In the realm of B2B marketing, the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not just an upcoming trend, it’s a revolution. AI is beginning to reshape the branding landscape, offering marketers unprecedented tools to engage, understand, and captivate their audiences like never before. This transformative power of AI in B2B Marketing can craft brands that are not only widely seen and heard, but that are also connected deeply to their target audience. However, if it is used incorrectly it has the potential to fragment brand cohesion – and you could lose your hard-earned authenticity entirely.
We engaged with top global B2B marketers to explore the current impact of AI on their brand-related efforts. In this blog, we’ll dive into their primary concerns and how they’re implementing AI in the branding arena.
1) Using AI to Increase Brand Relevance
In B2B, staying ahead means keeping pace with the market and your competitors. Marketers are already leveraging tools to monitor competitor activities and glean insights that refine their brand’s positioning. AI is at the forefront of this revolution, equipping marketers with the data necessary to anticipate market trends and adapt their strategies accordingly. By analyzing competitors’ moves, AI helps B2B marketers craft messages and offerings that not only stand out but that also deeply resonate with their target audience, ensuring a competitive edge in a crowded market.
“Yes we’re using AI to monitor the market and feed that into messaging for example. We are using ChatGPT in-house and are also in conversations with our social monitoring and research companies to get a cohesive approach to how AI powers things, things like our social listening and PR stuff. It’s getting better quickly.”
Every impactful brand is anchored by a compelling story that mirrors the aspirations, challenges, and values of its audience. Here, AI serves as a critical enabler for B2B marketers, allowing for the personalization of messaging in a more intelligent and usable way. This shift from generic interactions to personalized connections has been a topic for some years, and now AI provides a significant evolution by taking heavy lifting away from marketers and increasing relevance. However, this transition isn’t without its challenges, as B2B markets are characterized by their complexity and diverse audience needs.
There is an evolving legal landscape surrounding AI, and so when we use it for personalization, it’s crucial to distinguish between public and private information. Employing AI in brand marketing for displaying information about sports sponsorships and brand partnerships for example is becoming popular but requires robust governance. Use cases would include information on artists, sporting heroes and even company stakeholders.
“For events we’ve actually done a lot of AI. You know, I would say in AI use cases in the past, but not so much gen AI. But this year we actually used our gen AI capabilities to, create a to create real time stories on the artists at the event. So, it’s public knowledge. We, you know, crawl like all the social media post, everything that’s public. And then we sort of create, we call it AI stories. Yeah, stories. Now I’m on to my next event, it’s nonstop.”
The current capabilities of AI, while impressive, can sometimes fall short in fully grasping B2B subtleties, leading to branding efforts that may not effectively engage the intended audience. This risk is compounded by the proliferation of filler content or ‘shadow marketing’—content that, while not always problematic, can be considered superficial or irrelevant. When AI leverages such content to train brand messaging, it risks diluting the brand’s essence and alienating its audience.
“So the brand that actually has imagery and content that reflects the buyer and makes them feel like this is right for them, etc., I still think will be invaluable. It so worries me that marketers are rushing towards the coloring in aspect of what AI can do for them. I mean, it really does, because it’s that to me is not what marketing is. How to use AI on pricing. How can we use AI to really understand what products go with what and what people tend to buy together? How can we use it to really understand that customer and have you not meet them as a stranger?”
The true value of a brand lies in its ability to reflect and connect with its buyers, making them feel understood and valued. This critical aspect of branding is where the strategic use of AI to maintain relevance in a shifting global economy and culture becomes invaluable. As the industry evolves, the focus should remain on leveraging AI for its power to deepen customer understanding and forge meaningful connections.
2) Building Consistency for an Authentic Voice
While AI has the capability to generate content, crafting stories that truly embody a brand’s essence and connect with audiences on a personal level still requires the human touch. The challenge with AI-generated brand content is its tendency to feel insincere or disconnected from the brand’s authentic identity. Authenticity isn’t just about the words used; it’s cultivated through genuine interactions and experiences, and these are areas where AI still falls short. Real authenticity in branding emerges from understanding and embodying the brand’s values in every piece of content, something that AI tools, for all their advances, cannot fully replicate (yet!).
Marketers are indicating that their experience of using AI writing tools can be patchy, and highlights the limitations of AI in capturing a brand’s nuanced tone of voice. Usage is of course highly dependent on providing these tools with detailed inputs about a brand’s voice, however this is a growing field and the output often lacks the subtlety and depth that come from human craftmanship.
“We’re understanding how our brand should show up. There are tools in place or, you know, underway for helping with that. It’s just how mature is it? How much assisting is involved? When we tried Jasper, I think I was really excited to use it and the demo that we got was like, great. And they can set up campaigns. And this is not a knock on Jasper, I think they’re doing great, you know, great stuff over there. But when we ascribed a name to our tone of voice, right. And we plugged in, here’s what it means to speak in a particular tone of voice. We finished with all of these, inputs. And then it’s like it used those words directly. There was no nuance to it.”
There’s a clear desire for AI to serve not just as a content generator but as a guardian of brand consistency—evaluating whether a piece of content or an image aligns with the brand’s guidelines before it even reaches the team. This vision points towards a future where AI significantly boosts efficiency by enabling creative teams to focus on adding the final touches of humanity and authenticity that resonate with audiences.
“We would talk about this as a team so that we have a collective understanding of brand guidelines and usage. And I would love for any AI tool to, you know, for someone to feed into, hey, I want to say this is this on brand, I want to show this picture. Is this on brand? So it’s an AI tool doing the checks before it gets to my team to say, is this on brand? So again, get my team to the 80% or you know, this version that’s at the 80 yard line. So it’s a for me it’s about efficiency.”
The true potential for maintaining brand integrity and authenticity lies between this partnership of AI, and human creativity.
3) Brand Guidelines are Becoming Brand Ingredients
Forward-thinking brand marketers believe that the future of brand management is evolving towards a more flexible and dynamic model. It is moving away from the traditional, rigid brand guidelines to what can be better described as “brand ingredients.” This approach envisions brands as collections of approved elements— dynamic creative assets rather than fixed creative templates. These ingredients can be mixed and matched by AI to generate an output that meets the brand’s needs in real-time, adapting to various contexts and audiences with unprecedented speed and efficiency. This system transforms the brand into a living entity, characterized by prompts, guidelines, and materials that are dynamically assembled and vetted by AI, facilitating a seamless and consistent brand identity across all touchpoints.
The potential of this shift would herald a new era of brand agility, enabling enterprises to respond quickly to short-term trends, real-world events, or popular memes, much like the rapid content cycles seen on platforms such as TikTok and Instagram reels. By leveraging AI, brands not only achieve a faster time to market but also align more closely with the fleeting attention spans of today’s consumers, which will enhance brand relevance and engagement. Moreover, AI’s role in ensuring consistency across digital channels fortifies brand recognition and loyalty by ensuring that every piece of content, regardless of the platform, resonates with the brand’s core values and messaging. The challenge, then, will be to maintain a recognizable brand identity amidst this versatility, emphasizing the importance of quality “ingredients” and the continuous adaptation based on market feedback. This approach calls for a departure from the traditional, labor-intensive process of crafting brand guidelines, urging brands and agencies alike to embrace a more dynamic, feedback-oriented strategy that prioritizes connections that resonate with the audience to drive engagement and behavior change in the digital age.
“So actually, it comes down to, good ingredients. Right? Good items, showing people all the different versions you can put together with it. And keep increasing volume and changing it. Then what you actually teach people is how to recognize what’s on and off brand, by what actually works in market. What do people react positively to? What actually changes their behavior? Then feeding that back in again. So agencies who love to, you know, get a hundreds of thousands of dollars for writing guidelines that take a year and are an absolute tome, you know, all of that. They need to stop doing that and actually focus on the feedback loop of what is working in market.”
4) The Role of Advocates is Shaping and Amplifying Your Brand Identity
In an era where AI-generated content and trust can be easily compromised, the significance of brand leaders is becoming more vital to build authority. The authenticity and credibility of figures like Sam Altman, who embodies OpenAI, illustrate how vital a trusted figurehead can become, not just for employees and engineers but also for users and investors. This growing emphasis on leadership integrity and visibility is becoming increasingly critical, especially as companies face the risk of becoming more generic and impersonal. As content creation leans towards automation, it sparks concerns over authenticity and differentiation – and so the personal connection and trustworthiness represented by company employees and brand leaders are becoming indispensable for maintaining a brand’s integrity and distinctiveness. This personal touch will combat misinformation and inspire cynicism for deepfakes of key figures. This underscores the importance of public familiarity and trust in these individuals, which extends to trust in those companies.
“We need to get to the stage where if deep fakes come out with our Clinical Director, saying something wild, people will go, I watch her, I know that’s not her. I know that’s a deepfake, right?”
Moreover, in the realm of sales and customer interaction, the role of employees becomes ever more mission critical. Their ability to earn and maintain credibility with potential customers is fundamental, necessitating robust training and support in understanding the brand’s unique selling propositions and how AI and intent profiling can foster more trustworthy engagements.
“So we just hired a ton of new salespeople. Right. We named the salespeople directors of trust and safety, right. But the issue is that their credibility with potential customers has to be earned. For the new starters their credibility is at the moment, zero, apart from one of them who has worked in the market for the last 15 years and built a team at another company so he really knows the market.”
This emphasis on personal credibility and the human element in brand representation is being looked at in tandem with the deployment of AI-driven chatbots and better trained virtual assistants. These tools often act as 24/7 brand ambassadors however many customers report frustration with the limitation of these tools. Human authenticity and AI efficiency continue to combine to redefine customer engagement and trust, and both remain important.
Conclusion
AI in B2B Marketing is a transformative force, redefining how brands connect with their audience, understand their market, and position themselves for success. As we look to the future, the integration of AI into brand strategy is not just an advantage; it’s a necessity for those looking to lead in their industry.
We’re keen to hear your thoughts on integrating AI into your brand strategy. Have you seen a transformation in your brand’s engagement and positioning with AI? Share your experiences and insights in the comments below!