Building a Brand in the AI Era
By Adam Kleinberg
Yesterday, I was honored to be invited to speak about “Building a Brand in the AI Era” at the CMO Alliance Summit in San Francisco.
One of the core principles to keep in mind is that there is a big difference between branding and building a brand.
I frequently hear clients say things like “we can’t talk about branding in front of my CFO” or “we made an investment in brand last year, but we’ve been told we can’t invest in branding anymore.”
That’s fine. You shouldn’t reinvent the wheel every six months. You develop positioning, a visual identity, a brand voice and a narrative, and those things are not supposed to change every year. Your branding is most successful when it is used consistently.
Brand-building, however, is a different story. If no one is aware of your brand, your performance marketing won’t work. If people don’t perceive your brand in a distinct and positive light, you will have less sales.
That is not an opinion. It is a fact.
Read Ad Age or ADWEEK and you’ll see that many companies are eliminating the CMO role. Perhaps that’s because many fail to make this distinction. But someone is still leading marketing.
Many CMOs are being replaced by Chief Growth Officers or Chief Revenue Officers. Growth marketing differs from brand marketing or performance marketing / demand generation in that it is a "full-funnel approach" to marketing that includes accountability for driving revenue. That includes building awareness, driving consideration, engaging audiences and all the other things that build brand. Except it doesn’t include the word branding.
Once you approach brand-building through this full-funnel lens, you can map the customer journey, identify points of friction, and look at how AI can help resolve them. You can make the case that your data needs to be clean and well structured and that your martech is properly connected to enable you to harness the power of AI and measure the business outcomes your company needs you to deliver.
Many look at AI as something that will allow us to do less. We believe in approaching AI with an abundance mindset. What more can I do to move my customers through their journey from awareness to purchase?
That is how you drive growth in the AI era. And at the end of the day, your CEO and CFO are well aware you can’t drive growth by saving.
So, don’t worry about semantics. If you hear that branding is not something to invest in, don’t fight it.
Invest in growth.
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