Bernard May is the CEO of National Positions, a 5-time Inc. 500 company, award-winning marketing agency and Google Premier Partner.
AI has completely changed the content game. Hours’ worth of brainstorming and drafting can now be condensed into seconds. A blog post or ad design can appear almost as quickly as you can type the prompt. That is a genuine advantage, and I have seen it help teams move faster when time and resources are tight.
But there is, as usual, a catch. When every brand has access to the same tools, polished content alone stops feeling distinctive. If everyone orders from the same menu, customers start getting the same basic dining experience.
In my view, that is why emotional branding is becoming more valuable again. The brands people remember are not necessarily the ones publishing the most. They are the ones that make customers feel something familiar or personal. AI alone cannot decide what a brand should stand for in someone’s mind.
Content Has Never Been The Brand
A brand is more than a pile of posts, ads and product pages. Above all, it is the impression that remains after people have encountered those things.
AI can produce content rapidly, but speed does not create a point of view. It also does not create the sense that a company understands the people it wants to reach. Those qualities come from the decisions behind the content: what a brand chooses to say (or not say) and where it appears in the customer journey.
An article published by MIT Sloan in March made a point industry leaders should take seriously: As AI adoption becomes more widespread, companies need to move beyond individual productivity and apply it to enterprise workflows that create measurable value, including richer customer experiences.
The same distinction applies in marketing. AI can make individual team members faster, but it cannot replace a shared understanding of the experience a brand wants customers to have. That still requires human judgment.
People Remember Meaning, Not Just Information
Consumers need the numbers: how many calories, how wide it is, how fast it goes, how many decibels it puts out. But with all due respect to the statisticians among us, most people can’t get all that excited about facts and figures. Emotion is what gives consumers a reason to care. It can be evoked through humor, confidence, belonging or just a sense of being understood.
Nostalgia is another factor that should not be overlooked. A study published in Psychology & Marketing last year found that ads that brought to mind meaningful experiences with familiar brands made those brand names easier to recall than ads built mainly around data (or “factual-semantic advertising,” to be precise). The effect was strongest among people who already had a personal connection to the brand.
The study does not mean every company should start adding retro images to its ads or reviving those old singsong radio jingles. But it does reinforce a valuable lesson: Advertising becomes more memorable when it connects to a customer’s real experience, rather than simply delivering more facts.
That is a difficult thing to fake. Of course, newer brands have less history to draw from, so their opportunity lies in creating consistent experiences that people will eventually connect with their own lives.
AI Should Amplify Your Brand, Not Become Its Voice
I am not anti-AI. Far from it, in fact. I believe marketers who ignore it will miss meaningful opportunities to improve efficiency and explore new ideas.
Still, I would be careful about handing over the entire creative process to AI. If everyone uses AI to write the first draft and set the tone, every piece of content can start to sound like it was written by the same very eager intern.
The better approach is to give AI a defined and relatively limited role. Let it help with production, research, testing and adaptation. But keep human beings responsible for setting the strategy and deciding what the brand should make customers feel.
Before asking AI to create content, leaders should be able to answer a few basic questions:
• What should customers consistently feel when they encounter us?
• What language, themes or visual cues are unmistakably ours?
• What customer truths should shape our stories?
• Would this content still feel like our brand if the logo disappeared?
That last question is a particularly useful test. If a competitor could publish the same piece tomorrow with only a few search-and-replace edits, the work probably needs more human, personalized direction.
And do not set that system and forget it. Regularly review AI-generated content to make sure it still feels unmistakably like your brand.
Build A Brand System, Not Just A Content Engine
AI works best when it has good material to work from. That means marketers need not just a prompt library but a complete branding system that gives AI clear direction.
Such a system should include:
• A defined brand voice
• Signature messages and core themes
• Visual standards that make the brand recognizable
• Customer stories that show the brand in action
I also encourage leaders to look beyond short-term engagement numbers. Clicks and conversions remain important, but they do not always reveal how recognizable or trusted a brand has become. Pay attention to repeat engagement and the language people use when they describe your company.
There is no doubt that AI can fill the feed in seconds. The brands that stay with people are the ones that can use that speed to create work that customers recognize and trust.
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