How smart marketers hack brand visibility without chasing clicks

The old funnel’s basically dead. Buyers aren’t clicking their way through journeys anymore. They’re discovering brands in places where clicking is optional or nonexistent: AI summaries, LLMs, LinkedIn feeds, and Reddit-style threads. That’s where the momentum starts: where people shape what’s trusted, repeated, and remembered.

Although your dashboard may be reporting differently, clicks are fading out; being remembered is the metric that matters now.

The smart marketers are the ones who treat marketing like momentum: Borrow attention, build a distinctive brand, and control the narrative.

Louis Grenier calls this the Borrow–Brand–Control framework. It’s not a hack, but rather a way to fast-track brand mental availability when zero-click behavior eats your old playbook alive. This blog looks at Grenier’s brand visibility framework and how to implement it, step-by-step.

Step 1: Stop trying to own attention. Borrow it.

You can’t own attention anymore. You can, however, rent it from the people and places your buyers already trust.

For years, the game was predictable. Rank on Google for a key term, get guaranteed traffic, and then turn a slice of it into leads. 

That control is gone. 

AI tools and AI-powered search engines now sit between your content and your buyer. So instead of obsessing over ranking, it makes more sense to focus your efforts where attention already flows.

Borrowing attention to gain brand visibility looks like this:

• Other people’s audiences: Show up in front of influencers, creators, and peer brands your ICP already follows;
• Other people’s channels: Tap into TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, Reddit, podcasts, events, and newsletters where your buyers already spend time;
• Other people’s budgets: Pay to appear in feeds and lists they already trust, from LinkedIn ads to sponsored slots in niche emails.

This isn’t shallow influencer marketing. It’s distribution through trust.

And you can’t find those places by asking buyers “what do you read?” or “which blogs do you like?” They will give you flattering lies, telling you that they read serious business books and highbrow blogs, while their real attention is on TikTok or Instagram half the day.

So stop believing self-reported behavior and look at:

• Where referral traffic and brand mentions come from;
• Which social channels show repeat engagement, even if they do not “convert” in your CRM;
• What your own team scrolls on their phones when they think no one is looking.

A founder-led borrowing play that rebuilt pipeline

Grenier shared a simple case. A training company selling to B2B professionals had cruised for years on category demand. After Covid, demand dropped. They were losing money. The CEO had written books and used to be vocal, but had disappeared into building courses “in secret.”

The fix was brutally simple:

• Show up where the audience actually hangs out: in this niche, Instagram;
• Make the founder visible again;
• Post three to five times a day with practical tips, glimpses of daily life, and proof of expertise.

Within months:

• Engagement on Instagram doubled;
• The founder started getting invited back onto podcasts and events;
• After 12 months, the business went from losing money to about 2 million in profit, off the back of renewed demand.

It’s nothing magical. The key to fast-tracking brand mental availability is just borrowing attention from the platforms and creators that already owned their market’s time.

Step 2: Build a brand people remember, not just see

While borrowed attention gets you into the room, brand distinctiveness decides if anyone remembers you the next day.

AI and zero-click behavior have made one thing very obvious. Being known, noticed, and remembered in buying situations is one of the only levers you still control. Everything else is getting harder to track and predict.

The science is simple:

• Recency drives recall. The more recently someone saw you, the more likely they are to remember you.
• Memories fade. Show up once, then disappear, and you fall off the shortlist.

That is why the biggest brands in the world keep running ads even though “everyone already knows them.” They are fighting memory decay, rather than for awareness.

For B2B, the same rules apply. People and memories, not personas and funnels.

Distinctive beats “clever”

Grenier loves the story of Demo Diva, a demolition company. Same heavy machinery as everyone else. Same services. The only notable difference: instead of the standard yellow and black excavators, all the equipment is bright pink. 

(Image source)

That color means nothing. It is not a metaphor. It simply stands out in a sea of sameness. So they get remembered first when someone needs demolition work.

Here’s how to make sure you’re pulling the right levers:

• Find the “little things” people notice: The haircut everyone comments on. The founder’s accent. The office dog that appears in every photo. Even the random Elvis impersonator on your team. If people keep pointing at it, that’s a signal. Triple down.
  
• Explore the negative space: List every common pattern in your category: colors, layouts, tone, symbols, and behaviors. Then look for what nobody does. Demo Diva saw that its competitors had all conformed to yellow and black. Pink was the unused space.
  
• Anchor everything with a face or symbol: A founder, a mascot, a distinctive logo, even a recurring sound or line. The point is instant recognition.

Pick one or two strong cues. Don’t try to be weird in 10 different directions. You still need to feel like you belong to the category, just not vanish inside it.

And then repeat until your own team is sick of it. That’s usually the moment your market is finally starting to notice.

Step 3: Spice beats values every time

“Company values” are cheap. Anyone can declare they are “customer-centric” and “innovative.” 

What sticks is not what you say you value, but how you behave. Grenier calls this your spice.

Spice is:

• Observable behavior, not slogans;
• Something competitors can’t honestly copy;
• The way you show up when nobody is writing a press release.

One of Grenier’s favorite examples is a minor league ice hockey team that hired players who were better fighters than players. Their spice was aggression. On the ice, they attacked relentlessly, never “parked the bus,” and turned games into pure entertainment. 

You cannot fake that. You either commit, or you don’t.

To find your spice, start with what only you can do:

• Maybe your founder is brutally direct and loves asking hard questions until they hit the truth.
• Maybe your product team is almost annoyingly nerdy and willing to show the messy details most competitors hide.

Use the alter-ego trick:

High performers often use an alter ego to switch into their “on stage” self. Grenier cites Freddie Mercury as the stage persona of Farrokh Bulsara. The alter ego allowed him to show up flamboyant, confident, larger than life, instead of worrying about what people would think.

You can do the same to boost brand visibility and recall. Treat it as a persona you manage, rather than an extension of your ego.

Make spice concrete with do/don’t rules:

Vague ideas like “unapologetically bold” mean nothing until you spell out what that looks like:

• We do: Ask challenging questions in webinars, even if it makes guests sweat;
• We do: Ship creative ideas that might polarize people;
• We don’t: Publish generic “ultimate guides” that could live on any competitor’s site.

Step 4: Control the narrative before algorithms do it for you

If you do not control your story, AI tools and random community threads will do it for you. And they won’t care whether they get it right.

“Narrative” is one of those B2B words that got abused. In practice, it’s simple. It’s your point of view that signals to your audience: we are on your side. Your narrative should answer one clear question:

“What are we protecting our audience from?”

Bad data. Wasted ad spend. Lazy marketing. Burnout. Whatever the enemy is, it must be real for your segment.

When you get this right, your brand becomes a bat signal. You‘re not trying to be controversial for the sake of it. You are saying, “Here is the problem we know you are living with. Here is the line we draw. Here is why we exist.”

That clarity does four things:

1. Filters in the right people and repels the wrong ones;
2. Gives your content and creative a consistent spine;
3. Makes it easier for partners to reference you correctly when they talk about you;
4. Keeps you from drifting into random tactics chasing short-term clicks.

Remember: These tools surface what is happening in the real world. If a lot of conversations happen on Reddit in your category, you need to be present there in some form. But you want those brand mentions to carry the narrative you designed, not some vague, accidental one.

Step 5: Shift your success metrics from clicks to recall

Clicks and traffic are lagging indicators from a world that’s disappearing.

Buyers often pick from their mental shortlist before they ever compare you on a pricing page. Research Grenier referenced shows the brands on that shortlist win most of the time, often before others are even considered.

So you need to measure whether you are in that shortlist, not only whether someone filled out your form.

Practical proxies:

• Branded search and direct traffic: These go up when more people already know your name;
• Organic mentions: Count how often you appear in community threads, DMs, and casual conversations, not just tagged posts;
• “How did you hear about us?” surveys: Build attribution yourself. Let people type the podcast, person, or community that sent them;
• Unaided recall studies: Ask a sample of your market which brands they think of in your category, without prompts.

This work is slow because you are not just optimizing funnels, but rather updating people’s brains. That takes time, repetition, and some faith in the science.

Getting internal buy-in when everyone wants instant ROI

Inside most companies, the biggest blocker is not creativity. It’s fear. Fear of losing control and not being able to credit a specific ad for a specific deal.

A few ways to cut through that fear:

• Ask for forgiveness, not permission: Run small experiments that don’t require a full committee. Prove impact, then show the data.
• Set up internal competitions: Let leadership run the “safe” campaign while you run the distinctive one. Compare outcomes.
• Use customer voices, not just graphs: Bring a couple of customers into the office to talk about how they see your brand and competitors. Even better, invite someone who churned. One brutal story hits harder than 10 dashboards.
• Never frame it as “a marketing thing”: Call it a business-critical visibility or growth project. Get the people in charge to lead the session, not just attend.

The harshest wake-up call a CEO can get from a customer is their indifference. They bought once, barely used the product, and never thought about it again. All the more reason you need to repeat yourself, show up everywhere your buyers are, and make it easy for them to remember you when they finally care.

What to do next

If “more traffic” is your first instinct, you are solving the wrong problem. Start here instead:

1. Audit where attention flows: Map where your ICP truly spends time: LinkedIn, Slack groups, subreddits, niche newsletters, YouTube, events, and AI tools. Mark where you are absent.
   
2. Pick one borrowed-audience play: Partner with a creator, appear on a podcast, speak at a community event, or have your founder post daily on the platform that dominates your niche.
   
3. Choose one distinctive asset and one spice: Decide on a visual, symbol, or character that will cue your brand. Pair it with a concrete behavioral rule that makes you uncopyable.
   
4. Write your protection statement: Answer “What are we protecting our audience from?” Use that line to guide every webinar, post, and pitch.
   
5. Track recall proxies, not just clicks: Monitor branded search, direct traffic, mentions, and survey answers. Look for movement over quarters, not days.

Would anyone miss you if your website vanished tomorrow?

Imagine your site disappears. No redirects. No landing pages. Nothing.

• Would your market still think of you first when they needed what you sell?
• Would they still recommend you in a Slack thread?
• Would your name still show up when someone asks an AI tool for options?

If the honest answer is “probably not,” then you know what to do.

• Borrow attention from people who already hold your buyers’ trust.
• Build a brand that is distinctive enough to survive in their memory.
• Control your narrative so every mention, feed, and quote reinforces why you exist.

Clicks may be getting harder to win, but memory is still up for grabs.

Don’t wait for attention—earn it at scale. Claim your seat at Louis Grenier’s live course, Build Brand Mental Availability for Zero-Click Behavior, and learn how to make your brand impossible to ignore.