Earlier this week, I noticed something strange when I was looking at the brand references that a client had shared. They wanted me to look at those brands before I started building their brand strategy.   

All these references were wildly different... and yet somehow, they all seemed similar. Despite having different colors, different typography, and different brand elements, they all looked like they were done by a single masterful designer who was too ambitious and have left certain signature styles to mark his creations. 

But then I realized why all of them felt so similar. They were all created using Claude. I could see the distinct block shapes that Claude uses, the unnecessary taglines at the bottom or elemental lines placed haphazardly around key words. 

These brands didn’t look bad. On the contrary, they were really finished products.

But there’s one caveat to branding using AI that I feel people are slowing coming to realize – it looks obviously built with AI.  

And although there’s nothing wrong with using AI to build something faster, the whole point of building a brand positioning strategy is to establish your business as a standout amongst others in the market.

Because, in the words of Buddy Pine, "When everyone’s super... no one will be."  

Table of Contents: 

• When good branding starts looking familiar  

• AI is very good at finding the middle 

• The shortcut from brand strategy to aesthetics 

• What we are seeing right now 

• Where brand positioning strategy becomes important 

• The strange value of human judgement 

• A brand strategy roadmap needs some resistance 

• What happens when everyone has the same tools 

• The brands that may stand apart 

  
  

When good branding starts looking familiar 

There was a time when producing something polished required a certain amount of effort. You needed a designer, a writer, a strategist, a photographer, and a production team. Even a mediocre piece of communication had friction built into it.  

AI has removed a lot of that friction.

A founder can now ask for ten brand positioning ideas while having lunch with one hand. A marketing team can generate campaign concepts, headlines, images, and social posts in minutes. Designers can explore directions at a speed that would have seemed ridiculous just a few years ago.

All of that is genuinely useful. We use these tools ourselves.

But, like all the tools that the world has seen in the past couple of decades, there is a catch.

When the cost of producing an idea falls dramatically, more people start producing ideas in roughly the same way. And when the tools have learned from the same enormous pool of existing human work, their suggestions naturally tend to gravitate towards things that already make sense.

The result can be a strange kind of visual and verbal average.

AI is very good at finding the middle 

This is where I think the sameness begins. AI is remarkably good at recognizing patterns.

Give it a category, an audience, and a desired personality, and it can produce something that feels immediately appropriate. A technology company becomes clean, confident, and minimal. A premium brand becomes restrained and elegant. A wellness brand becomes warm, soft, and reassuring. A financial brand becomes trustworthy, sophisticated, and blue.

None of these choices are inherently wrong. In fact, they are often exactly what the category has taught us to expect.

The problem appears when every competitor is making the same reasonable choices.

AI doesn't necessarily know that your brand should be a little strange or a little out of the box. It doesn't automatically know that the most interesting decision might be the one that makes someone pause and think, "Why did they do that?"

That still requires judgement - human judgement - from someone who has done it before, someone who understands the nuances way beyond what’s “good” or “good enough”. Someone who understands why certain decisions are made and what becomes of them.

And that judgement comes only with the experience of working with multiple clients under various constraints and long, relentless hours spent in finding turnarounds and alternatives.

The shortcut from brand strategy to aesthetics

This is something I noticed when I was experimenting with AI in the initial stages of Claude Design. AI makes it incredibly tempting to jump from a vague business idea straight into brand strategy and brand expression

Because it becomes so easy to execute, we spend less time thinking, pondering, and actually breaking the idea apart to see what it’s actually made of – the kind of distillation we do when we want to build a brand that not only “looks good” but is also remembered.

In an instant, the chatbot tempts you to ask for a logo, a tagline, a brand voice, an Instagram campaign, and five concepts for the launch campaign.

The machine is happy to oblige.

But somewhere between the question and the answer, an important conversation can disappear: what should this brand actually mean?

And that very question sits at the heart of a good brand strategy.

Before deciding on a brand strategy, someone has to decide where it belongs in people's minds, what it is willing to stand for, who it is really for and what makes it worth choosing.

This is also why we keep coming back to the distinction explored in our article A Logo Is Not a Brand. A logo can help people recognize a business. The larger brand has to give them a reason to remember it.

AI can produce the expression very quickly, but the meaning still has to come from somewhere.

Where brand positioning strategy becomes important

This is where a strong brand positioning strategy starts to matter more.

Brand positioning gives AI something specific to express.

If the strategic thinking underneath a brand is vague, AI has very little to work with. It will fill the gaps using familiar patterns from the category.

But imagine the opposite.

Imagine a brand with a very particular point of view about its customers, its category and the problem it exists to solve. Imagine that the company has decided what it believes, what it refuses to say, who it does not want to appeal to and what kind of experience it wants people to associate with it.

Now AI becomes much more interesting.

The machine is no longer being asked to invent the brand. It is being asked to help express one.

That is a very different relationship with the technology.

The strange value of human judgement

There is an irony here that I keep thinking about.

The better AI becomes at producing polished work, the more valuable human judgement may become.

Someone still has to look at the fifth perfectly acceptable headline and say, "No. That's too obvious."

Someone has to notice that the visual direction looks exactly like three competitors.

Someone has to decide that the awkward idea is actually the interesting one.

Someone has to know when to stop asking for more options.

That last part matters.

AI gives us abundance. Branding has always involved choice.

And choice becomes harder when there are thousands of possible answers sitting in front of you.

A brand strategy roadmap needs some resistance

Perhaps this changes what a brand strategy roadmap should look like.

Rather than showing multiple inconsistent variations of the same source, GA4 now consolidates them into standardized reporting groups. 

The process cannot simply be a sequence of outputs that eventually produces a brand book.

There needs to be friction in it.

Questions that are difficult to answer. Decisions that eliminate options. Moments where the team has to choose a direction and live with the consequences.

That may sound slower, but I think it becomes more important as production gets faster.

The purpose of strategy is partly to create boundaries.

When those boundaries are clear, AI becomes incredibly useful. It can explore, challenge, adapt and accelerate. Without them, it can simply help a brand produce more of the same.

This may also change what companies expect from brand strategy consultant. The value will increasingly sit upstream, in the thinking that gives every later piece of work its character.

What happens when everyone has the same tools

I don't know exactly where this goes.

Maybe the sameness will become more obvious before the industry learns how to respond to it. Maybe AI systems will eventually become much better at understanding individual brands and producing work that genuinely feels distinctive.

I hope they do.

But I suspect there will always be a difference between generating something that looks like a particular kind of brand and knowing why that brand should exist in the first place.

That difference matters.

Because when everyone can generate a polished answer, the interesting question becomes who decided what the answer should be?

The brands that may stand apart

The uncomfortable part of AI for branding is that it doesn't necessarily destroy creativity. It removes many of the excuses we once had for mediocre execution.

Now the harder work becomes visible. Knowing what to say. Knowing what not to say. Knowing when an idea feels too familiar. Knowing when something slightly strange is actually more truthful.

AI can make a brand faster. It can make it cheaper to explore. It can help a small team do things that once required a much larger one.

But if every brand starts asking the same machine for something "modern, premium, human and distinctive", we may end up with an awful lot of brands that are exactly that.

And none that we remember.