From time to time, team members will share their views stimulated by content from an industry thought leader. Here, our CEO, Lisa Maier, discusses the recent Branding Strategy Insider article, “Brand Management in the Age of AI” by Kevin Keohane.
This is an interesting article because it begins to explore what AI and rapid consumption and integration of customer data might mean for the expression of a brand. In the past, a ‘brand’ has been a stalwart of consistency until such time there is deemed to be a need for a wholesale change, after which it again locks into position of what the author calls “ruthless consistency.” After all, this is what is needed for a brand to be crisply understood and related to by its target market segments.
But there is an increasingly strident argument that no brand can maintain its relevance in the most effective manner in a highly volatile and chaotic environment as is the digital world. Our marketplaces are rapidly changing … and at an increasing rate … making “agility the new rallying cry” as consumers are increasingly expecting one-to-one experiences that only AI is really able to step in to offer.
So how does a brand respond to this new reality? This author makes a strong argument that you basically keep your brand solid in the center and flexible at the edges. This is very much the approach I learned in college Sociology 101, as this is exactly how societies and cultures survive generation over generation. A very solid approach in my estimation.
So, the question then becomes, well how would this be executed? Again, some great directional advice is given about some fundamental guiding principles for brand management in the age of AI:
- Purpose is King. Get very solid on your why, your purpose, mission, values. This is your core.
- Limber Up. Experiment with ways to be agile in experience while consistent in brand core.
- Radical, Real-Time Collaboration. Let the data guide you to what your next iteration might look like on the edges.
In this way, brand management becomes the ‘DevOps’ of marketing, an approach that incorporates both a morphing aspect of the brand with the historical consistency of ongoing brand management. It is a great idea and well worth planning for now in your organization, so you aren’t soon sprinting after a runaway (and out of control) bus!
If you are ready to start making real use of marketing and sales data, let us know. We can help you get started on this path. Good luck and happy morphing!
