Leveraging AI to Build Innovative Brands: Use Case - Part 1 of 5

Leveraging AI to Build Innovative Brands: Use Case - Part 1 of 5

We are thinking about creating a new brand to better represent our expertise in AI. We have used the same brand for over a decade. It is now time to consider a more representative name. Additionally, ‘System in Motion’ is a very generic name that other companies use in various forms. Finally, we cannot protect that name, because it uses very generic words. Therefore, we have decided to leverage generative AI to help us come up with different name ideas.

In this series of five articles, we will attempt to build a new brand identity. We will see how much AI can help us, analyze mistakes in our prompts, and learn more about how to leverage AI in creative processes.

Disclaimer: we are not branding experts; we are exploring the field progressively through this initiative for our company. This series of articles does not advocate replacing branding agencies. Many companies handle their own image because they lack the budget or access to professional agencies. These companies can benefit from leveraging generative AI to achieve better results.

Let’s start the process by setting up our AI personality.

System Prompt

We start with a system prompt to define the desired AI personality. We have defined the role as:

You are an expert in B2B branding, with 20 years' experience, you help tech companies create, update, and maintain a great brand image.

Full Process

Before starting, we want to get the full process. This is not only useful for the user, but it will setup the stage for the AI to frame its next steps.

Prompt 1

List the steps required to create a new brand name, only the headline.

Answer

• Define Brand Strategy.
• Conduct Market Research.
• Brainstorm Potential Names.
• Evaluate Name Options.
• Check Availability and Legal Clearance.
• Test the Name with Target Audience.
• Finalize and Register the Brand Name.

AI Guided Creativity

Next we want the AI to guide us through the steps. We will make critical decisions along the way, and we will vastly speed up the process by leveraging the technology.

Prompt 2

Let's start with step one. We already have the key elements of our value proposition, is it enough? What do we miss?

Purpose: Empower knowledge workers to reclaim their creativity and intelligence.

Mission Statement: Our mission is to empower knowledge workers by fostering a culture of creativity, intelligence, and innovation. We believe in delivering results, embracing new ideas, fostering team spirit, promoting personal leadership, and maintaining transparency in all we do.

Core Values: We don't hide, Team spirit, Be the leader of yourself, Results matter, Try something new

Answer

Having a clear value proposition, mission statement, and core values is an excellent start for defining your brand strategy. However, there are additional elements you might consider to ensure a comprehensive brand strategy:

Target Audience: Define who your primary customers are. Understand their demographics, psychographics, and pain points. This will help tailor your branding to resonate with them effectively.

Competitor Analysis: Analyze your competitors to identify gaps in the market and opportunities for differentiation. Understand their strengths and weaknesses, and position your brand to leverage these insights.

Brand Personality: Decide how you want your brand to be perceived. Should it be professional, innovative, friendly, authoritative, etc.? This will influence your tone of voice and communication style.

Brand Promise: Articulate what your brand commits to deliver consistently to customers, beyond the functional benefits. This should align with your mission and values but be expressed as a compelling promise to your customers.

Brand Positioning Statement: Develop a concise statement that captures the essence of your brand’s unique value in the market, targeted audience, and how it differs from competitors.

Brand Story: Create a narrative that connects your brand with customers on an emotional level. This should encapsulate your brand’s history, mission, and values in a compelling way.

Visual Identity and Style Guidelines: While this might be developed more fully in later stages, having an initial sense of desired visual style can help align all subsequent branding efforts.

By addressing these elements, you’ll have a more robust foundation for your brand strategy, ensuring that your new brand name and overall brand identity are well-aligned with your business goals and market needs.

Building the Missing Pieces

Based on the AI recommendation, we will now start to build the missing pieces of our brand identity. Every time we add an element, we need to ensure that it is consistent. Here we’ll encounter a strong bias of generative AI. AI is greatly influenced by user’s prompt. We will use the same prompt once to ask for confirmation of alignment, and once to look for misalignment.

Asking for Confirmation

Prompt 3A

Our target audience are executives and managers of medium to large companies, who need to optimize the efficiency of their knowledge workers. Are all other elements of our brand consistent?

Answer

Given your target audience of executives and managers in medium to large companies, let’s evaluate the consistency of your brand elements:

Purpose and Mission Statement: Your purpose to “Empower knowledge workers to reclaim their creativity and intelligence” and your mission statement are well-aligned with the needs of your target audience. These leaders are likely looking for solutions that enhance productivity and foster a creative and innovative work environment.

Core Values: Your values such as “We don’t hide,” “Team spirit,” “Be the leader of yourself,” “Results matter,” and “Try something new” resonate well with a corporate audience that values transparency, leadership, teamwork, results, and innovation. Ensure these values are communicated in a way that speaks to the challenges and aspirations of executives and managers.

Brand Personality: Consider if the brand personality you project is appealing to corporate executives and managers. They might prefer a brand that is professional, reliable, and visionary. Ensure your brand personality communicates these traits effectively.

Brand Voice: Your brand voice should be professional yet inspiring, aligning with the decision-making caliber of executives and managers. It should reinforce your brand as a thought leader in empowering knowledge workers.

Brand Positioning Statement: Ensure your positioning statement clearly differentiates your brand from competitors in the eyes of your target audience. Highlight aspects such as unique methodologies, proprietary technologies, or exceptional outcomes that are relevant to executives and managers.

Visual Identity: Your visual identity should reflect a professional and modern look that appeals to a corporate audience. Use clean lines, a strong color palette, and sophisticated typography to convey your brand’s authority and reliability.

Brand Promise: Your brand promise should resonate deeply with the needs of your target audience. It could be something like, “Driving unparalleled productivity and innovation in your knowledge workforce.” This promise should be evident in all your communications and customer interactions.

By ensuring all these elements are consistent and tailored to the needs and preferences of your target audience, you will strengthen your brand’s appeal and effectiveness in reaching and engaging executives and managers in medium to large companies.

Asking for Misalignment

Prompt 3B

Our target audience are executives and managers of medium to large companies, who need to optimize the efficiency of their knowledge workers. Which elements of our brand are not consistent with this target?

Answer

Given your target audience of executives and managers in medium to large companies, it’s crucial that your brand elements resonate with professionalism, efficiency, and innovation. Let’s evaluate your current brand elements:

Purpose and Mission Statement: Your purpose and mission statement focus on empowering knowledge workers and fostering creativity, intelligence, and innovation. These are aligned with the needs of executives and managers who are looking to optimize efficiency. However, the language could be more tailored to emphasize how this empowerment directly translates into business outcomes like increased productivity, profitability, and competitive advantage.

Core Values:

• We don’t hide: This value might be perceived as vague. Consider rephrasing to emphasize transparency and accountability, which are crucial for your target audience.
• Team spirit: This is relevant but could be enhanced by highlighting collaboration and synergy, which are key in organizational settings.
• Be the leader of yourself: While self-leadership is important, your audience might also value guidance on driving team leadership and organizational leadership.
• Results matter: This is very relevant and should be emphasized as it directly correlates with business efficiency and success.
• Try something new: This promotes innovation, which is good. However, ensure it’s balanced with a message about risk management or informed decision-making, which are critical for executives.
• Brand Personality and Voice: Ensure that the brand personality and voice are authoritative yet approachable. It should convey expertise and confidence, which are qualities that resonate well with executives and managers.

Visual Identity: Your visual identity should reflect a professional and modern look. Use clean lines, a strong but limited color palette, and high-quality imagery that speaks to a corporate audience.

Brand Positioning Statement: It should clearly articulate how your offerings lead to enhanced productivity and decision-making capabilities for knowledge workers, thereby benefiting the company as a whole.

In summary, while many elements of your brand are on the right track, refining the language in your mission statement and values to more directly address business outcomes and leadership at organizational levels could enhance alignment with your target audience. Additionally, ensuring that your brand personality, voice, and visual identity exude professionalism and confidence will help in resonating more effectively with executives and managers.

Balanced Results

Looking at the above two prompts, it is clear that the second gives more balanced feedback. It still gives positive feedback on key elements, and gives constructive feedback on potential for improvement. Generative AI has a strong bias to please the user. Asking for positive feedback may not be helpful, as it could result in overly favorable and less critical responses.

Next Step

In three prompts, we were able to get:

• a clear list of brand identity items we need to decide
• a process to follow,
• feedback on some of our existing brand identity elements.

For a company that has no background in branding, this has great value, and will improve tremendously its ability to manage and improve its own brand.

As the steps were clearly defined by the first prompt, we will continue in the next article in our journey to rebrand ourselves, putting together all the critical elements of a good brand name. While assessing the alignment of our existing elements, generative AI also gave us some suggestion on Brand Personality, Visual Identity. But we are still missing many elements, before we can start generating brand names.

In the next article , we see if generative AI can help us build all or some of the missing pieces of our brand identity. Register to our newsletter to get the next article in your mailbox.

Technology

The above answers were generated by gpt4-turbo, running on azure infrastructure, using our internal web application.

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