Ever found yourself staring at a shelf lined with choices, each product promising the same result, and yet your hand reaches for just one?
Let’s say you are in the supermarket, looking for butter. Which one do you pick? Chances are the first name that popped into your mind is none other than Amul.
Amul is one of India’s most iconic brands. It’s not just a dairy brand, it’s a symbol of trust – the result of a long-enduring and effective brand strategy. People trust Amul not just because the product is good, but because the brand stands for empowerment, self-reliance, and fairness. People don’t just buy Amul, they buy the taste, trust, and story behind it.
That’s what a great brand strategy does – it makes us feel something.
Great brands don’t just sell a product, they stand for something we relate to, and believe in. But the way branding is experienced today has entered a new phase.
Artificial intelligence has stepped into the spotlight, in the tools we use, the content we consume, the suggestions we trust, and the feeds we scroll through.
But the real question is where does AI stand in branding? What difference is it really creating? Can it even help in brand strategy? Let’s shed the light on the broader implications and nuances of AI in the branding world.
Can AI Build a Brand or Do Branding?
To find a clear answer to this question, let’s unfold the concept of branding. Branding is a multi-dimensional process built in stages, each layer adding depth, clarity, and meaning to the brand.
- Surface Layer: What people see first
- Name, logo, colors, packaging, tagline
These things create a first impression, but they’re just the outer shell.
- Personality Layer: How the brand talks and behaves
- The tone of voice, social media presence, and style of communication
This layer gives the brand character and relatability.
- Emotional Layer: What people feel about it
- Emotional triggers, experiences, and associations
Why people feel loyal or connected to a brand (e.g., comfort, nostalgia, trust)
- Purpose & Value Layer: Why the brand exists
- Mission Vision, Brand Story, Values
This layer creates deeper meaning and cultural relevance.
- Culture & Strategic Layer: Where the brand fits in the world
- Brand positioning, competitor landscape, and audience role
This layer helps define the brand’s place in people’s lives
- Evolving/Adaptive Layer: How the brand grows and reacts
- Innovation, trends, social impact, and now AI integration
This shows how branding is dynamic, not a one-time task.
Let’s take the example of Dove. The self-care brand has the basic personal care items: shampoo, soap, and deodorant. At first glance, it has clean, minimalist packaging with a soft color palette, a gentle product image, and a consistent visual brand identity. At this level, Dove looks like any other self-care brand. But there is more to it.
Their brand personality has a warm, honest, and nurturing tone. Speaks directly to the women, and keeps softness and clarity in language. Not just this, their campaigns, purpose & values, strategic depth, and everything else aligns with their audience, or rather, resonates with them.
The iconic and timeless brands we admire were built by humans, not AI. People with creativity, experience, and dedication.
In each layer, branding demands a deep understanding of the brand’s core and emotional resonance.
Brands build relationships with the audience. Brand identity is why you’d be attracted to them. But branding is why you’d fall in love with them. And that’s where artificial intelligence falls short.
It can help with repetitive tasks, assist with trends, and even mimic tone, but it can’t bring the creative soul a brand or business truly needs. It doesn’t understand the “why” behind the concepts.
So, who brings that edge?
Creatives. Brand Strategists. Agencies.
People who’ve lived through countless branding challenges, crises, and collapses. People who’ve seen what works and what doesn’t – for years. People who’ve understood how people think, and more importantly, how they make decisions.
AI can automate, help in repetitive tasks, and assist to some extent, but branding is more than that; it works on ideas and experiences that AI can’t replicate.
You must be thinking – why is it so?
If AI is capable of doing so much, why can’t it handle branding? The answer lies in understanding how AI works and, more importantly, where it falls short.
The Creative Gaps AI Faces
While AI can optimize, automate, and even create, it still can’t feel, and in branding, that’s a pretty big deal.
It is crucial to connect with your audience to get remembered and become more credible, to build trust.
Using AI is efficient and has massive advantages in data-driven insights and scalability.
But when it comes to branding, AI has its limitations that you just can’t overlook.
- Limited Contextual Understanding: Gen AI can produce content, but it can’t draw context or make decisions in complex situations. It lacks the intuition and sensitivity needed to understand grey areas, which are often where the most meaningful brand decisions are made.
- Sameness and Predictability: It is more important than ever to be authentic and unique, as AI outputs often look and sound alike. If you over-rely on it for your work, it will become bland and will lose its distinct brand identity or voice.
- Surface-level Creativity: Even with tools, AI-generated branding often feels templated. It repurposes patterns from existing data, not ideas rooted in thinking or brand intuition. Good branding feels original.
- Shallow Understanding of Culture: AI can pick up on trends. But it lacks lived experience. It doesn’t understand subcultures, regional emotions, unspoken taboos, or local humor. Branding is deeply rooted in culture, and culture is lived, not scraped from the internet.
- Reliability on Data: AI relies on what has already happened, and it has limited training or data, which leads not only to limited results but also struggles with forward-thinking storytelling, vision-led branding, or ideas that challenge the norm.
- Dubiousness of Information: AI can confidently generate completely false or misleading information; it’s up to users to double-check what it says. So if you rely on AI without your own insights or verification, your credibility is at risk.
So if AI falls short when it comes to creativity and branding, the question is how do you fill that gap? What should businesses actually be looking for?
What Brands Should Focus on Today
Today, it’s easy to get swept up in the promise of instant results and flawless efficiency. But when it comes to building a brand, AI alone can’t carry the weight. Brands today need to focus on what machines can’t replicate, human creativity, connection, and authentic storytelling.
If businesses want to build brands that feel real in an AI-shaped world, they need to rethink their brand strategy, not with an algorithm, but with human awareness. Here’s how brands can move forward:
- Use AI for speed, not strategy
AI can be great for automating tasks, generating initial drafts, moodboards, etc. It helps save time and reduce execution costs. But it can not decide which idea is right for your market or customer. Rely on human insights for decisions that affect perception, positioning, and brand values – crucial aspects of a brand marketing strategy.
- Don’t chase trends. Build brand equity
AI often can provide you with existing styles, viral formats, or crowd-sourced inspiration. This can make your brand look trendy, but not different or unique. This may get attention, temporarily, but won’t build trust for the long term. Focus on long-term brand building that makes your brand distinctly yours – a brand identity that immediately conveys who you are – even when you don’t mention your name.
- Build an adaptive brand system
Create flexible brand systems that adapt and work across platforms. Use AI to track performance and get feedback. But appoint internal or external teams to review, adapt, and manage your brand as it grows. A flexibly, adaptable brand marketing strategy is what keeps your brand relevant in the fast-paced world that we live in.
- Work with people who think creatively and analytically
You need both big ideas and smart execution. Look for partners who can shape stories, track what’s working, understand both emotion and data, and not just build an effective brand identity for your business but be able to execute the right brand marketing strategy to make the most of that new identity.
- Choose a branding and creative agency
A good agency doesn’t just deliver visuals. It helps you shape your brand strategy, craft your story, and bring the expertise. This is what the experts at The Go-To Guy! do, bringing years of hands on experience and have helped over 300+ brands embrace the mindset with a mix of clarity, creativity, and system driven brand strategy.
Conclusion
AI tools are everywhere. From logo makers to automated copy generators, but branding is not about generating things with a prompt or automating a task. It’s about building a business that people trust, remember, and choose – repeatedly.
Sure, AI can help.
But it cannot replace human insight, emotional intelligence, or nuanced thinking.
Because branding isn’t just design or copy or data. It’s clarity and perspective.
It is knowing what to say, when to say, and how to say it in a way that makes people feel something.
And that’s why human brand experts matter.
Because they don’t just follow trends, they understand people and connect dots that AI doesn’t see.
We at, The Go-To Guy!, combine strategy, creativity, and agility with a team of branding experts with the experience of 20+ years in the industry, and we’ve helped 300+ brands. We help brands stay relevant in a world that’s constantly shifting with creative strategy and brand thinking. If that sounds like the edge you’re looking for, let’s have a chat.
