The Art and Science of Brand Building
And how AI factors into brand building
There has always been an art and science to brand building. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing the game to make us more efficient and is doing so with the hopes of not denigrating our brand in the process.
AI is already changing how brands segment and hyper-personalize their content and the overall customer experience. Through immersive dynamic engaging experiences AI allows us marketers to get closer to providing 1:1 experiences.
In B2B, AI is providing one to one experiences in Account Based Marketing, through chatbots, and by providing hyper personalized offers.
In DTC, extended reality is meeting customers where they are, such as trying on glasses without leaving their couch (Warby Parker) or seeing what furniture looks like in their home (Wayfair).
But to really build a sustainable brand over time, you need to carefully curate it and you need to be consistent with it over time. Brand building is a long game, as I recently mentioned in LinkedIn Live event on Why Brand in 2025?
Per a 2024 study from TrustRadius and Pavilion, 86% of enterprise buyers short-listed a product they'd already heard of before starting the research process. This makes brands that are top-of-mind more likely to win.
The art of designing a long lasting brand
Defining your master brand promise/purpose
It’s why you exist, it’s also extremely important to Gen Z these days, and most importantly it’s in your DNA. It is essentially defining the very face of your company and what you stand for. It needs to be genuine and embedded in all of your marketing. It doesn’t change. It can evolve, but the core values are the same.
The mistakes many brands make is choosing similar words as other brands in their category and using those same words, which doesn’t help you stand out in the sea of sameness. Choose different words to get out of the sea of sameness. Shorter is always more memorable.Positioning - Your brand positioning can flex and change and made more relevant over time. Essentially it is presenting your brand as the ultimate solution for solving your ideal customer’s pain points. However, positioning should always be revisited.
Personalizing - In today’s market you need to go beyond basic personalization. You need to provide immersive and dynamic engaging experiences. Consumers and prospects expect more.
Since marketing owns both the customer and the understanding of their behavior, AI has the ability to elevate marketing in B2B organizations and increase relevance in the business. But it also has the ability to do brand management, ensuring brand consistency across the company.Promotion - As part of the 4 P’s in Marketing, you do need to focus on promoting your brand. But the key here is to tie it into your overall purpose. This is why choosing your words carefully when creating your purpose really matters.
Technology - Part of building a great brand is choosing the technology to support your efforts. Some of the top challenges with using AI are risking the denigration of your brand’s promise and authenticity over time by using off the shelf AI tools that are less than perfect. AI can do a lot of things, but as the owner of the brand, you must consider what trade-offs you are willing to make to stay true to your brand. For example, Dove has said they will only use real models, rather than AI generated models) in their ads. Amazon uses AI to serve up recommendations to you based on prior purchases and browsing activities which deliver on their brand promise of customer centricity, convenience, and choice.
Pricing - No matter what you put out there and say about your brand, perception is everything. I’ve worked for many companies over the years where I’ve had to fix the perception “we’re too expensive” or “we’re too cheap to be any good” and you need to prove otherwise. Pricing is hard to get right, especially SaaS pricing. But the way to combat misperceptions in the market on pricing is to put your pricing on your website to clear up any confusion and to demonstrate the value of your product.
Memorability - what is the one thing you want people to remember about your brand when they encounter it for the first time? What do you want them to say about you when you are not in the room? Being bold and audacious is what stands out in a crowded market, but maintaining that boldness consistently is where many brands fall short.
When I was trying to get in front of developers who developed code on the AWS platform, I spent over a year providing thought leadership content, sponsoring AWS events, engaging in AWS partnership activities, and being helpful to any developer on the AWS platform — all so they would remember our brand when they were in need of our product. And I didn’t stop there, I kept going, consistently pounding on our messaging and value to developers until they were tired of hearing us say it.
The science of creating a brand that makes you feel something
When it comes to the science of brand, people look at you sideways. Science? But there is very much a science to building a brand. Knowing when and where to do brand placement, understanding the segments in your market and how and where to reach them. Studying the behavioral traits of your customers so you can meet them where they are in their journey, understanding how color impacts purchasing behaviors or how words in a specific country translate, all of this is the science behind building a strong lasting brand.
THE SCIENCE OF COLORS ON BRANDING
There has long been proven psychological connections between colors and buyer behavior. For example: bright reds trigger impulse buys which is why you frequently see the word “Sale” in red or with a red starburst background.
Red - invokes impulse, excitement (examples: Netflix, Target, CNN)
Green - makes people think of healthy, organic, causal (Starbucks, Wholefoods, Dick’s Sporting Goods)
Blue - makes people feel trust, safe, reliable (IBM, Ford, AIG)
Orange - is viewed as fun, energetic, budget friendly (Kayak, Fanta, Nickelodeon)
Yellow - evokes joy, optimism, happiness (McDonalds, DHL, Lays)
Purple - associates with high quality, power, luxury, wealth (Cadbury, Hallmark, FedEx)
THE SCIENCE OF WORDS IN BRANDING
Words sometimes translate into meaning other than intended in different languages, which is why if you do global marketing, localization is extremely important. Some historic marketing fails (source: Lytho):
Ford made the mistake of not translating the name of the Ford Pinto in Brazil. Pinto is the Brazilian Portuguese word for “small genitals”.
The Coca-Cola name in China was first read as “Kekoukela”, which means “Bite the wax tadpole” or “female horse stuffed with wax” depending on the dialect. Coke then tried to find a phonetic equivalent, eventually settling on “kokou kole”, which translates as “happiness in the mouth”.
IKEA introduced the “Fartfull workbench”. Although fartfull means “full speed” in Swedish, in the United Kingdom, the product was received with chuckles.
Words matter. Just like marketers have words that mean different things to most people:
Swag - most think it’s the way you walk, marketers think of premium items they are going to give away
Banner - most people in the world think of it as a giant sign at a parade. But marketers think of it as something that goes across a website or an ad.
Channel - most people think of this as television stations, whereas, we marketers think of a tactic/platform by which we will deliver our message.
THE SCIENCE OF BEHAVIOR IN BRANDING
Past behavior often provides a predictive pattern of future behavior. As I mentioned above, Amazon uses AI to look at browsing history and past purchases to recommend products their customers are more likely to buy. Netflix uses viewing history to recommend new shows. (Similar to TiVo, if you rate the shows you watch it will give even better recommendations).
Other companies like Sephora use their loyalty program to track customer’s behavior and purchasing history to provide not only recommendations but also beauty advice.
In August 2017 Dunkin’ Donuts announced they were changing their name to just Dunkin’ and people were furious. There was a 70% negative sentiment all over the internet about dropping the ‘donut’ from their name. A year later they did it anyway.
Mars, the candy and pet care company is using AI to “For Mars, AI is already helping us predict whether cats and dogs could develop chronic kidney disease; speeding up the sequencing of pet genomes to provide individualized nutrition and care; and unlocking efficiencies in our manufacturing operations through digital twin technology."
In B2B, Slack was originally created as a communication method between engineers working on a gaming platform. But when that company was headed for failure, they decided to try to market Slack as an alternative to Instant Messaging tools like Salesforce’s Chatter. But Slack really had no idea how big it would become or how people would use it outside of asynchronous cross communicating internally. If you remember early on, they didn’t think it would be used for online communities. There was no pricing model for online communities and it was impossible to grow a large community and figure out the backend permissions.
Fun fact about Slack is they were in negotiations in 2015 with Microsoft to buy them for $8 billion, but then Microsoft decided to build something in-house instead, which today we know as Microsoft Teams. The real kicker is Slack was purchased by Salesforce in 2021 for $27.7 Billion.
When customer behavior uses your product differently than intended, it often requires you to readjust your business model and re-evaluate product market fit for a potentially new or completely different segment.
In Summary
Branding is both a science and an art. It’s more than just a logo, brand colors, fonts, and taglines. It’s also impossible to build demand for a company that has no brand presence. Demand generation elicits action, while a brand elicits feelings and emotions. People are more likely to talk about things that make them feel something rather than things that made them do something, such as fill out a form. This is how you get word-of-mouth marketing, and you can’t get word-of-mouth marketing without a strong brand presence.