Before You Generate Demand, Engineer Your Market

In a CMSWire feature published May 22, 2026, industry analyst Myles Suer reviews Bruce Cleveland's Market Engineering and makes the case that winning in the AI era requires more than building a better product — it requires engineering the market itself.

Drawing on Cleveland's framework, Suer walks through the five core disciplines that separate category leaders from also-rans: category design (defining how buyers think about a problem before competitors do), positioning (claiming specific mental territory in the prospect's mind), messaging (translating strategy into language the market can repeat), storytelling (reducing adoption friction by making customers the hero), and thought leadership (shaping industry language and standards before others fill the void).

Suer argues that in an agentic AI era — where features are copied in weeks and product advantages become table stakes overnight — the companies that own the narrative, the category, and the buyer's mental map own something far harder to dislodge. As he puts it: winning isn't just about building the product right, but building the market so your company becomes the name that defines it.

Read the full article on CMSWire: Before You Generate Demand, Engineer Your Market