Today, we are introducing the TOM Index™

We have seen this kind of shift before

If you have been in marketing long enough, you know this feeling.

The tools change. The rooms change. The way buyers find us changes. And for a minute, everyone is trying to decide what still matters.

I felt that when desktop publishing changed the business. I feel it again now with AI. The technology is different, of course, but the human question is familiar: when the market changes how it sees you, who are you going to become?

That is where the TOM Index begins. Not with a dashboard. Not with a ranking for the sake of ranking. It begins with a simple belief we have carried for a long time: when a brand is unmistakable, growth becomes undeniable.

Visibility has changed

For years, we talked about being top of mind. That still matters. Buyers remember the brands that feel clear, credible, useful, and distinct.

But buyers are not discovering brands in one place anymore. They are asking peers. They are searching. They are reading summaries. They are using AI systems that surface, describe, compare, and sometimes misunderstand brands before a sales conversation ever starts.

Right? The shortlist can form before you know the opportunity exists.

That is why top of mind now has to meet top of model. A brand has to live clearly in human memory and show up accurately in machine-mediated discovery. If buyers cannot remember you, you get left out. If AI systems cannot understand you, you get misread.

Neither outcome is acceptable for a brand with real ambition.

What TOM measures

TOM stands for Top of Mind and Top of Model.

Top of Mind measures how clearly a brand lives in buyer memory, category conversations, peer validation, and public market signals. It looks at distinctiveness, clarity, trust, resonance, and confidence.

Top of Model measures how accurately AI systems place, surface, describe, and compare a brand inside buying-context prompts. It looks at category discovery, persona discovery, executive voice, buying committee consideration, and buying committee evaluation.

Together, those signals create a TOM Score: a composite visibility score for a brand in a defined industry category. The public TOM Index uses that score to publish the TOM 100, a ranked list of the 100 most visible brands in the category.

It is powered by StudioNorth and editorially independent by design. StudioNorth owns the methodology, not the rankings. Every score comes from the research and analysis, independent of any client relationship.

That matters. Trust only works when the work can stand on its own.

Where we’re starting

The TOM Index launches publicly today at TheTOMIndex.com, with the first categories focused on Technology.¹

We are starting in Technology with four categories: Cybersecurity, Infrastructure, Networking, and Solutions Providers. From there, we will build into more Technology categories, then Healthcare and Manufacturing.

The TOM Index will publish monthly. In August, we will add the Top 20 Signal Map, a read on what the leading brands in a category do well, where the group can improve, and what the month's movement teaches senior marketers.

I am excited about that part because the movement matters. A ranking tells you where a brand stands. The pattern tells you what the market is learning.

How this connects to client work

For StudioNorth, the TOM Index is more than a publishing platform. It is a front door into the visibility system we are building.

The public TOM Index creates the category conversation. The TOM Score Snapshot gives leaders a free, high-level read on one brand. The StudioNorth Brand Visibility Audit turns that interest into a deeper client-specific view of where the brand stands, why it stands there, and what to do next.

From there, the work can connect into the Executive Presence Program, Synthetic Audience Intelligence, AI Website Audit, and the broader brand visibility system around it.

That ladder matters because brands do not need another abstract measure. They need to see what buyers and AI systems can actually see. They need to understand where they are clear, where they are trusted, where they are being misread, and where they are being left out of conversations that matter.

Candidly, that is what excites me.

The human truth inside the machine

AI can surface a brand, but it cannot give the brand meaning. A score can reveal a pattern, but it cannot decide what a company should stand for.

That is still our work. Human-led, AI powered. The TOM Index gives us a new way to see the market. It shows us the brands buyers remember, the brands models understand, and the brands at risk of disappearing between the two.

The future of visibility will not belong to the loudest brand. It will belong to the clearest one.

That is the edge. That is the difference. That is why we built the TOM Index.

How is the TOM Index different from the Brand Visibility Audit?

The TOM Index ranks a public category. The TOM Score Snapshot gives a free, high-level read on one brand. The Brand Visibility Audit is a deeper StudioNorth client service with competitive context and a 12-month path to improvement.