Insight
The Goldfish Problem
The hidden cost of corporate amnesia and what to do about it.
We’re working on a fascinating rebrand project at the moment.
As part of the discovery process, we’ve spent months interviewing customers, speaking to leaders, gathering feedback and uncovering insights.
The kind of work that generates a huge amount of value. Then halfway through the project, I had a slightly uncomfortable thought.
In a few months’ time, most of this knowledge would be forgotten. The project would end. The deck would be filed. People would move on.
And this incredibly rich body of customer understanding would slowly disappear into the depths of a SharePoint folder somewhere.
Not because anyone wanted it to. Just because that’s what organisations do.
And that’s when it hit me.
Most B2B marketing organisations suffer from corporate amnesia, aka ‘The Goldfish Problem’.
Not because people aren’t smart. Not because teams aren’t working hard. But because we’ve become incredibly good at creating knowledge and spectacularly bad at keeping hold of it.
Think about the last few years.
How much has your organisation invested in understanding customers?
Customer interviews. Brand research. Messaging frameworks. Persona mapping. Account intelligence. Campaign analysis. Employee surveys. Agency workshops.
Probably hundreds of thousands of pounds. Maybe millions. Across B2B it's more like billions!
And yet six months later, somebody asks a question and half the room says:
“Didn’t we already research this?”
The deck can’t be found. The people involved have moved on. Nobody remembers the context. And before you know it, you’re paying to learn the same lesson all over again.
It’s madness.
We spend fortunes creating sales and marketing intelligence and almost no effort preserving it.
Which is why I’ve become increasingly fascinated by what I believe is the next big opportunity in B2B marketing:
The rise of the Collective Intelligence System.
Not another AI tool. Not another workflow. Not another dashboard.
An actual system that helps an organisation remember.
Because memory might be the most underrated competitive advantage in modern B2B marketing.
- Imagine a regional marketer being able to access five years of customer insight in seconds.
- Imagine a salesperson learning from thousands of previous customer conversations.
- Imagine a creative team building on everything that’s already been learned rather than starting from scratch every time.
- Imagine an organisation that gets smarter every year instead of repeatedly forgetting what it already knows.
That’s powerful. And thanks to AI, it’s suddenly possible.
The first wave of AI was tools. The second wave was workflows. I believe the third wave will be Collective Intelligence Systems.
Some will be broad.
A Brand Intelligence System. A Marketing Intelligence System.
Others will be more focused.
Creative Intelligence. Messaging Intelligence. Sales Intelligence. ABM Intelligence.
The principle is the same. Capture what the organisation knows. Make it accessible. Help people use it. Allow it to get smarter over time.
At Rooster Punk, this sits right at the heart of our Systemize thinking.
In fact, we’re already helping clients explore, scope and build some of these systems.
What gets me super excited is that Ai isn't just about doing work faster. It’s helping organisations become smarter.
Giving them memory. Giving them context. Giving them a way to compound knowledge instead of constantly losing it. A flywheel of learning rather than a treadmill of forgetting.
But here’s the important bit.
None of this matters if humans don’t want to use it.
We’ve all seen expensive technology projects arrive with great fanfare only to gather dust six months later.
Technology isn’t the challenge. Adoption is. Behaviour is. Enjoyment is.
The organisations that win won’t necessarily build the most sophisticated intelligence systems. They’ll build the ones people genuinely love using.
The ones that make work easier. Smarter. More creative. More enjoyable.
That’s why I believe the future isn’t Humanize or Systemize.
It’s Humanize and Systemize.
Building brands that people believe in. And building intelligence systems that marketing, brand, creative, sales and ABM teams actually use.
Because in a world where everyone has access to the same AI tools, the real advantage won’t come from the technology. It will come from what your organisation knows. What it remembers. And how effectively it puts that intelligence to work.
If you’re curious about what a Brand Intelligence System, Creative Intelligence System or Collective Intelligence System might look like inside your organisation, drop me a message.
We’re building some fascinating things in this space and I’d be happy to share what we’re learning.