The role of AI for your brand: how to tell authentic stories
We’re living in the era of AI. Or at least, AI hype.
Hot takes are everywhere about how AI will revolutionize marketing and brands. And AI-generated content is all over our screens and feeds (not in a good way).
We’re going to unpack the good and bad of AI, and how to use it in the right way for your brand.
The role of AI in branding
AI is a great tool. At Good Brands, we use AI tools for research, administrative tasks, proofreading, brainstorming, and some data and content analysis – but always supplemented by a real person doing their own reviewing, research, and critical thinking.
Creative design and brand storytelling are where we see more risk from AI. While we sometimes use AI during the creative process, we advise clients to be very careful about AI for image and video generation, public-facing copywriting, and direct customer outreach and engagement. That’s because getting the humanity, nuance, voice, personality, and authenticity your brand needs is not something AI does well.
The bottom line is, if you use AI in the wrong way, you may be doing real damage to your brand.
Yes, you may save on production costs, increasing the volume of output and reducing time, but the long-term damage to your brand and customer relationships far outweigh these modest savings.
We believe that with the proliferation of so-called “AI slop,” or low-quality AI-generated creative, people will crave and value real human stories and art even more. This is a new gold rush and golden age for the few brands who can do this well. Those brands will set themselves apart and build a new depth of loyalty and affinity with their audiences. And those are exactly the types of brands we love working with.
Brand is the lens for AI decision-making
The deciding factor for the role AI should play in your marketing should come from your brand: an understanding of who you are, who your audiences are, and the promise you’re making to them.
For example, if you’re making a promise to your audiences about your brands’ authenticity, the craft of your products, the real people behind your brand, etc. then you cannot undermine that promise in how you use AI. Claiming to tell real human stories while you show an AI image – in other words, not a real human story – is a contradiction at best, and at worst, hypocrisy (and a real example – we’re shaking our heads).
Your brand is a promise, and this would be a broken promise.
And this isn’t a moral criticism, it’s an existential threat to your business. Because if you promise one thing and deliver another, why would any customer ever trust you? Why would they choose you over a competitor who they can trust to deliver?
Customers already tune out advertising and marketing. We’re an industry where our audiences actively try to tune us out and avoid us. It’s the reason ad blockers and premium subscriptions exist. And brands think the solution is to increase the volume of content customers see, but not the quality – to actually lower the quality to save on costs?!
That’s just burning money.
No, the only way to break through to customers is to give them something worth their time: delight, surprise, and just tell a good story for the brief time you have their attention.
These core pillars of your brand strategy will directly impact the type of stories you tell as well as how you tell them (i.e., what role AI plays). So make sure you know:
What is our unique value proposition?
What is our personality and voice?
What values do we embody?
Why do we exist?
Who are our audiences? What do we mean to them?
What experience(s) do we create for our audiences?
How do we set ourselves apart from our competitors?
… and you’ll get a good guide for how to use AI in your creative.
AI in branding: Helpful use cases
As mentioned earlier, AI is a useful tool in parts of the brand and marketing process. We fully endorse and use AI ourselves in some of the following helpful, on-brand ways:
Research: AI can help expedite the research process, summarize large amounts of data and content, and uncover insights – when used in conjunction with human researchers and strategists. That’s key – human insights and empathy are invaluable in creating a brand that actually connects with real people.
Drafting: AI can also help with first drafts, developing prompts, organizing outlines, and providing structure to content. For example, we’ll often use it to come up with topics (with heavy editing afterwards), provide a keyword framework for SEO, or start a first draft. But writing and editing with a human touch, as well as a strong understanding of your brand voice and personality, is essential, and as copywriters, we don’t think AI can do this as well as humans.
Data analytics and monitoring: For marketers, AI can offer excellent data analytics and monitoring of campaigns, content, owned channels, and customer feedback. One of our mantras for a good brand is knowing your audiences, and AI is a great tool for helping you know them better – when paired with deep human empathy and listening.
Personalization: Again, there are exciting opportunities with AI to personalize marketing content, if paired with a real person. AI can’t capture the empathy, interpersonal connection, and nuance as well as a real person.
Hyper-targeted campaigns: AI can help get the right message to the right audience at the right time and place, especially at scale. But brand stewardship is more important than ever to ensure customers are treated with empathy and to guide the brand voice and personality. The core message and creative of the campaign should not be outsourced or mass produced, but personalizing elements of it can be done through AI.
Recommendations
Our recommendations to be a good brand in how you use AI are simple: be transparent, be authentic, and be good.
Be transparent: Don’t hide when something is created by AI. We’ve seen lots of examples of this backfiring on brands. Especially when using AI contradicts your brand or the message of the creative – it’s smarter to just be open about it.
Be authentic: Start with your brand, and then use AI in a way that is consistent with who you are and what you promise to your audiences. For some brands, AI will make more sense than others. Don’t use AI in a way that undermines who you are and the experiences you want to create.
Be a good brand: Ultimately, good brands will make decisions based on principles and commitments. Be true to who you are as a brand, and what type of world you want to create.
Our preference at Good Brands is to prioritize real humanity, because it makes for better stories and experiences. We will continue to use AI to power our creative process, but art touched by human hands, infused with soul, will always beat AI as far as we’re concerned. And that attention to detail and design makes a brand a good brand. Besides, we’d rather live in this world anyway.
Ultimately, make your decisions about AI through the lens of your brand. Tell better stories, not just more, cheaper stories. Be transparent and authentic about what you say and how you say it. And treat the people you’re talking to with care, empathy, and principles. They’re giving you their time and attention for a brief moment; treat that as a privilege. That’s being a good brand.
