The Future of Branding: How AI is Changing the Game, What I'm Experimenting with, and What You Need to Do About It

You’ve heard it before.

Branding is everything.

Developing a brand has always been important.

What’s different now is the ways we can approach this problem.

AI is making it easier to:

• Generate

• Repurpose

• Automate

our content.

With these new unlocks, comes a new set of challenges:

• How do we inject our brand into the content?

• How do we ensure AI is on-brand?

• How do we get AI to understand our brand?

That’s what we’re talking about today.

Why?

Because the input is just as important as the output.

The Right Inputs

If you’ve been paying attention on LinkedIn or X (Twitter), you may have seen content that was clearly generated by AI.

You know what I’m talking about:

• Big words

• Too many emojis ( e.g.,🚀 , 🌟)

• Passive voice

It’s comically bad.

And it gives AI a bad wrap.

“AI-generated content isn’t even good”

This is what you’ll hear the skeptics say.

But these are the same people who don’t know how to prompt the models to get the most out of them.

On top of poor prompting, they don’t even have the right inputs.

How do you expect AI to write in your brand’s voice if you don’t offer it a comprehensive overview of what that is.

I’ve realized that developing branding guidelines for AI is a crucial yet often overlooked step.

Let me share how I’ve been approaching this problem.

Developing Brand Guidelines for AI

I have been iterating on a brand guideline development process that will help people construct comprehensive brand information for AI models understand and reference as they generate content.

The high-level process is as follows:

1. Collect all relevant content sources for the brand

2. Define content goals, voice & tone, etc

3. Leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to help generate a comprehensive branding guideline resource

4. Use branding guidelines to generate content

I’m currently building this workflow inside Airtable so I can easily organize brand guidelines and automate parts of the process.

Let’s go through this process in more detail

Collecting Information for Brand Guidelines

To start the process, I’ve created a simple form for me to submit information about:

• my content goals

• target audience

• brand voice

• value prop

• links to content sources

Once all of this is submitted, we begin the data ingestion process.

Processing the Data

After we submit our information, I use an airtable script and make automation to:

1. Scrape the links submitted in the form

2. Generate key insights and summaries for content scraped from each link

3. Save new information to Airtable as new records

We do this so we can develop more context as to what the brand is about.

Scraping their content is a great way to start synthesizing their brand guidelines.

Once that information is saved, we can move on to generating the brand guideline.

Content to Brand

Before showing you how I generate the brand guidelines, let’s take a step back:

What even is a brand guideline?

What are the core components of a branding guideline?

All of these are great questions.

To define this, it’s best to describe what its use is:

• A branding guideline is referenced to create content in the brand’s style and voice

• They are the external knowledge that is essential for steering LLMs to create content unique to the brand

• They define qualitative and quantitative aspects of the brand

Now that we have a better sense of what we want the brand guidelines to be, we can start implementing the automations to accomplish this outcome.

Constructing Brands for AI

To start this process, I opted for throwing my own entire brand’s digital footprint at the system raw.

So I start by submitting:

• My target audience

• My content goals (e.g.,newsletter subs, selling products, grow audience, thought leadership, etc)

• All the links: LinkedIn, newsletter, website, Twitter

• Any other notes I have about my brand and what kind of tone / voice I want

Now we let the magic happen…

I have an automation setup to:

1. Scrape all links we submit

2. Generate summary overviews & analyses of the content with specific callouts for things like:

   1. Tone

   2. Writing style

   3. Common language

3. Generate a full-blown brand guideline playbook based on our analyses

Scraping the Links

I have an Airtable automation trigger when we submit a new form to call a webhook I setup on make.com.

The Make automation will then:

• Scrape all links we send to the webhook

• Generate brand analysis from the content

• Save these to our collected brand info table in Airtable

  

Generating the Brand Guide

The end of the automation above will end by updating our brand input record as “Ready to Generate Brand Guide”.

This will trigger another automation which will then call another Make automation I created.

The Make automation will generate the fullblown Branding Guide and save it to airtable.

The Output

Here is what we got:

Now this is probably not a final draft output quality (yet. I’m working on it…).

But it gives us a great starting point and saved me so much time thinking of everything from the ground up when really all I need is my raw ideas and some help massaging them from AI.

Why is This Important?

People think AI will replace humans fully.

But they’re missing something that’s right under their nose (and yours):

Human Creativity

You think I’m BS’ing you right now but I’m not.

AI is not a replacement for human creativity and intuition.

It's a tool to augment and enhance it.

The best results come from a synergy between human input and AI's processing power.

As the saying goes:

“Garbage in. Garbage out”

But when we provide clear, comprehensive, and creative inputs, AI can take our ideas to new heights.

It can help us formalize our thoughts, generate new insights, and create content that truly resonates with our brand identity.

Without the proper inputs, how can the AI be expected to behave the way we want?

“But Michael, does that mean I have to think on my own again to give these inputs?”

Yes.

But wait…

It’s not all that bad when you realize we can use AI to help you in this process as I just showed you here.

You have the ideas in your head.

You need some help formalizing it into something more structured sometimes—this is where AI can do the heavy lifting.

The Future of AI and Branding

The integration of AI into the branding process is just the beginning.

As these technologies continue to evolve, so too will the ways in which we develop and express our brand identities.

Imagine a future where AI not only helps us create on-brand content more efficiently but also provides real-time brand alignment feedback, generates dynamic brand assets, and even helps us identify new brand extension opportunities.

By staying at the forefront of this trend—by learning to harness the power of AI while retaining the spark of human creativity—we position ourselves not just for success, but for leadership in the exciting new era of AI-powered branding.

If you take nothing else away from reading this, just remember this:

Better inputs yield better outputs and humans are the key ingredient to provide this input to the AI.

The dance between human creativity and AI's computational power is just beginning.

Those who learn to master this duet will be the ones writing the branding playbooks of tomorrow.

Let's embrace this exciting frontier together.

That’s all for now! ‘Til next time, much love and peace y’all 🤠