Back to the Future with Branding…

Branding. It’s having a moment.

Why? AI is the future, right? Marketing will never be the same again.

Yet ironically, it’s also driving a return to the fundamentals of branding.

With the rise of the digital world, branding took something of a back seat. Initially, experts warned that there would be less need for brands. Since everyone now had near perfect information at their fingertips, they would be making more rational decisions, unmoved by branding. This soon proved to be an illusion. As people became swamped with information, brands were still needed as a shortcut.

However, a bigger impact came from the siren call of data-driven marketing. Social media, SEO, website analytics, and the like all enabled impact to be quickly measured. Under pressure to demonstrate the ROI of their activity, marketers moved their focus to optimization and short-term results (a.k.a. performance marketing), rather than the less measurable and longer-term effort of brand-building.

And now, with the hype around the speed, scale, and precision AI can bring to marketing, it would be reasonable to assume that branding would fall even further down the ladder.

In fact, the reverse has happened. As McKinsey pointed out, brand has returned to the top of the CMO’s agenda.

Why branding is back

To be fair, the pendulum had already started to swing back to brand-building prior to AI. Helped by the efforts of Binet and Field, and of course Byron Sharp, there was a growing realization that performance marketing needed to work in combination with branding in order to generate long term growth.

But the rise of Generative AI has given this a new urgency, for three key reasons:

Branding can cut through an AI-driven sea of sameness

With the ever-increasing availability of AI-driven tools, businesses can increasingly produce an almost infinite amount of content, continuously optimized, and intelligently distributed.

But as every business gets on board, the likely result is an endless sea of sameness.

Distinctiveness, emotional connection, and trust will then become the levers that can cut through, rather than speed and scale. These are the hallmarks of strong brands.

Branding increases likelihood of being recommended by AI

As people increasingly move from browsing search results to asking AI to provide recommendations, businesses need both visibility and credibility to stand a chance of being recommended. Again, these are the hallmarks of strong brands.

Branding increases likelihood of being chosen by people

Businesses need people to choose them, whether from a shortlist of recommendations from AI or ideally directly, sidestepping the need for AI to get involved. This requires people to already be familiar with the business and to trust that it can deliver. That is the very essence of branding.

How branding needs to evolve

But this not just a rewinding of the clock. Branding in this environment needs to evolve:

Greater emphasis on creativity and innovation

The current mantra for achieving visibility seems to be “everything, everywhere, all at once”. Yes, AI pulls from a wide range of sources, so the brand needs to be present. But this feels a bit like an arms race, where everyone produces more and more content, and distributes it more and more effectively, just to end up with the same problem of gaining attention.

This will put a premium instead on creativity and innovation to gain stand out. And in a sea of similar brands, creativity needs to extend beyond just messaging to how the brand is positioned and the products that are developed.

Building a clearer, more coherent pattern

Brands have always formed patterns. We learn to recognize them, understand what they offer, and what goals they can help us achieve.

AI takes this to another level. It effectively pulls from everything known online in response to a prompt and forms its own understanding of the brands that appear. To have a chance of being recommended, a brand needs not only to be visible across these sources but crucially to be considered a credible solution. What it says about itself, what others have to say about it, and what it actually d0es needs to be coherent and clearly understandable .

Branding will need to ensure that the intent of the brand is delivered across all touchpoints and the resultant pattern understood by AI as well as by people.

Investing more in human experiences

Word of mouth has always been important, but AI appears to give even more weight to what people say about the brand rather than what the brand says about itself. This is already giving a new lease of life to the PR industry, to get coverage in trusted media sources. But it also requires the brand to inspire people and deliver experiences that they then want to talk about.

Over the last decade, the emphasis has been on making customer experience more efficient and seamless. AI tools will only improve this further.

However, a frictionless experience, though important, is not particularly memorable or inspiring. Brands will need to invest in experiences or forming communities that can engage and really resonate with people, making them feel valued and connected.

A key responsibility for the leadership team

But here’s the rub.

Embracing creativity and innovation, ensuring coherency across all touchpoints, and delivering human experiences go far beyond a marketing campaign. CMOs may recognize the importance of branding in the age of AI, but the brand needs to guide the values, investments, and operations of the business to be successful.

Rather than an activity of the marketing department, brand-building becomes a key responsibility for the leadership team.