How to gain more clients with AI? The customer journey is your opportunity: updated AIDA model +R
In this conversational interview, Nir Zavaro and the host discuss how brands must craft a concise, consistent narrative that can be understood by both humans and AI. They argue that AI cannot create a brand story; it can only learn from a clear, well‑defined brand character. Using the Kalicube framework, they emphasize the need for a short core message, consistent language, and a brand "character" that guides all content. They introduce practical tactics such as starting with a clear hero section on the website, employing a "small wins" approach, and feeding AI with explicit brand behaviors, preferred words, and things to avoid. The conversation revisits the classic AIDA funnel, adding a Retention (R) stage, and shows how machines reverse‑engineer the funnel—starting from the decision point and moving outward. They explain how the Kalicube flywheel creates a feedback loop between human actions, AI learning, and brand advocacy. Long‑term considerations are highlighted, including the concept of "return on latent proof," the decay of web content over 3‑5 years, and the need to plan marketing strategies with a 36‑month horizon. Throughout, they stress the importance of confidence, consistency, and intentional storytelling to win clients in an AI‑driven landscape.
Chapters
Hi, welcome to this session with Nir Zavaro. Lovely to see you again, Nir. Wonderful person. You are the king of storytelling for brands.
Thank you. It's always good to see you. Yeah, I've been going on with the Business Storyteller for a while and it's been such an interesting time using the most basic skill and the most let's say up to date skill with AI.
Brilliant. Well, one of the core concepts of the Kalicube framework is that the, it's up to the brand to tell their story. It's up to the brand to frame everything about them in a way that helps them in their business because AI can't do that for them. Not because AI can't frame, not because AI can't, figure out what the brand might want to say. It's got no reason to say anything more than the facts. So the AI has no skin in the game. Therefore, the brand must create the narrative and communicate that to the AI. That's the fundamental approach. What do you think?
You and I have often, like, we talk about different brands and different identities and different things. And you have this claim where you want to go and tell the AI who you are and you want to tell that consistently all over the web.
Yep.
I think that was even the first conversation you and I had. And I think while you are correct, a lot of brands or let's say CEOs and founders might not like you. And I'm saying this very politely. The main problem In order to create a good story, we need a framework and we need to know what fits and what doesn't. We need to be very specific about how we want to be perceived. That means we also need to know what we are not, what we don't do. And basically you're telling us in order for the AI to go around, come back and say, hey, this is exactly what you need because this is exactly who they are. what they stand for as a brand, you're asking us to do probably one of the hardest things is to use storytelling to quickly articulate in a sentence or 2 sentences what we actually do, who we are, and what we stand for. And exactly the reason why brands are struggling, because we were taught or used to that we needed 10 pages to explain our vision.
Hmm.
We had— the website had 3,000 words of fluff and buzzwords and everything. But at the end, you said, Okay, but who do you serve? And you'd say everyone. What does your brand do? We make people's dreams come true. No, you're a defense company. So it had a lot of issues and problems. And basically, you're now asking people to be mindful and consistent. And by the way, the next problem that AI gives us is that we want to actually feed the algorithms more content and more about us, right? And then what we go is we take this clean 2-sentence and then we dirty it again with the wrong things. And that's exactly what I'm solving with brands today.
Right. Which is a wonderful insight. And the fact is that we make everybody's life better. Those very kind of fluffy, as you said, terms, we're never very helpful. I actually, as a human being, want to know exactly what you do, what you can do for me, and why I should trust you. And that core message that you're talking about, we do force people to do that. And it's the hardest conversation we have with a client at the beginning is what do you actually wanna say in 2 or 3 sentences? And then you are very right, you need to expand out and give more detail. And the tendency for people and brands is to then make it messy again. So you've gotta be incredibly intentional as you expand that content out, but you have to start with that core.
That's why I love Lord of the Rings. Okay?
Yeah.
It's an endless universe where the characters have a lot of depth, right? But the places, even a song is over 2 pages. Everything has, if you take 10,000 words, but they were thought of, they know exactly where everything fits. And there is consistency. If you see a certain axe or a sword and it has a name, It will come back in the third book in a certain way. But the name of the sword, the way it looks, and the purpose it was meant to be used for hasn't changed.
Yeah.
Yet in brands, in business, we forgot that. And basically today, the way we are building our brands is, hey, we need to fix this and that. We dress them up, as we say, visually. They're nicely dressed, but they don't really stand for or mean anything. They're an empty shell. And you and I know this. They might be a biker, a rock star, right? A shaman, a businessman, whatever they may be, an influencer. We know how it's supposed to look. But you might meet someone who looks like, I don't know, someone in shorts and flip-flops. But only when you talk to them, you realize they sold the business for $200 million, right? So my problem with brands today is for many years when I said, but what do you stand for? I got empty answers. AI now won't let that slide anymore. And basically, your brand needs to stand for something, needs to be a brand character, and it needs to have enough depth so when we feed it to the AI, it knows how we think or how we operate. Same as when you and I write or read the book. When I write the books, I've written 2 novels about the nightlife of the city of Tel Aviv where I was born, and I had bars. I had 4 bars in the city, and I know everyone. So if the main character is not consistent, you won't enjoy the book.
Hmm.
But after a certain time, if you like the brand, if you like the character— we all know James Bond. It's always on character. And if it's off, you're like, no, no, no, that's maybe the Bond No, I'm out. I'm not, not the same movie, right? So it's not James Bond, it's Jason Bond. And you're like, I don't like that.
Right. Yep. No, 100%. I really like the idea of Lord of the Rings, for example. As you say, the sword comes back much later and it's still the same sword. So there are a couple of things that strike me there. Number one is within a corporation, that's really hard to do because you have a whole team and everybody uses different approaches, expresses themselves in different ways, and doesn't necessarily know all the details of the brand story. How can you deal with that?
When we say we have a combined vision, it means that your ability and my ability have to come together and serve a greater purpose. Like in a book, they have to bring the rings to that mountain.
They have to.
Yet imagine if when they would argue, everyone would go on a different path, do a different thing and say, no, no, no, I know how to get the ring. Don't worry about it. That's a board meeting. But someone needs to make a decision. But more than that, they need a clear goal. What if we built a brand that stands next to us, not just visually the brand logo or the visual identity, but how we operate, how do we stand for something, how do we deal with problems? For many years, I would say brand values used to be we're professional. And I say that's not a value because you've never met a brand who says, hey, we're not professional and we're not reliable. Sign with us. No one does that. So what if there were ways of being? Okay. Or a way of behavior, an attribute, and you combine them all. It takes a bit longer, but when you teach the AI, hey, this is how we behave, this is how we talk, these are the words we avoid. Everybody knows avoid the em dash. Right? But they don't know what to avoid as a brand. The more we feed, for example, I use AI to build brand characters for my clients. The interesting thing is I only use things that are out in the open. I do not use anything that is confidential, that might be an issue, a client content of theirs or stuff. Only things that you can find with AI today on a search.
Crazy.
We are still able together to teach the AI who we are, how we operate, how we talk, how we stand for, and so on. And then tell every person on the team, and I work as the business storyteller, I work with the founders, the marketing, sales, we work on the messaging for the website, we build customer journeys. The more we feed it, the better we get when it comes to the outcome. But more than that, consistency. And that's what AI wants. It wants an easy life and consistency.
Right. And there you're talking about using AI internally to figure out what the brand story is and what the brand narrative is. So you've done that. I'm assuming you've got your team together and they've all agreed, which is always difficult to do. Now you've gotta get it consistent. Sorry?
That's my job to make them agree.
Very difficult to do. That's your job. You're one of the best. And we have this consistent story, this, sorry, this story. Everybody's agreed on it. Everybody's on board. Now we need to make sure that it's consistent across the web and over time for the AI, because the AI that's learning from us, as opposed to the AI that's creating that message with us. So the AI that's learning from us, like Gemini, Google, ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity needs that consistent message across time and over space. How do you do that within a company?
I love working in the small wins method. What is the easiest win I can show them? And they needed to be visual. For example, I would go fast into the website and say, okay, the hero section would say, exactly who we are, right? So this is what we actually do. And another paragraph, how we're going to achieve it. That's where the buzzwords go in, you know, the fluff. Now, once we agreed on that, say, great, do we want content? What type of content? And there we use the words we like, don't like, the attitude and stuff. It is easy to agree on. That means all of a sudden the core that we have is the website.
Hmm.
And everything I build from now on is to duplicate that. And every time a problem will appear, and as you know, it's probably, it could be on an hourly basis in some startups I work with. What we do then is we go and say, okay, do we know how to solve it based on the brand character? And if not, let's solve it so it keeps the consistency and add that. And a character evolves. People made the mistake. They used to go to a branding company, pay a quarter of a million dollars, come back, nice logo, a few different things. We're empathetic, we're family-oriented. It doesn't mean anything. And that was it. You put it in the drawer, you maybe put a few stickers on the wall and you never live it. My brands have to have a living organism, which is the brand character. It will change and evolve and I keep them in check. I become their brand guardian.
Right. So one thing you said there is we're empathetic or we're professional or whatever it is. And you're saying, okay, that doesn't really mean anything. So it's not a very helpful thing to have as a core message. The thing about AI is I'm sitting here, I'm pretending to be Gemini. My response to we're empathetic and professional is, so what?
But that was exactly the way I reacted 10 years ago when people said, no, but we have a nice logo. Now, what happens now is if everybody says we're professional, AI says, okay, everybody's professional. How do I decide?
Yeah, exactly.
But if I have a nuanced brand character, and that goes back to storytelling, words matter. We are able to describe the same room in a different way. You and I will sit in the same room, describe it in a different way. Why? Because we use words differently. We do not have the same level of English. We have a different background.
I know. And different things are important to us. I mean, I'm looking around my room now, which is what we do when somebody mentions this kind of thing. If you look around it, you might say he's got a blue sofa. I would say I have a double bass. I would start with a double bass and you would start with a sofa. So it's also what's important to me and what's important to you. And that's something we have to communicate to the AI.
Yeah, but funny, why is, why do I love storytelling? Because it backs, it goes back to the boardroom and that team. I'm now working with a brand. We've been able over the last, let's say, 24 months or so become number one in the market in what we do. We're about to break a record year. Average sale is $150,000 to $180,000. And I built their original brand character in 2019, came back in 2025 to revamp the brand character. And now we're discussing different things. And we're saying, do we want the people who have money and can pay us to know who we are? Or do we want on social everybody to know who we are, even those who cannot afford us? Different messaging. And now we're talking, but the way I react is not my thoughts. You see, the way we build the brand, it is very accessible. It is very polite when people cannot afford. But the people who can afford will get an unbelievable, unforgettable experience.
Right. Well, you said people. So obviously the final goal is to get people as clients, to serve people, to give them value. But what about the AI? Because in order, I mean, in this particular scenario, if we're looking at the Kalicube framework, we're saying, okay, over there on the right-hand side, we're serving the people. OPIDC is all about serving the person or the company that we have as a client. And then the codified part in the Kalicube flywheel is what you're talking about, which is how do we take what we're giving people, put it into a format the machines can understand and push it back into the bot recorder part and the Activate algorithm part to then get that cycle going. So what is the key to that? Amazing.
Okay. When we are now discussing if the brand should talk to everyone, right, or should talk to a very specific audience, the way we're going to control it after we decide is for now social media, articles, blog posts, paid PR. This is an AI issue because this will stay online for a long time. So the marketing and the creative cannot be decided today, but is how is my brand going to be perceived in the next 12, 24, 36 months? This is the argument that we are now having. And I'll give you a nice solution. I assume everybody knows the AIDA model. You and I discussed it a few weeks ago. So awareness, interest—
Sorry, just to cut in there. When you were saying we have to be aware of what is gonna be in the future and what we place today is incredibly important to the future. That's exactly what I call return on latent proof. So the investment we're doing today is gonna pay off today to some extent, but there's latent proof and latent value in the future that we need to think about today. Okay.
You and I are gonna do a 3-hour session about this, but are you ready? I'm gonna give you a glimpse of what I'm working on. Many, many years ago, I would teach in colleges and university the AIDA model Freshman year students, college, university, and we teach the AIDA model. It hasn't changed for almost 100 years. Awareness, interest, desire, acquisition. And I added over the years the R, the retention. Then it became a bit more common to add retention, right? At the end, we still need to remember, doesn't matter what AI does, at one contact point there is a human. No matter what we do today, the AI, probably I need to ask it something, right? There is some communication at the moment. So what we're now doing is actually going and saying, wait, wait, we have an existing business. So that means we have a lot of retention. We can do a lot of marketing around retention. The best thing I can do today is have other clients who have used my service or my product And they do that in different places around the web, referring everyone, and you like links, right? Referring everybody back to when they go to the A, the awareness stage, they find a lot of people who like, happy, recommend, and so on. Yeah. We looked at the R as the end, and now I'm saying using AI, it becomes a circle.
Yeah, which is the Kalicube flywheel in the diagram we're looking at here. And as you said, it's users, it's the brand, it's independents talking across the internet. And we can encourage our ex-clients or our clients to talk about us in independent sources across the web. And actually, the feedback loop into the bots comes into the Kalicube framework— sorry, the Kalicube process. And you mentioned AIDA, which is top to bottom of the funnel. That's how the human functions: awareness, consideration, decision.
Yeah.
And part of the Kalicube framework is for machines, they work the other way around. We flip the funnel. The machines have to understand, which is the bottom of the funnel, the decision moment. Who is this brand? Do I trust them? In order to be able to see that you're credible, the consideration phase, in order then to be able to advocate for you, the awareness phase. How do you feel about that?
If you look at it, in order to get good retention, which means people will buy again and people will recommend. The human aspect inside the business needs to give a good service and a good product, which is amazing, right?
Mm-hmm.
So if we are now starting to reverse engineer the situation, I'm saying, okay, in order to get retention, and it is part of my customer journey that I'm building with my clients, we need to be aligned on this. We need to make sure, is this a good service? Great. When did we ask? When did we reply? How quickly? In which platforms?
Yep.
Suddenly I'm going back, going back to easy wins. When I tell a brand, hey, how do you send a thank you email? Really? That's what we wrote? Are you doing the follow-up after a month to ask if they're happy? Now, this going in a reverse engineering model says, okay, now we have a good service and a good product, right? Now we don't know how the acquisition stage is going to look like. And we have this today in 2 different aspects because today I saw something I like. I went online. I'm just now buying a stand-up desk for my other office. I'm not enjoying the process, okay? I would really much rather have an AI say, hey, here are 3 options, choose one, or hey, I just bought, paid, and sent it to your office. Okay? So that means that in one stage, I will find, I will look, I will make the decision, but we are quickly moving to a situation where the AI will say, hey, they have a lot of reviews, they're the best at this, they pop up in the top 3, they're in a great location to help us send this or ship it, we'll go with them. So, right, the emotional retention and the logic.
Yeah, no, 100%. And Dave Davis brought up a really interesting point because he works at a SaaS platform where the main client is the agent. And he pointed out that actually confidence is the most important thing for an agent, i.e., it's confident that this is an answer and a solution that will function as opposed to reputation. So he's not saying reputation isn't important. He's saying the confidence that the solution is actually the correct solution is the key factor right now.
Humans want Certainty and confidence. They don't care. Reputation helps them build up, right, the confidence to make that decision and hope they didn't make a mistake. The worst thing they can do is ask a good friend that they trust and it's a bad recommendation. So the human aspects did not change. Just the way we use words became a new level. So funny enough, we're actually now asking humans to be more intentional. Think before you talk, or more than that, before you write, and think long term. Because in the short term, you will achieve success, but you will win in the long term. And that's what we forgot.
Right.
We were used to, ah, I'll change it, we'll do this. I was like that for many years. I had a marketing agency. for 14 years. Let's start moving and we will learn along the way. Now we are able to say we can do both. Yeah.
And I mean, you were talking about the stuff we write today is going to have value tomorrow. We need to bear that in mind, the return on latent proof within my framework. But also one thing that's really interesting is our data at Kalicube shows that after 5 years, 30% of what you've written has disappeared.
5 years. Most of the businesses disappeared in 5 years.
But from the web. So I think we get the idea that the web is this permanent record and it isn't. An awful lot of what you do, an awful lot of what you create will disappear in the next 5 years.
If you told me that, and we're working on the, the working assumption is up to 36 months. And the reason is because the world is—
Up to 36 months for what? The working assumption of—
The plan that we're building in terms of marketing and we're saying, hey, The business is going in this direction. By the time we launch, build, whatever it has to be, by the time we open a new office in the US, by the time we do any scale that is a business link today, the strategy is roughly 36 months. Now, if you and I would have had this conversation 36 months ago, Mm-hmm. Let's say, what is it now? It's June. Let's say we had a June 2020 conversation. 2023, and all they'll say, yeah, we're using, we're using chat and it's really nice. I'm asking it questions. Now we are very, very specific about which platform, how do we use it, what does it do for us. If your business isn't using AI, before we had posts, hey, you should jump on the train of AI, 36 months. But I think It has fundamentally changed.
Absolutely. So the whole aspect of what we're trying to achieve within the AI universe has completely changed in the last 36 months. Thank you so much, Nir. That was absolutely brilliant. And thank you everyone for watching. Keep going with the summit. Thank you.
