In Good Company E10 – Jem Marketing

AI tools will save under-resourced marketing teams a significant amount of time. But without brand guardrails, proper setup, and someone who actually understands the output, they will also do real damage.

Melanie Brook is the founder of JEM Marketing and former Head of Marketing at Beverley Holidays. She came into this conversation already testing Claude and ChatGPT side by side, working out which suited her workflow better. What followed was less a debate about AI and more an honest account of what is actually happening in marketing teams right now.

The setup matters more than the tool

One of the most useful things Melanie raised was about prompting. A lazy prompt produces soulless content. She described the standard SEO agency approach of finding the top-ranking article and rewriting it as essentially what AI does now, just faster. The difference is in how you set it up and what you feed it.

The experience at Holidaymaker reflects this. Setting up Claude for a team is a different process from using it personally, and a lot of operators are still in dabbling mode because nobody has shown them where to start. Brand assets in one place, a clear system prompt, real examples of previous content that has worked — these are the foundations. Without them, the output is generic. With them, it sounds like the brand.

For holiday park marketing teams in particular, this is a real gap. Melanie observed that many parks do not have a centralised repository of their own brand materials. Some do not have a clean copy of their logo. Font licensing for digital surfaces is another area where operators are quietly exposed. These are things AI will not fix. They need sorting before AI can help at all.

What AI actually changes for marketers

Talented marketers are not being replaced. What is shifting is where the time goes. The repetitive work of maintaining brand consistency, producing first drafts, building documents to a consistent standard — that compresses significantly. The thinking, the relationship-building, the quality judgement about what the output actually says — that is where the work moves to.

Melanie made the point that AI will expose people who are not growing. Not because the technology is hostile to them, but because everyone around them will be working at a different pace. In hospitality, where operators talk to each other constantly and share what is working, that exposure happens faster than in most sectors.

The guardrails question

Marketing teams are often the early adopters in any business. They are not always IT specialists. Connecting an AI tool to a file system without understanding what it can access, or letting team members use tools without any framework, creates real risk. Brand damage is one part of it. Data exposure is another.

The answer is not to slow down adoption. It is to have a sensible internal framework before the tools go wide — what they can access, what they cannot, and who reviews anything that goes public.

Melanie put it simply: use AI to enhance, not to replace. That applies to the content itself and to the human judgement that sits around it.