The Impact of AI on Corporate Brands and Positioning
At an early-morning coffee meeting yesterday, I was asked a fascinating question I hadn’t gotten before: how has AI changed the big picture of messaging and branding?
For context, my meeting partner and I were having a discussion about the most effective B2B brand/message platforms and how to best differentiate one company from another. We also talked about the pros and cons of using AI to prepare some basic marketing materials. His question was a natural combination of both concepts, but it caught me off guard; I talk with people all the time about the effect of AI on strategic communications writ large, but not on specific topics like this.
As I told him, and as I’ve written about here before, AI has influenced the art of strategic communications – not so much the science. The nuts and bolts of interpersonal communication are the same as they’ve ever been: a sender sends a message through a channel to a receiver; noise attempts to distort the message; feedback loops ensure two-way dialogue; etc. But the art…the how…AI is just the latest thing that changes how people can initiate or prepare correspondence.
To me, it’s essentially the same with branding and messaging. The science hasn’t changed one bit; the characteristics that make for the most successful platforms are the same as ever. But AI has given us another tool to use to arrive at those platforms. In particular, I think it can simplify/automate some of the research involved in the process and provide some more creative ideas for words and phrases that might fit in the platform.
Also, AI isn’t likely to have a huge impact on brand experience and evolution. AI search will return content that’s already published; as long as that content is true to one’s brand, AI will present it as it is and users will experience it how it was meant to be experienced. But if content doesn’t contain consistent messaging, AI will spread that inconsistency – just as search and other dissemination tools have for a long time.
Long story short: as is so often the case, I don’t see AI as a magic bullet for any particular use case. But it can sometimes be a useful tool in our arsenal – just like all the other tools available to us.
