In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, Jamie Dimon explained why JPMorgan Chase is spending billions more on AI. He was making a long-term bet. The same kind of leaders make when they build headquarters, factories or infrastructure that won’t “pay off” this quarter but will define competitiveness for decades.

It’s exactly how marketers should think about and position differentiation in the eyes of the C-Suite. Differentiation is a capital investment.

It’s the parallel most marketing teams miss. Buildings are capital investments. You amortize them over time. AI is a capability investment. You expense it upfront but expect long-term returns. Differentiation works the same way. But we treat it like a cost, not an asset.

Brands don’t ‘launch’ differentiation. They build it over years of consistent choices, tradeoffs and reinforcement. Yet marketing budgets are often judged like short-term operating expenses.

• Did this campaign convert now?
• Did awareness spike this quarter?
• Can we prove immediate ROI?

That mindset quietly dismantles differentiation before it ever has a chance to work.

The hidden cost of short-term marketing logic

Dimon’s warned, “We’re not going to hit an expense target today and then explain in 10 years how we got left behind.” This should hit home for marketers, too, because the marketing version sounds like this:

• “We’ll revisit brand marketing once product demand grows.”
• “Customers already know us for what we do.”
• “We need fast wins right now.”

Those decisions feel responsible. They’re measurable. They’re safe. But they’re also why so many brands become interchangeable. Differentiation erodes not because teams don’t value it, but because they optimize it out in favor of short-term impacts.

Why differentiation feels expensive before it feels obvious

Like AI or a new building, differentiation looks inefficient at first. It requires patience while competitors chase trends, repeating messages until they feel internally boring and staying consistent through waves of doubt.

And early on, differentiation won’t spike metrics. But it will reshape perception and perception compounds slowly. By the time differentiation shows up clearly in pricing power, loyalty and preference, the groundwork was laid years earlier, just like infrastructure.

Marketing’s real job isn’t optimization, it’s relevance

Too many marketing teams are evaluated on how well they optimize what already exists. Things like better targeting, faster testing and lower acquisition costs. These things are useful, but insufficient.

Dimon isn’t investing in AI to optimize yesterday’s bank. He’s investing to remain relevant in tomorrow’s market. Marketers must do the same. Differentiation is how brands stay strategically relevant when competitors copy features, pricing and messaging. And relevance, unlike social media clicks, is never built overnight.

So instead of asking, “Can we justify this investment right now?”, we need to ask, “What will we regret not building when customers stop noticing us?”

Differentiation is the only marketing investment competitors can’t easily copy

Differentiation is fundamentally different from other marketing spend. It doesn’t depreciate the way tactics do. Performance ads stop working the moment you turn them off. Promotions lose power as customers get trained to wait. Marketing tech stacks age the second competitors buy the same tools.

When a brand invests consistently in a clear point of view — what it stands for, who it’s for, and what it will never be, it builds memory structures in the market. Those memories make every future dollar work harder. Ads start to convert faster, sales cycles start to shorten and pricing resistance drops. But like any compounding asset, differentiation rewards patience.

But quarterly targets reward speed over strength. Dashboards reward what’s measurable, not what’s meaningful. So, organizations default to what feels safer — feature-focused messaging, trend-driven campaigns and short-term demand capture. The result is marketing teams that are busy and visible, but forgettable brands.

Long-term differentiation requires leadership, not just creativity

Just as CEOs protect long-term capital investments from short-term cost pressure, leaders must protect differentiation from being diluted every time numbers wobble.

The brands that win aren’t just the ones that react fastest to the market. They’re the ones who invest early in a clear identity and refuse to abandon it when it doesn’t immediately pay off.

And that’s not a creative choice, it’s a strategic one. Because like any serious long-term investment, differentiation only works if you commit to it before you desperately need it.

Differentiation isn’t a line item, but a long-term asset that appreciates only if you keep investing when it’s uncomfortable, unproven and unfashionable. Those brands that win are the ones that dare to build something enduring before it is obvious they need to.