Don’t get me wrong, AI definitely has a place in brand building.
And while it hasn’t progressed by leaps and bounds as it has in performance marketing, we can still use AI to augment some of the brand building basics:
- Enhancing campaign execution – AI-generated insights can help optimise brand messaging or visuals for campaigns and even predict which is likely to be more emotionally engaging.
- Aiding in customer insights and positioning – AI can analyse massive amounts of consumer sentiment data, helping brands identify opportunities in the market, and better position themselves for those opportunities for campaign effectiveness.
- Strengthening brand consistency – AI can enforce brand guidelines across every touchpoint, which is crucial for long-term brand building.
So AI can optimise, analyse, and enforce. It can refine the edges, but can it define a brand? Can it ‘manufacture meaning‘?
And that brings us to what AI can’t do
It can’t replace human strategic thinking. It can’t dream up “Dumb Ways to Die” as the most irreverent and widely shared PSA ever or match the resonance and simplicity of Nike‘s “Just Do It”. AI can’t manifest the purpose-driven brilliance of Patagonia’s “Don’t Buy this Jacket” because it lacks the cultural awareness and gut instinct required to move the brand strategy dial from good to great. Or at least it can’t yet.
We’ve already watched Apple, Google, and others stumble in their early attempts to harness AI. And if other brands follow suit, we’re likely to see more of the same or worse—
Competent and data-driven but shallow and forgettable. Effective in garnering attention in the short term but ineffective in the long term. Brand managers taking us from tried-and-true brand building to “bland building”—diluting a differentiated brand with homogeneous, meaningless AI slop. Bleck.
My advice for brands?
Sidestep this disaster altogether.
By all means, let AI do the number crunching and campaign optimisation, but remember AI can’t do the heavy lifting required to effectively build your brand.
Why? Because AI is the ultimate yes-man:
- AI is a tool for the timid. It can’t help you do anything brave because it can’t risk anything.
- It can’t challenge a brief or break the rules to create something to form an emotional connection.
- AI has no skin in the game. It simply does not care if you fail.
So AI is not the problem
Marketers treating AI like a magical shortcut to relevance and ROI without doing the hard strategic thinking—that’s the problem.
Again, some brands have no problem striking the right balance—for example, the recent Temptations campaign is actually quite good. This AI thing has got legs.
But if you’re using AI to cut costs without first understanding how your brand actually builds equity with real humans, you’re not leveraging technology to build a brand. You’re automating mediocrity. Now is not the time to make like Ron Popeil and “set it and forget it” (hello fellow Millennials 👋)—branding doesn’t work like that.
If brands want to stand out, they need to be careful about chasing efficiency and focus on equity instead. After all, charismatic brands aren’t the ones that play it safe and just follow the data—they take brave, bold, creative risks.
And if brands want to create lasting impact, they need to make the sort of meaningful connections that require emotional intelligence and empathy.
And that? That’s a job for humans.
