Episode #234: Dave Steer on repositioning a brand around AI in three months
Webflow’s CMO had 90 days to relaunch the website, reposition the brand, and ship an ad campaign.
For marketing leaders whose board just told them to become AI native, and who don’t have a playbook for it.
Dave Steer is CMO at Webflow, leading brand, demand, and product marketing after two decades at GitLab, Cloudflare, Twitter, Facebook, and Mozilla. His mandate came from the board and leadership team, timed to Webflow Conf three months from his start date. We cover how he reorganized a 50-to-60-person marketing team around AI tools, why he ran positioning as an executive exercise with April Dunford rather than a marketing one, and where he draws the line between what a human writes and what an agent touches. He also walks through Webflow’s AEO Maturity Index, a study of 2,000 US websites where the average site scored about two or three, and where the problem was site structure rather than content volume.
WHAT YOU’LL HEAR
– Why positioning is a corporate strategy activity, not a marketing activity, and who has to be in the room
– How the team moved from a relay race of specialists to treating everyone as an orchestrator and connector
– The two instincts that go wrong first: buying a pile of ChatGPT licenses, and optimizing for day one instead of day two
– Where the human/agent line sits: the human owns the argument, the agent owns the permutation
