How do I use the 5 stages of market sophistication with AI?

Published 10 October 2026 · by Chanelle Segerius-Bruce

This guide is for anyone learning to write copy with AI who keeps getting words that are technically fine and land with nobody. It shows you how to bring Eugene Schwartz's five stages of market sophistication into the brief, so your AI writes for what your readers have already heard, with the exact line to add to your brief at each stage and an example of one offer written five ways. I use Claude and it's the one I recommend, so that's what you'll see throughout, but the method works the same in ChatGPT or Gemini.

Most people think the fix for flat AI copy is a better prompt. A prompt tells AI what to write. It doesn't tell it who it's writing for or how worn out that person is on the promise you're about to make, and that's the part market sophistication fills in.

What is market sophistication, in one minute?

Market sophistication is how many claims your market has already heard, and how sceptical that has made it. Eugene Schwartz set it out in five stages in Breakthrough Advertising in 1966. Every stage needs a different kind of headline.

1. You're first. Say the claim plainly.
2. Others copy you. Make the claim bigger and more specific.
3. The claims stop being believed. Introduce a new mechanism, a different way the promise gets delivered.
4. Others copy the mechanism. Make the mechanism easier, quicker or surer than theirs.
5. Nobody believes the claims or the mechanisms any more. Speak to who the reader is and who they want to be. Schwartz called this identification.

People often confuse this with Schwartz's five stages of awareness, which is a different idea. Awareness is about one reader: do they know they have a problem, and do they know you exist? Sophistication is about the whole market: how many times they've heard the promise before. You need both in a brief, and they're not the same question.

I've written a full guide to each stage here: What are the 5 stages of market sophistication?

Why does AI write stage 1 copy by default?

Because it doesn't know what your market has heard. Claude has read more copy than any of us ever will, but nobody has told it that your readers saw forty versions of "double your revenue" on Instagram this morning. With no stage in the brief, it falls back to the most general and least risky version of your promise. That version is a stage 1 or stage 2 headline: the plain claim, or the plain claim with a number on it.

You'll recognise it. "Grow your business with confidence." "Get more clients in less time." Grammatically perfect. Completely forgettable, because your reader has been hearing that sentence for ten years.

I've used Claude for copywriting since 2023, when I had to reach it through a VPN from South Africa. Back then there were no Projects, no Skills and no Claude Code, just a chat window, and the results still came down to what I put in front of it before it wrote a word. That's still true. Claude can only write for the reader you describe.

How AI itself moved through the five stages

The clearest example of market sophistication I've lived through is AI. The market I now teach in went through four stages in about three years, and you can watch the headlines change.

Stage 1, late 2022 into 2023: "AI can write your emails." That was enough. Most people had never used a chatbot, and Claude wasn't even available where I live. A plain claim sold, because the claim itself was the news.

Stage 2, 2023: bigger claims. "10x your content." "1,000 prompts." "A month of social posts in an hour." Same promise, louder numbers. The prompt pack was the product.

Stage 3, 2024: the mechanism. Everyone had tried the prompts and been disappointed, so the pitch moved to how. Train it on your voice. Build a custom GPT. When OpenAI opened its GPT Store in January 2024, OpenAI said more than three million custom GPTs had already been made (OpenAI).

Stage 4, 2025 to now: a bigger mechanism. Agents. AI employees. An AI team. Same promise again, that it'll do the work for you, but now the mechanism does more of it, with less of you. Gartner put AI agents at the peak of its hype cycle for AI in August 2025 (Gartner), and it has already coined a term, "agent washing", for ordinary chatbots relabelled as agents. When a mechanism has a word for its imitators, you're at stage 4.

My own year followed the same curve. In March 2026 I wrote a post about the anxiety of keeping up: one minute it's Skills, then Claude Code, then something else, and if you're not first you must be behind. By July I had a team of named AI agents doing real work. One clears my inbox every morning and drafts my replies in my voice for me to check. One files my receipts. One writes my blog posts from my own material, and another drafts my email marketing. People who asked me what Claude was two years ago now ask me how to build their own team.

The numbers show how fast the floor rose. In the UK, the share of businesses with ten or more staff using AI went from about 12% in late 2023 to about 35% by June 2026, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Across six countries including the UK, weekly use of generative AI nearly doubled in a year, from 18% to 34% (Reuters Institute, 2025).

And the stage 5 signs are already showing. In a 2024 study of more than 1,000 adults, Washington State University researchers found that simply mentioning "artificial intelligence" in a product description lowered people's intention to buy (WSU). When the label itself costs you trust, the claim is spent.

That's why I teach AI the way I do. Prompt packs were the answer at stage 2. My own map of where people are runs from prompting, through automations, assistants and workflows, to an AI operating system your business actually runs on, and most people I talk to are still on the first rung. What they're after now is a foundation they own: their voice, their rules, their knowledge in one place, with the agents built on top of it.

You don't need to sell AI to use this, though. Swap in your own market and ask the same question: how many times has my reader heard my promise?

What to put in the brief at each stage

Here's the line I'd add to the brief at each stage. Put it near the top, before the task.

The brackets are where most of the work sits. Claude can't invent your mechanism or your story, and you don't want it to. If you leave them empty, it'll fill them with something generic and you're back at stage 1.

One offer, written for all five stages

To show the difference, here's a single offer, a programme that teaches business owners to use AI for their email marketing, with one headline per stage. Notice how far the promise travels, from a chatbot that writes an email to an agent that does the job.

• Stage 1: Write your marketing emails with AI.
• Stage 2: Write a month of marketing emails in one afternoon.
• Stage 3: The brand-voice brief that gets AI writing emails that sound like you.
• Stage 4: An AI agent that drafts your weekly email, your blog post and your inbox replies in your voice, ready for you to approve.
• Stage 5: For people whose readers reply to their emails because they sound like someone they know and trust.

Read them in order and you'll feel each one get less impressed by itself. The stage 1 line is the one your AI will give you if you don't say anything.

My own AI Ban List page is a real stage 5 example. The headline doesn't promise faster or better copy, because my readers have heard every version of that. It opens with where I've been instead: I've used Claude for copywriting since 2023, back when there was no paid plan to buy. That's identification and proof in one line.

How to brief your AI, step by step

This is the order I use.

1. Decide the stage yourself. Don't ask Claude. Open the top five competitors in your space and read their headlines. Plain promises mean stage 1 or 2. Everyone has a named method means stage 3 or 4. If your readers could recite the pitches back to you and roll their eyes, you're at 5. Most expert-led businesses and personal brands are at 4 or 5, whether you're a doctor, a consultant or a restaurant owner teaching what you know.

2. List the claims already out there. Paste three or four real competitor headlines into the brief. This is the single most useful thing you can give Claude, because now it knows what to avoid.

3. Give it your mechanism or your story. At stage 3 or 4, a short description of your method and what makes it different. At stage 5, a real story from your life or your clients' results, in your own words. A voice note transcript works brilliantly here.

4. Add your voice and your rules. Your brand voice, and a list of the words and structures you never want to see. Without this, the right strategy still comes back sounding like AI. I've written about this part separately: How do I make AI writing sound human?

5. Ask for two stages, not one. Ask for five headlines at your stage and five at the stage below. Seeing them side by side shows you very quickly whether Claude has understood, and the stage below is often a useful line for the body copy.

6. Make it a Skill, then give it to an agent. If you write for the same market every week, save the stage, the competitor claims, your mechanism and your voice into a Claude Skill. Then you stop re-explaining your market every time you open a new chat, and every piece starts from the right stage. Once the Skill works, an agent can use it to draft your weekly email, your blog posts and your replies in your voice, and all you do is check and approve.

7. Read it out loud before it goes anywhere. Claude drafts. You decide. My own eyes are still the final check on everything I publish.

FAQ

What stage are most expert and personal-brand markets at?

Stage 4 or 5. Whether you coach, consult, teach a trade or run a practice, your buyers have usually heard the promise and most of the methods, so identity and story do more work than claims.

Can Claude work out my market's stage for me?

It can help you think it through if you paste in real competitor headlines, but don't let it decide on its own. It doesn't see your feed, your DMs or your sales calls, and those are where you find out how tired your readers are.

Should I still mention AI in my marketing?

If you sell something that uses AI, say so honestly, and the UK advertising regulator expects claims about AI to be accurate. Leading with "AI-powered" as the main selling point is a stage 1 move in a market that's well past it. Lead with the result, your mechanism or your story, and mention the AI where it helps people understand how it works.

Is this the same as the stages of awareness?

No. Awareness is about one reader's knowledge of their problem and of you. Sophistication is about how many similar claims the whole market has heard. A good brief to Claude includes both.

Which AI is best for this?

Any AI writing tool will take a stage in the brief, so it works in ChatGPT and Gemini too. I recommend Claude. I've used it for copywriting since 2023, I find it holds a brand voice better, and Skills let me save the whole brief once instead of pasting it into every chat.

Key takeaways

• Market sophistication is how many claims your market has heard. Eugene Schwartz described it in five stages in 1966.
• AI writes stage 1 copy by default, because it doesn't know what your readers have already been told.
• Put the stage, your competitors' claims and your mechanism or story at the top of every brief.
• The AI market itself moved from "AI can write your emails" to "build your AI team" in about three years, and "AI-powered" on its own now costs trust.
• Save the brief as a Claude Skill once it works, hand it to an agent if you want the drafts done for you, and keep the final read for yourself.