AI in brand building: An asset or a liability?
AI has revolutionized what’s possible for branding and marketing small and medium sized businesses. It’s become an administrative assistant and a content generator, a brainstorm partner and a research assistant. It can crawl millions of websites and provide business solutions to real-world problems in seconds. So, if you’ve started reading this expecting me to tell you not to use AI, I’m going to disappoint you. I think AI has enormous power, and I expect that learning how to incorporate its benefits while minimizing the unintended consequences will be the test of an entire population for decades to come.
As with most things, I’m going to discuss this topic through the lens of growing businesses. Most emerging and scaling businesses are trying to have a big impact with as few resources as possible, which makes AI extremely appealing. It’s inexpensive, immensely powerful and the results appear far more professional than anything you might create yourself. The benefits are numerous. But so are the unintended consequences, and unfortunately, many growing businesses discover them the hard way.
Here are a few of the major pitfalls we’ve been seeing in the brand-building space in the last few months.
Generic messaging: So here’s the scenario, you go to ChatGPT and ask it to create some content. It gives you long-form ideas (for blogging or podcasting) and accompanying social media posts. It asks if it should draft them for you and you say yes. You take a deep breath and marvel at how much time you just saved - allowing you to outsource a task you strongly dislike and reallocate those hours toward your other income-generating activities.
Skip ahead a few months. Your engagement on social has plummeted, you’re not even sure who you’re talking to anymore, and you’re questioning what value you bring to the table that your competitors don’t.
This happens ALL. THE. TIME. AI analyzes and repackages what is already on the internet. It is built to give you results that help you fit in. But that’s not the game you’re playing. In branding, you are trying to stand out.
Logos are a logistical nightmare: New scenario, you have an idea you’ve been noodling on for a while. You’re ready to give this hustle a real shot but don’t have a lot of money so you decide to forgo hiring a brand agency and let your favorite AI-enabled program create a logo for you. It looks really cool. You’re excited to upload it to your new account pages and get started.
It takes about one hour to realized that this highly detailed vertical logo doesn’t fit in the square profile picture. In fact, you can’t even read the text. You crop it and it’s not perfect, but it’ll do. The next day you realize that the image file you have has a white background when you need it to be transparent. You play around with a few different programs until you find one that will delete the white background for you. It’s a little rough around the edges, but again, you’ll make do. The following week you go to get a sign printed and the printer tells you they need a single-color vector format. You only have a the multi-color version. And it’s a .jpg. What is a vector file, anyway? Is a .jpg a vector file? (Spoiler alert: It is not.)
Copyright and legal complexities: You go ahead and ask AI to help name and brand your business. It gives you a free logo and a full business plan. But then you remember that everything AI gives you was created somewhere else first. Is this a copyright infringement? Can you get in trouble for this?
your brand is built to stand out.
AI is wonderful and powerful and efficient. It has a place in augmenting your productivity. But it shines in the areas of synthesis and analysis. AI was developed to help you recreate and investigate what’s already been created. This makes it aptly suited to help provide the foundational elements upon which a brand is built.
But, that is the time you can (and should) pass the baton to a skilled brand builder. Why? Because the process of creating a brand requires a creative approach to an old problem. You’re developing something new. Offering a unique perspective or solution to a market saturated with old wisdom. When we build brands, we connect deeply with your ideal audience, what they need and what resonates with them. Brand building is such a difficult task because it’s an innately creative endeavor. It takes a human approach to create a human connection. Brand specialists are professionals in the art of human attention, engagement, and motivation.
At Doodling Pandas, we’ve been building brands for decades. We’ve seen the pitfalls. We can anticipate the pain points you’re likely to experience and have built services specifically to sidestep as many of them as possible. Interested in learning more? Reach out today for a free discovery call.
