But you see the point. We know the ideas work because most of those technology concepts still exist. We still have video, we still have the internet, we still have s

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Releasedatum: 24-12-2025 15:30:50