AI for Consumer Brands

When shoppers ask AI what to buy,
is your brand the answer?

Shoppers are skipping search and asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini what to buy. Those answers name only two or three brands. Shelf Help AI gets challenger and mid-size consumer brands into them, and puts AI to work everywhere else you compete: shopper marketing, insights, and trade spend. It's the playbook the giants pay millions for, sized for brands that can't.

Free for the first 5 brands each month. In your inbox within 2 business days.
Not ready? Grab 50 free AI prompts for brand marketers instead →

ExperienceMeta · Kimberly-Clark ($1B P&L) · Unilever TeachingRutgers Business School EducationMBA, NYU Stern RecognitionDigital Marketer of the Year
What we do

AI, applied where brands compete.

No labs, no moonshots. We apply AI to the work your team already does, so the wins show up in this year's plan.

Shopper & brand marketing

Sharper briefs, faster content, smarter retail media. AI takes the grunt work; your team keeps the judgment.

Insights & analytics

Turn syndicated data, reviews, and shopper feedback into decisions in hours, not weeks of waiting on an analytics queue.

Trade spend & revenue

Find the margin hiding in your trade plan with AI-assisted post-event analysis and promo optimization.

The new shelf

Getting named by AI isn't luck.
It can be measured and fixed.

There's one more shelf, and it's growing fast. When AI assistants answer a buying question, they usually name only two or three brands. If yours isn't one of them, you're invisible to those shoppers, and a competitor is winning them.

A spot in the answers comes from structured product data, machine-readable content, and strong third-party signals, all of which can be measured, fixed, and tracked. That's the job of our flagship AI Visibility Audit: one week, fixed price, and a roadmap your team keeps.

Three ways to start

Meet AI at your own pace.

Free

Learn the fundamentals

Grab 50 AI Prompts for Brand Marketers, ready-to-steal prompts for insights, retail media, trade, and more. New to AI? Start with Prompt Like a Pro.

Get the 50 marketer prompts →
Self-paced

Take a course

Structured, on-demand courses that turn AI curiosity into a working skill, taught with the same approach Chad uses in his Rutgers Business School classroom.

See what's coming →
Premium

Work with Chad

High-touch help for consumer brands ready to move: the AI Visibility Audit, trade and marketing spend audits, and a fixed-bid AI Strategy + Pilot Sprint, delivered remotely.

Explore audits & advisory →
How it works

Built for busy operators.

1. No travel, no theater

Everything is delivered async or over videoconference. You get outcomes, not on-site consulting rituals.

2. Fixed scope, fixed price

Advisory engagements are productized with defined deliverables, so you know exactly what you're getting and what it costs.

3. You keep the roadmap

Every engagement ends with artifacts your team owns: playbooks, prompts, workflows, and a plan that outlives the engagement.

Chad Lesher, founder of Shelf Help
Why Shelf Help

Strategy chops. Teaching craft.
Applied to AI.

Most AI consultants are either technologists who can't talk business or marketers who can't go deep. Chad Lesher spent nearly two decades doing both: he designed a $20M incentive program at Meta that returned more than 3X ROI, ran a customer P&L approaching $1B at Kimberly-Clark, and led consumer insights for Hellmann's and Knorr at Unilever.

Today he teaches marketing strategy at Rutgers Business School and helps consumer brands adopt AI the same way big companies adopt any capability: find the highest-value use cases first, prove them fast, and train the team to run without a consultant.

See a real one

This is what a Snapshot looks like.

A real category we ran in August 2026: prebiotic soda. Ten buyer-style questions, asked cold with no brand context, across leading AI assistants. Here is the scorecard.

AI Shelf Snapshot · Prebiotic soda · August 2026
Olipop named in 8 of 10 answers · first pick in 6
Poppi named in 7 of 10 · never the first pick
Culture Pop 3 of 10 · niche questions only
Mayawell 2 of 10 · one niche foothold
Wildwonder · Halfday 1 of 10 · effectively invisible
The finding: in 9 of 10 buyer questions, the answer starts and mostly ends with two brands. On a retail shelf, shoppers see 8 to 12 options. On the AI shelf they see two or three.

Run cold on leading AI assistants, screenshots kept on file. Answers move between models and weeks, which is exactly why we measure them.

That scorecard is the deliverable. Yours takes two minutes to request.

Find out where you stand. Free.

The AI Shelf Snapshot shows you in one page whether AI assistants recommend your brand, and who they recommend instead. Two minutes to request, in your inbox within 2 business days. Free for the first 5 brands each month.

Prefer to start smaller? Get 50 free AI prompts for brand marketers →