At some point this season you will walk into a living room that feels more volatile than any quarterly board meeting. Your in-laws are gathered. Someone has already opened a second bottle of wine. You silently pray:
“Please do not let Uncle Mark bring up crypto.”
“Please do not let my dad explain how to deep-fry a turkey indoors.”
“Please, absolutely no politics.”
If you work with AI tools all day, your brain does something funny. You start to frame these hopes as prompts.
“Gently ask Aunt Carol to stop talking about crypto.”
“Request Dad to avoid politics, sports, and kitchen advice in one sentence.”
The marketer in you knows how to write a great prompt. The human in you knows it will not matter. Your relatives will ignore all instructions and still run their own model.
That tension is exactly why this topic is useful for CMOs, CEOs, and marketing leaders. Prompt engineering for in-laws is a joke. Studying it is not. It exposes how we communicate expectations, set guardrails, and structure requests inside our teams and our tech.
Why Leaders Secretly Wish Relatives Behaved like Large Language Models
When you give a modern AI a clear prompt, you get something back that mostly follows the rules. You can:
- Define the role: “You are a menu strategist for a regional QSR brand.”
- Narrow the task: “Create three limited-time offers using ingredients we already carry.”
- Set constraints: “Stay under 500 calories and avoid breakfast items.”
The system takes your input and tries to honor it.
Family does not. You can say,
“Dad, can we keep it light tonight? No politics.”
and three minutes later he is rating candidates between bites of stuffing.
That gap is a useful mirror for how we work with both people and machines.
Inside your business, you are constantly “prompting”:
- Agencies with briefs
- Franchisees with new programs
- In-store teams with promotions
- AI tools with data and instructions
When things go sideways, it is tempting to blame the model or the person. “The AI is wrong.” “The store did not follow the playbook.” Often the real issue is upstream. The request was vague, overloaded, or missing context.
So let us borrow the holiday table as a safe sandbox. By looking at “bad prompts” and “better prompts” for relatives, we can sharpen how we frame asks for both humans and AI.
Bad Prompts vs Better Prompts: Holiday Edition
1. The vague prompt
Bad prompt for in-laws:
“Can everybody just behave this year?”
Result: No one knows what “behave” means. One person hears “no political arguments.” Another hears “do not mention my divorce.” Someone else hears “no carving the turkey with power tools.” Chaos resumes on schedule.
Bad prompt in your marketing world:
“Let’s make our loyalty program more engaging.”
Your team hears “more app push notifications.” Your CFO hears “more discounts.” Your agency hears “more animations.” No one shares the same picture of success.
Better prompt for in-laws:
“During dinner, let’s keep the conversation on family stories, travel, and fun plans for next year. Let’s skip politics and medical debates at the table and save those for later if people want to chat one-on-one.”
Here you set:
- Time: “during dinner”
- Scope: topics that are welcome
- Explicit exclusions: topics that are off-limits
- Escape valve: they can still happen, just not in the main setting
Better prompt for your team:
“In Q1, redesign the loyalty experience for regular drive-thru guests. Focus on:
- Faster check-in at the speaker
- One tap to redeem the top three rewards
- Fewer blanket discounts, more personalized offers based on past visits
Success is a 10% lift in repeat visits from members who visit 3+ times per month.”
You defined:
- Who: regular drive-thru guests
- What: specific elements to improve
- How to measure success: repeat visits
You did not say “be more engaging.” You painted a clear picture.
2. The emotionally loaded prompt
Bad prompt for in-laws:
“Aunt Carol, can you please not bore everyone with crypto again?”
You are not just managing content. You are judging her identity. That almost guarantees the opposite of what you want.
Bad prompt in your business:
“Stop sending these generic campaigns. Our customers are bored and our open rates are embarrassing.”
That may feel honest, but it is not constructive. It pokes at pride more than it points toward change.
Better prompt for in-laws:
“Carol, everyone loves hearing about what you are working on. At the table tonight can we keep it to one quick update, then move to topics everyone can join, like trips, recipes, or shows we are watching? I want to make sure the kids feel included too.”
You are still setting a boundary. You are also showing respect and offering alternatives.
Better prompt for your team:
“For our next CRM cycle, let’s retire the one-size-fits-all monthly blast.
- Create three versions based on visit frequency.
- Use recent purchase data to suggest one relevant add-on.
- Test subject lines that feature specific value instead of generic ‘special offers.’
Our goal is to raise both open rate and basket size without leaning on more discounts.”
You named the problem without attacking anyone. You translated frustration into a structured brief.
3. The impossible multi-task prompt
Bad prompt for in-laws:
“Dad, at dinner can you please avoid politics, sports, stock market predictions, parenting advice, and your thoughts on the restaurant industry, and also maybe talk less overall?”
You just asked a human to override their core operating system. That is like asking a model trained on Reddit to speak like a Supreme Court opinion.
Bad prompt in your AI work:
“Write a full annual marketing plan for our restaurant chain that fits on one slide, includes channel-by-channel spend, creative concepts, and a forecast model, and make it funny.”
You might get something back, but it will not hold up in front of a CFO.
Better prompt for in-laws:
“Dad, could you help me out tonight by asking everyone at the table one question about their year, and maybe sharing one favorite story from your own? That way the conversation feels more balanced.”
You did not try to turn him into a different person. You redirected his energy into a useful behavior.
Better prompt in your AI work:
Break the giant ask into stages –
Break the giant ask into stages –
- “Summarize our last 12 months of campaign performance into 5 bullets for the executive team.”
- “Based on that summary, list the top 3 channels we should prioritize next year and why.”
- “Draft a one-slide outline with those priorities, including rough spend ranges and expected outcomes.”
You still use AI to move faster, yet you respect its limits and your own review process.
Three Prompt Principles Holiday Dinners and AI Systems Share
This is fun, but it is not just a joke. The same habits that would make holiday gatherings smoother also make your AI, your briefs, and your teams more productive.
1. Define context like you are setting the table
“Act as a menu strategist” is helpful. “Act as a menu strategist for a 20-unit regional burger brand with drive-thru in the Midwest, focused on value-conscious families” is better.
Context narrows the response space. For family:
“We’ve only got two hours together tonight and a lot of kids at the table. Let us keep conversation topics light and kid-friendly during dinner.”
For AI:
“You are an AI assistant for a convenience store operator, shaping local offers based on weather, time of day, and recent visits. Recommend three offers for a rainy Tuesday evening at 6 p.m.”
Same skill, different arena.
2. Replace wishful thinking with clear guardrails
“Everyone, be kind” is a wish.
“During dinner, no phones at the table and no debates about elections. If a topic gets tense, we will change the subject and revisit later if needed” is a guardrail.
AI systems thrive on guardrails:
- “If you are not sure, say you do not know.”
- “Do not invent policies. Only reference the list provided.”
- “Answer in 3 sentences or less, then offer one next step.”
As you roll out AI inside your business, those rules protect your brand and your guests. The holiday table is a reminder that without guardrails, the loudest voice wins.
3. Assume misinterpretation and design for recovery
Relatives will ignore your prompts. Models will misread your prompt. Staff will skim your email.
Smart leaders plan for that.
At home, you might:
- Change the subject when things heat up
- Move a side conversation to the kitchen
- Take a walk with the relative who needs extra airtime
In your business, you can:
- Put AI responses behind a review step for staff
- Add “safety prompts” that remind the system what not to say
- Train teams on how to correct and refine prompts in real time
Prompt engineering is not only about getting it right the first time. It is about creating a path back when the first attempt misses.
The Honest Part: Relatives Ignore Prompts, but the Practice Still Pays Off
Here is the punchline. You can write the perfect prompt for your in-laws:
“Kindly respond with supportive, drama-free conversation, avoid politics and unsolicited advice, and prioritize listening over lecturing.”
Your results will be… mixed.
Humans arrive with their own history, mood, and motives. They are not fine-tuned on your preference stack. That is what makes them infuriating, and also what makes them worth celebrating.
AI systems, on the other hand, actually respond to better prompt engineering. They do not take feedback personally. They can be retrained. Inside your restaurant, your c-store chain, or your brand portfolio, that matters.
Practicing “prompt engineering for in-laws” is a light way to build a serious habit:
- You learn to be specific.
- You strip emotional weight out of requests.
- You define success upfront.
- You build guardrails instead of vague wishes.
Those same muscles give you better creative briefs, cleaner AI instructions, sharper loyalty programs, and more consistent customer experiences.
So this season, when you catch yourself silently thinking
“Please, no crypto this year.”
go one step further. Rewrite it in your head as a better prompt. Then accept that the family model will probably override your instructions.
Back at work, do not settle for the vague version. Your AI tools, your teams, and your customers are far more likely to listen.
