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Stocks are wobbling, AI headlines are multiplying, and budgets feel more like Jenga towers than line items. In times like these, it’s tempting to go heads down and wait for certainty to arrive. Spoiler: It will not.
Pew’s February survey found that 52% of U.S. workers are more worried than hopeful about AI’s impact on their jobs. That worry has weight. Research in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine estimates burnout now costs employers up to $21,000 per employee every year.
As a brand marketer who has steered teams through layoffs, pivots and more “back‑to‑the‑whiteboard” moments than I can count, I’ve learned one truth: Ambiguity is not a phase. It’s the water we are all swimming in. The question is whether we let it pull us under or turn it into forward thrust.
Related: The Smart Entrepreneur’s Guide to Thriving in Uncertain Times
Why brand leaders must own the ambiguity agenda
Brand is the only business asset that appreciates with clarity. When stories scatter, equity erodes; when stories align, equity compounds. I argued this back in 2022 during the recession, and today, the same principle applies to internal storylines. If your team cannot see the path, they’ll fill the gaps with fear — and fear is expensive.
Gartner’s latest HR focus survey shows 73% of HR leaders cite change fatigue as their top concern for 2025. Translation: Employees are exhausted by shifting priorities, and leaders are struggling to translate noise into narrative. That challenge is tailor‑made for brand marketers because building a narrative out of chaos is what we do for the market every single day. It’s time we turned that muscle inward.
Meet the ambiguity breakthrough canvas
I adapted Gustavo Razzetti’s Navigating Ambiguity Canvas to create a brand‑first tool that does three things fast:
Anchor zone: codifies what we know and where our brand already wins.
Lab zone: lists uncertainties worth experimenting on in the next quarter.
Loudspeaker zone: parks far‑off fears and headline noise, so it stops hijacking meetings.
One page, three columns, sticky notes at the ready. The goal is not to solve everything. The goal is to name the fog so it stops running the show.
How to run the canvas in four moves
1. Set the stakes with data and vision:
Open with metrics your exec team respects: cost of burnout, employee sentiment, the relationship between brand consistency and revenue lift (consistent brand presentation can boost revenue by 33%). Numbers anchor urgency; narrative supplies hope.
2. Crowdsource, then sharpen:
Give each participant five minutes to dump thoughts into the three zones. Your job is to push for specificity. “AI” becomes “customers fear we will replace human onboarding with bots.” The more precise the note, the easier the experiment.
3. Vote and assign:
Three dot‑votes per person. Highest‑scoring items turn into action statements with an owner, deadline and success metric. Ambiguity hates accountability.
4. Broadcast progress:
Post the canvas in a shared doc. Every two weeks, move notes: Lab items graduate to Anchor, Loudspeaker items shrink or disappear. Progress, not perfection, keeps anxiety at bay.
Related: 5 Startup Marketing Moves That Work Even in Uncertain Times
A brand‑led sprint in action
Twelve months ago, Spekit’s product had outgrown its original box, yet the market insisted on keeping us there. We’d evolved into a full‑scale sales enablement platform, but prospects still waved us off as “that digital‑adoption walkthrough tool.” Pipeline stalled, reps stumbled, and the brand equity we’d spent five years building suddenly felt like a liability.
Running the Ambiguity Canvas on ourselves, we’d find:
Anchor: users raved about our in‑app guidance, but the “digital‑adoption” label trapped that power in yesterday’s story.
Lab: would an end‑to‑end visual and narrative overhaul shake category bias fast enough to hit this year’s ARR target?
Loudspeaker: the lingering fear that torching a familiar identity would torch hard‑won awareness, too.
We chose ignition over hesitation. In March 2025, we rolled out a ground‑up rebrand: new wordmark, high‑energy gradient system and a sharper octopus icon to signal Spekit’s AI “central brain” delivering just‑in‑time enablement wherever revenue teams work.
The launch wasn’t cosmetic. It was a market correction. We blanketed the internet, pulsed thought‑leadership on the “Change Economy” and armed sellers with storylines that linked live revenue moments to Spekit’s AI‑powered guidance.
Thirty days later, the data told the story:
Website traffic jumped up 27%, but more importantly, engagement was skyrocketing, with average session durations and clicks up more than 40%.
Organic traffic from LLM‑generated queries spiked, driving net‑new interest we hadn’t paid a dollar to capture.
Demo requests spiked, with most coming straight from direct traffic (brand recall in action) and nearly half converting on the spot.
Our CEO’s launch post punched above its weight with 81 K+ impressions and sparked 590+ engagements in a single day, proving the new story resonated and traveled fast.
Anchor locked. Lab validated. Loudspeaker retired. One canvas, one high‑velocity reintroduction, category perception realigned with the company we are today.
Watch‑outs for facilitators
Vague inputs stall momentum. Keep slicing until the note becomes testable. Dumping into Loudspeaker is avoidance in disguise. Separate distraction from deferred priority. Stopping at mapping turns canvas into décor. Without a sprint backlog, nothing changes.
Related: 4 Ways Leaders Can Break Through Uncertainty and Unleash Meaningful Innovation
The brand advantage hidden inside uncertainty
When the going gets tough, shallow tactics hit a ceiling. Sustainable advantage lives in the story you tell internally first, externally second. My 2022 playbook piece challenged marketers to ask whether a “best practice” sparks joy or just clutters the shelf. The canvas applies the same discipline to decision‑making: if an initiative does not clarify our Anchor or inform our Lab, it waits.
Brand is who you are, why you exist and how you deliver. That story, told with conviction, is the signal employees crave when spreadsheets start to wobble. Give them a canvas, invite them to help write the next chapter, and you convert anxiety into assets the balance sheet never shows: focus, creativity, resilience.
Book a 60‑minute slot. Bring the sticky notes, the scary headlines and the latest customer win. By the hour’s end, you will have fewer unknowns, clearer experiments and a narrative your team can repeat without the slide deck.
Uncertainty is permanent. Leaders who ship through it will be the ones who turn market fog into laser‑focused brand equity, one sticky note at a time.
Stocks are wobbling, AI headlines are multiplying, and budgets feel more like Jenga towers than line items. In times like these, it’s tempting to go heads down and wait for certainty to arrive. Spoiler: It will not.
Pew’s February survey found that 52% of U.S. workers are more worried than hopeful about AI’s impact on their jobs. That worry has weight. Research in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine estimates burnout now costs employers up to $21,000 per employee every year.
As a brand marketer who has steered teams through layoffs, pivots and more “back‑to‑the‑whiteboard” moments than I can count, I’ve learned one truth: Ambiguity is not a phase. It’s the water we are all swimming in. The question is whether we let it pull us under or turn it into forward thrust.
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