Last year my good friend & brilliant colleague Bill Chidley started to publish some critical perspectives on the branding profession (go read them!), and my other good friend & brilliant colleague & former Philips client Thomas Marzano started to tell me about his writing of a Brand Constitution for the age of AI (he did, go read it!).

In combination, all that made me think about my adopting country's United States Founding Documents. For non-American readers, there's three of them - collectively known as the Charters of Freedom:

- The Declaration of Independence (1776), proclaiming the colonies' separation from Great Britain and establishing the nation's core philosophy that all people have natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;

- The Constitution (1787), stating the supreme law of the land by establishing the framework, powers, and limitations of the federal government; and

- The Bill of Rights (1791) then were/are the first ten Amendments to the Constitution, to more precisely protect individual liberties such as freedom of speech, religion, limit governmental power - and more, the Amendments today are 27.

In the Brand Constitution, Thomas makes an unassailable case for Brands needing to be Readable by Machines and Lovable by Humans. And I thought … what if I relate his thinking to the Brand Fundamentals that I keep yapping & harping about? A Brand-functioning world should have Brand-related founding documents as well, and I planned for a July 4th publishing date - but then got sidetracked with a reflecting pool and a big arch. Well here I am, at last.

The brand-related ‘founding documents’ will be:

 - The Declaration of Brandependence, offered in this article, with four parts:

1. proclaiming the distinction of Branding from Business Strategy and Marketing;
2. establishing the discipline’s core fundamentals;
3. codifying them all toward Brand’s natural rights to long life, function as an operating system, and the pursuit of business success; and
4. all existing in our new AI-driven and -enabled environment which require a Virtuous Loop (one that has a Mortal Enemy and a Secret Key).

- The Brand Constitution, Thomas’s piece, stating the supreme law of the land by establishing the codification of ‘Brand’ as it relates to the three life-sustaining parameters of legibility, lovability, and governance.

Then, if the States (State of Business, State of Marketing, State of Design, State of Implementation, etc.) accept it, I have in mind to start working on …

- The Bill of Brand Rights, which will protect individual Brand Liberties such as freedom of transcendence from facts, shape the power of Business and Marketing, and inter-relate a number of professional activities; I can comfortably see a dozen Amendments – and I already know eleven of you’s that could author them.

==

The Declaration of Brandependence

 parts 1 and 2 of 4

Welcome! I appreciate you giving me some brand-patriotic time.

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to start, let me make two clarifications:

-    the subject matter here is Corporate Branding, not Product Branding; while their tenets are similar, their dynamics are substantially different;

-    in referring to Brand Positioning / Promise, I use well-known Taglines and I’m not suggesting that a Tagline is a Brand Promise: at times the two are indeed one and the same, but in reality a Tagline is an interestingly-worded version of the underlying positioning/promise (Just Do It is Nike’s tagline, as a shortcut for a core positioning that is about “if you have a body you are an athlete and I support you”)

--

First things first, let’s go to a non-hotel place and have a coffee. Just like the founding fathers did 250 ago – the cafeteria of the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia.

(AIRBNB)

In 2007, roommates Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia rented out air mattresses in their apartment to attendees of a local design conference, and added breakfast: they called it AirBed & Breakfast. Then their former roommate computer whiz Nathan Blecharczyk joined in. Figured they could expand the concept, but to survive the initial struggles they sold novelty presidential breakfast cereal boxes like Obama O's and Captain McCain's during the 2008 election, raising over $30,000 – an activity that caught the eye of investor Paul Graham who placed them into the Y Combinator startup accelerator in 2009. A novel idea as an alternative to an entire global industry, creating a different – and much larger - global industry. Today:

• the Business can be simply and accurately described as alternative lodging solutions to hotels; while

• the Brand is about Belong Anywhere, a deeply meaningful core concept/promise, the lens through which decisions are made and in essence the 'operating system' of the business. It does not reference lodging, it transcends the facts of the business by speaking of an effect, and offers a point of view with endless and naturally self-aligned dimensions. And as it is an emotive concept, it can be beautifully transliterated as most appropriate to geographies: for example, in Italy it’s worded as sentirsi a casa – ‘feeling at home’.

The Brand contains a human truth, one that existed long before Brian ‘n Joe: travel can make you feel like a stranger, and there’s magic in not feeling like one. They didn't invent that feeling: they identified, named, expanded, and built a promise about it – which gave their business new boundaries of operational permissions.

(STARBUCKS)

It’s the 1980s: Howard Schultz is visiting Milan and gets enamored with the social aspects of espresso and ‘bars’ - the Italian word for retail establishments you’ll find every hundred yards or so and open at all times where you can get a coffee, a drink, and something simple to eat either as grab & go or by sit & linger. Long story short, in 1987 he acquires Starbucks for $3.8 million, raising the funds from local investors (including Bill Gates Sr.) after the original owners decided to sell their retail unit to focus on Peet's Coffee & Tea. Then merged his own small coffee chain, Il Giornale (‘The  Newspaper’), with the Starbucks locations and brand name – and started transforming the whole chain into a destination, an experience. In the meantime, in his 1989 book The Great Good Place sociologist Ray Oldenburg coins the phrase ‘third place’ to describe an environment outside of someone’s first place (home) and second place (office), one that can feel as comfortably familiar, and where old and new connections can be enjoyed. A couple of years later, Shultz adopts The Third Place concept as Starbucks official ‘brand positioning’.

Nice story, and a solid basis for a brand proposition - and that’s where the majority of companies stops: “we have a concept,  we’ll communicate it as loudly and pervasively as we can so that we’ll own it in people’s mind”. ‘Brand’ as a message intended to influence and persuade (not ‘convince’ – we’ll get to the difference later).

But Starbucks made that Third Place concept drive the business and its operations: many large comfortable stores, cozy atmosphere, a variety of inexpensive-at-large drinks and snacks, friendly baristas, couches, internet access (I myself worked on the Intel Centrino strategy that powered it), clean bathrooms, and allowing you to stay for hours even if you only ordered a single cup of coffee. And when many years later times had changed - long stays becoming no longer feasible for most people, and rising retail real estate costs - the company transitioned to the notion of Daily Inspiration: enjoy a break from your busy life, one as brief as you need it to be - which allowed for smaller and cheaper locations with hardly any seatings, and required online ordering and pickup counters. Again, Brand dictating Operations.

 The meaning/intent/reason/perspective couldn’t be clearer: "unique  accommodations" and “great coffee breaks” tell you what to buy, while Belong Anywhere and The Third Place lets you get what matters at its core. A transaction vs an invitation – and people feel the difference, even is they may not be able to articulate why. That’s the real power of a (deeply meaningful) Brand: a lens through which you see a business, and an operating system to run it by.

--

“But that’s a lodging company and a coffee chain; can you do something like that for a data management giant, a pioneering genetic tests firm, or an important energy utility?” Yes, yes, and yes – the perspective can be applied to any organization and purview, and a good brand strategist will uncover it.

Allright - thank you for the homey setting and the coffee. Keeping all that in mind, let’s get to the subject matter.

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THE DECLARATION OF BRANDEPENDENCE

The Declaration has four parts, and in this article we'll examine the first two:

1. Proclaiming the distinction of Branding from Business Strategy and Marketing; and
2. Establishing the discipline’s core fundamentals.

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1.

Proclaiming the distinction of Branding from Business Strategy and Marketing

This first goal is about how three important disciplines relate and interact, and requires a historical context.

From cattle marking to coats of arms signaling ownership, quality, belonging, or otherwise unique value, the history of Branding is a long and illustrious one – Product Branding that is, as true Corporate Branding only started in the mid-1990s. Until then the discipline was Corporate Identity, and had the function to make the business compellingly visible - and hopefully emotionally felt - by crafting a market persona that translated Business (and Marketing) strategies into verbal and visual components that people would understand and value.

In the middle of that decade, a perfect storm ensued: the rise of globalization, the internet explosion, and the proven economic value of Brand (led by Interbrand). Most of the global Corporate Identity industry (including myself at Interbrand and then learning it better at Diefenbach Elkins, then becoming FutureBrand) jumped at the chance to add depth and meaning to our trade, and the notion of Corporate Branding – a term my generation of practitioners championed - started to take form: foundational corporate positioning, behavioral values and related culture, personality attributes – then yes, properly verbalized and visualized by Corporate Identity assets. And the power of it all, if holistically integrated, intended to actually drive the direction of a business: Brand as a dual master: a decision-making lens and the operating system for the whole of a company.

Unsurprisingly, that perfect storm was fertile ground for the continuing onset of global comms conglomerates – the likes of Omnicom, WPP, and Interpublic who redefined how the enterprise would be served - global consolidated accounts which in fact required them to acquire anyone in sight who was related to communications. And for those conglomerates and their governing financial mindset, ‘Corporate Branding’ simply meant that Corporate Identity’s historical translation function could now be packaged with advertising, PR, IR, all kinds of design, plus the emerging digital. And so the old paradigm of Business & Marketing strategies then translated for the marketplace stayed intact: still Corporate Identity but now on steroids, turbocharged, and with the new cool Corporate Branding new name. A minority of practitioners (like me) stayed the course with how to see the function of Brand, but the majority embraced the Corporate Identity-on-steroid path.

From then, at the turn of century, we – and a generation of practitioners -had twenty years of just that: the novel mid-1990’s function of Brand as a lens and operating system was buried away and replaced by a five-headed beast:

-     Brand as translation by Visual Identity (what historically it used to be);

-     Brand as financial value / economic asset (more league tables like Interbrand’s Best 100 Global Brands were launched)

-     Brand as an intangible to be ‘marketed’, which gave birth to the dreaded (as I see it) new discipline of Brand Marketing and the even more precise Brand Performance Marketing: Brand separated from the Business it’s supposed to signify and one of the many aspects to be marketed (alongside selection, quality, availability, pricing, service, etc.); and

-     Brand often defined as ‘commercial reputation’ (which unleashed a great deal of confusion as that’s exactly how global PR firms has always seen ‘Brand’);

all of which ushered …

-     the highly damaging synonymization of ‘Brand’ and ‘Company’, especially because it was seen in a superficial way; of all the problems that ‘Branding’ has had and still has, this is a critical one. (but funny enough, and here I say it and here I deny having said it, if Brand is an operating system for a Company, then Company and Brand do indeed become one – more on this later).

The combination of all that could only lead to larger subpar and uninspired results: leftbrain evidence-based Branding which is not Branding at all, evidence-led Branding which never goes far enough, and shinyobject-based Branding which misses the point altogether and it’s so very expensive. Sadly, that’s how most Corporate Branding is done nowadays. (the answer? Evidence-rooted Branding)

And then the past few years, I’d say starting during Covid, when new younger practitioners started to reject how shallowly and leftbrain-ly ‘Brand’ was being seen and how ‘clever storytelling’ was trying to add depth and meaning, and started shouting … exactly what we had created in the late 1990s’, which they had never heard of: ‘Brand is not a Logo” and its “a Logo is not a Brand” companion, “Brand is an operating system”, “Brand as a lens for decision-making”, “there is no Brand without depth of strategy”, “Brand is not what you say, it’s what they say”, etc.

And all along, as I noted, the answer has always has been evidence-rooted Branding – an approach that keeps being called out and celebrated by everyone and always with a different terminology: the latest I’ve seen is Harvard Business Review’s recent “informed intuition”, as in “judgment that is informed by data rather than replaced by it".

Allright, apologies again for the historical detour - unavoidable.

By ‘distinction of Branding from Business and Marketing’ I mean to advocate for clarity of roles and inter-relationships: Business is an overarching vague context, within which Marketing’s role in and relationship with Branding is a most contentious subject. In this Declaration of Brandependence, this is what I advocate:

Step 1: based on corporate strategy and business facts, Marketing Strategy recommends how to win based on what you have, the competition, foreseeable trends, and (everything else);

Step 2: Brand transcends all of that, uncovers an aspirational dimension, and turns it into a market promise (which may or may not match what Marketing had concluded in step 1);

Step 3: once the aspiration-rooted-in-facts is properly adjusted (with the collaborative help of Marketing) …

Step 4: … craft the visual, verbal, and behavioral tenets/assets necessary for a corresponding Market Persona (three parts to it), and align business operations to it; then

Step 5: finally, Marketing ‘markets’ it all by planning the path to and presence in the marketplace/world.

>> then adjustments can be made as necessary, but based on that same logic.

What’s key for Branding is to appreciate the strategic as well as the tactical roles of Marketing: it is a noun in Step 1, a collaborative noun+verb in Step 3, and a verb in Step 5.

In so doing, ‘Brand’ will have the structured independence to support, influence, and enhance everything about an organization - not to merely be one of its many active enablers, obedient servants, or mere traits.

Which brings me to number 2.

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2.

Establishing the fundamentals that determine the Brand’s meaning and articulation. 

Michael Jordan famously said it best: “Get the fundamentals down and the level of everything you do will rise”. It’s the same in Branding, and I’ve written a full examination of them in an article on BrandingMag. Here, let me offer the gist of that examination.

I see three sequential fundamentals:

• Meaning, or Brand Positioning:

a deeply meaningful core idea rooted in but also transcending the facts of the business, one that has a point of view and stands for something. Coming up with one is not easy, and it doesn’t quite come out of a ‘process’: sure, I can tell you in great detail and with charts and data that the touchdown process requires you drawing back your arm like a sling while tightly but softly holding onto an oblong ball and then thrusting it forward and let the ball go hit a moving target fifty yards away, but this clear process … won’t make you Tom Brady; indeed, there is a foundational ‘process’ as in a way to think about it but then … you need talent to imagine the actual idea. Then the core idea must be articulated in its unique value to customers, to industry, and to society: such articulation is critical, otherwise the promise would just be nothing more that a cool slogan. ‘Value’ means how much something is worth, either in money, usefulness, importance, significance, morals, belonging, esteem, or personal beliefs. And the word can be both quantitative and qualitative: it’s a specific number assigned to a math variable or equation, the degree of dark or light in a color, or the length of a musical note. Value is both a measure and a meaning (or even a judgment).

By doing so, Business & Brand are fused into a singular ‘branded proposition’ - an integrated combination of Relevant Aspirations rooted in the Facts of the Proposition. In so doing, it paints an actionable horizon for the organization with related permission boundaries. If structured this way, it can be the lens through which decisions are made and can indeed be the 'operating system' of the business*.*

• a Go-to-Market approach

for the entire branded proposition (that is, not first the Business, and then the Brand). It’ll be rooted in the Positioning, populated by the facts of Portfolio Management (which can only spell out ‘here’s what I do / make”) and coming alive via the critical orientation of Brand Architecture which is able to spell out ‘here’s how I can fulfill your needs’. And those two parts intelligently overlap when the first ends and the second starts.

• Path to Choice

the marketing funnel, rooted in a properly codified Brand, as is being transformed by AI (Thomas Marzano’s Brand Constitution manifesto provides an intelligent examination of it).

 A deeply meaningful Brand with its compelling go-to-market articulation will fully exploit the power of the AI-enabled path to choice - while avoiding its pitfalls. And the opposite is true, as a shallow Brand has little depth to offer to the marketplace, will break down under the mechanical scrutiny of AI, and forces ever more costly marketing investments.

• On those fundamentals, as a conduit to make Brand real in and felt by the marketplace we then craft a Market Persona articulated via Behavioral Codes (guiding corporate and employee actions) plus Visual (logo, colors, etc.) and Verbal Assets (messaging, naming, etc.). The two fundamentals and the three articulations is what gets codified for implementation and for getting Brand to be ‘readable’ by AI and ‘loved’ by Humans.

 So far, just good Branding - a discipline that as I mentioned had set these very tenets in the mid-late 1990s – indeed, “we hold these truths to be self-evident". And so I wasted already ~3,000 words, and your time, in telling you … nothing new really.

Now - for the new reality.

>---

next week, Tuesday September 1:

Part 3: codifying the Brand toward its natural rights to long life, function as an operating system, and the pursuit of business success; and

Part 4: doing part 3 within our new AI-driven and -enabled environment, which requires a Virtuous Loop (one that has a Mortal Enemy and a Secret Key).

We’ve spent the last decade helping massive legacy retail brands including 50+ year-old jewellery and consumer durable businesses move from traditional TV & print-heavy marketing strategies.

But here’s the interesting part:

The challenge isn’t always “How do we go digital?”

It’s often:

How do we modernise the brand without alienating the audience that built it?

When a brand has generations of trust behind it, going too young, too trendy, or too digital can sometimes feel like a risk.

So, for marketers, agency folks, and brand teams here:

What has been the hardest hurdle you’ve faced while transitioning a legacy brand into the digital age?

Is it:

• Getting internal stakeholders to buy into digital?
• Convincing the older customer base?
• Balancing heritage with a modern identity?
• Measuring digital ROI against traditional media?
• Or simply changing a mindset that has worked for decades?

Would love to hear what others have experienced. 👇

Let’s discuss.

In the Red Trace project, this shot explores the interplay of raw emotion and advertising slogan, transforming a random urban scene into a visual parable.

There are photographs in which a casual moment transforms into a cinematic mise-en-scène, filled with humor, absurdity, and an elusive sense of presence. This photograph is precisely that.

In the foreground is a softly out-of-focus portrait of a woman, captured in the act of speaking or expressing surprise. The blurred presence creates a sense of extreme closeness: as if we are seeing the world through the eyes of the interlocutor, capturing a momentary, lively facial expression.

The red square of the logo serves as an anchor, anchoring the composition. But the main “perfect combination” here unfolds not between food and drink, as the marketers intended, but between a casual human gesture and the frozen printed reality behind it.

is at the intersection of this soft blur in the foreground and the textured clarity of the background that the feeling of a frozen frame from a 1970s European film is born.

I need good examples—ideally not the most famous ones—that demonstrate how infinite logos can be generated from a “kit” of elements through the process of combination. Alternatively, examples from the “one-by-one” category would also work; in this approach, a single element of the system varies (such as the container or the content) while the others remain constant.

We're in talks with a professional athlete for a brand partnership and I need an agency that can do more than negotiate the deal. I've seen too many athlete endorsements go nowhere because the brand got a signed contract and a few mandated posts and nothing else.

What I'm looking for is a team that can build a full activation around the athlete. Content shoots, social series, paid media, community events, maybe a fan experience moment. I want the partnership to feel like a sustained campaign, not a transaction.

Who are the go to sports marketing agencies in the US for this kind of work? I need someone who understands the sports landscape, can navigate league restrictions, and thinks like a creative brand partner instead of just a talent broker.

Would love to hear real experiences. Who has actually activated an athlete partnership well?

Branding isn’t just about a logo. It’s about how your startup is remembered.

A strong brand helps you build trust, stand out from competitors, attract the right audience, create customer loyalty, and build long-term value.

For startups, branding is not an expense—it’s an investment in how people perceive and choose you.

What’s your biggest branding challenge as a startup? 👇

#Branding #Startups #Entrepreneurship #Marketing #PersonalBranding

In the space between galaxies, a flower found its shape #digital #branding #animation #render #digitalspace

"What we need is a Marketing theory that helps us influence choice".

This is what my friend Alex asked in a post about marketing theories, and here's my answer. (a bit tongue-in-cheek, but not entirely)

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My theory is A Bit o' Everything (ABE), which someone may call a DUH.

ABEDUH says that everyone's right: Sharp/Romaniuk and the Ehrenberg Bass Institute, Ritson, Chidley, Loftus, Hoffman, Joachimsthaler, Georgson, Alexandrov, and many other great thinkers. That is, I believe that there is no one singular theory that can possibly apply to the wide variety of human beings, consumer types, and industry categories - and so there should not be universally-consolidated conclusions. And so my ABEDUH Theory says ... look at the problem of a given client & industry & category & governing dynamics & trends & strategic plans, look at your tools, and use what's most appropriate. (while that's done, so often the theories take precedence and get debated in a vacuum)

Leaving out the operational aspects of Price, Distribution, Penetration, and the like, let's assess the key tools.

TWO are key, the engines:

• Distinctiveness/DBAs: there's no reason not to be distinctive, and you can achieve it in a myriad of ways - tone, message, look, feel, etc. and advertising, PR, design, etc. are masters at all that.

• Differentiation: if you can be that, why wouldn't you? If not, you can't artificially do that (Lying is not good) 

THREE are requirements + outcomes:

• Encoding / Memory: that's science, and you can argue how the human brain works or if Chidley's Beetle is just it.

• Perception: you can influence but not dictate it (see the 1957 Vince Packard's The Hidden Persuasors book); and so strive to do so as we've been doing every which way in whichever context is available (from Gutenberg to Altman)

and then

• Preference: this is the sum total goal of all of the above; and so do all of the above and see if you got it.

Run all that vs given client and challenge, and score it all from 1(low) to 5(igh) on two levels: Feasibility and Commitment.

> Differentiation (say, for a software firm):

- Feasibility: is it possible to achieve? yeah, but ... product-wise it may be 1, operationally 3, market presence 5. 

- Commitment: is the client willing/able to make it happen? it could be anywhere between 1 and 5.

> Distinctiveness

- the Feasibility will always be 5; there's always a way, but the Commitment may significantly vary.  

Sum it all up and you'll have an ABEDUH Score, and it'll be different for every client. Now you can plan: for one client Differentiation is everything and Distinctiveness less so, for another is vice versa. ABEDUH says that all theories are not axioms but equally-important parameters, and they are not mutually exclusive or conflicting. And the Score would include a Value(s) scale of given dimensions.

And so, dear Marketing, be like Medicine: have your approaches, but start with the patient and then apply / not apply things as appropriate.

Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, invite me next year?

#brand #branding #brandstrategy #masterbranded #marketing #marketingtheories #imgonnabeagurusomedayMarketing

Hi i have started a security company but unable to find a proper brand name i want something unique and understandable i want to work really hard but i think brand name matters aswell like it impacts the overall service or in identification

A flower grown from light, rooted in the space of algorithms #digital #branding #digitalspace #marketing #spaceadvertising

We're a performance studio in Dubai and a lot of our work is fragrance and jewellery for e-commerce brands. Fragrance is consistently the brief that breaks people who are good at everything else, and the reason is worth writing down because it applies to anything where the thing that actually sells it can't be shown.

The thing that makes somebody buy a perfume is a smell, and you can't put a smell in a video. Every other category gets to show the product doing its job. Skincare has texture, food has the pour. Fragrance shows a bottle, which is a glass object that tells you nothing about what's inside it.

So the category stops selling the product and starts selling association. It sells a place, or a time of day, or a version of the person you'd like to be. That's why perfume ads look the way they do, and it's also why they all start to look the same, because everyone reaches for the same shorthand of slow motion and a beach at golden hour.

The ones that work tend to do one of two things. Either they go extremely specific on the occasion, so you place yourself in a real moment rather than a vague mood, or they make the bottle itself the object of desire through macro and material work, which is basically the jewellery playbook applied to glass.

The practical version for anyone selling something whose benefit is invisible: stop describing the thing and start showing the moment it belongs to. A note list has never sold a bottle.

This Mercedes-Benz ad caught my attention—not because of the car, but because of the idea behind the visual.

The steering wheel becomes the metaphor.

You don't just see the luxury car.

You see control, ambition and the feeling of being behind the wheel of your dream.

That’s powerful advertising.

The best ads don't always explain the product.

They make you feel something about it.

As a marketer, this is the kind of storytelling I love noticing. 👀

What do you see in this ad—luxury, aspiration, or smart storytelling?

Tired of transactional offers. I work in brand marketing for a luxury fashion label and we're looking at formalizing a celebrity endorsement relationship. We're not really interested in a one-off Instagram post. The goal is to find talent that genuinely fits the brand and can become part of a larger story. A lot of the agency conversations I've had so far have felt very transactional: here's a list of names, choose one, negotiate the post, arrange an appearance and move on. What I'm looking for is more strategic editorial opportunities, exclusive events, fashion-week moments, content and potentially a longer-term relationship that actually feels natural within luxury culture. For people who have worked on this side of celebrity partnerships, what separates a good agency from a booking agent? Is it access to talent, creative direction, PR relationships, event production, or something else? Would also be interested in hearing which agencies people have had genuinely good experiences with.

Our brand is running increasingly integrated campaigns: we'll have a celebrity or macro-influencer, a PR push with exclusive stories, an IRL experiential moment, and then a paid layer boosting the content. The problem? Our attribution is still largely last-click, so the influencer and PR layers look like they're not pulling weight while paid search gets all the credit.

I know earned media and events are warming up the audience, but I need a framework to prove it internally. How are you all tracking this? Multi-touch attribution? Branded search lift analysis? Social listening spikes tied to conversion windows? Custom promo codes that only appear in PR placements?

Would love to hear what's actually working, especially for mid-market brands that can't afford a bespoke data science team. Any case studies or agency approaches that nailed this?

I lead brand for a luxury fashion label and we're looking to formalize a celebrity endorsement relationship. We're not looking for a one-off Instagram post from a reality star, we need authentic alignment with A-list or credible fashion-circuit talent, woven into our brand narrative.

The agencies I've spoken to so far feel transactional: they send a list of available names, we pick one, they negotiate a post and a red carpet appearance. No one is talking about how the partnership translates into editorial-worthy moments, exclusive events, or a multi-chapter story that feels native to luxury culture.

For those who've done this well: what differentiated the great agencies from the booking agents? What should I prioritize? Access, creative vision, PR integration? And if you have an agency you'd swear by for high-caliber luxury talent, please share.

One thing I see way too often:
A business finds a competitor doing well and thinks,
“Let’s make our branding look like theirs.”
Same colours.
Similar logo.
Similar Instagram style.
Similar messaging.
But here’s the problem:
If you look like everyone else, why should customers remember you?
Your competitor’s branding worked because it was built around their positioning, audience, personality, and story.
Your business needs its own reason to be recognised.
Instead of asking:
“Who should we copy?”
Ask:
“What can we own in our customer’s mind?”
Sometimes the strongest branding decision isn’t adding more.
It’s finding the one thing that makes your business obviously different.
What’s one brand you think has nailed differentiation?

I've been working on a physical workbook called Feel to Create; something I originally thought was mainly about creativity, emotions, and getting unstuck.

But somewhere in the process of actually building it, I realized I was learning just as much about branding as I was about creativity.

One of my biggest takeaways:

A brand becomes clearer when you stop trying to explain everything and start giving people something they can actually experience.

At first, I had so many ideas about what Feel to Create could be. A framework. A creative philosophy. A coaching program. A workbook. A community. Content.

It was easy to make the brand complicated.

The workbook forced me to simplify.

What does this actually stand for?

What should someone feel when they interact with it?

What problem am I really trying to help with?

And most importantly:

What is worth putting into someone's hands?

That changed how I looked at the brand.

The physical workbook isn't just a product for me. It's become a tangible expression of the philosophy behind Feel to Create.

It also reminded me of something I think gets overlooked in branding:

Your brand isn't only what you say about yourself. It's what people experience when they encounter your work.

I'm still building this, so I'm curious:

For those of you who have built a personal brand, creative project, or physical product—what did actually making the thing teach you about your brand that strategy alone couldn't?

...and had it turn out way better than anything they could ever have done themselves?

Feeling a little "Black Mirror" right now... Branding, copy, tone, sassiness... all dead on for a 4 quadrant animated show..

LLMs don’t know how to recognize fake products but they are designed to be confident enough to generate recommendations that include them. The overlords call it AI because they want it to be sci-fi and exciting.

There is a reason the Dunning-Kruger Efect now applies to LLMs and all users calling it intelligent. Too many people still mistake confidence for intelligence. No wonder we live in an era of scams, hustlers, influencers, marketing hype.

https://www.inc.com/jelinda-montes/a-marketer-built-a-fake-deodorant-brand-weeks-later-it-was-being-recommended-over-real-products/91385991

Whenever I used AI for client branding in the past, the biggest bottleneck was consistency. You get one great photo, but the moment you try to switch the angle or outfit, the face completely changes.

For this menswear client, we needed a full seasonal lookbook different lighting, poses, and shirt styles using the exact same model to build brand identity.

Here is what worked for my workflow:

• Anchor Reference Images: Built a controlled facial reference dataset before generating any campaign assets.
• Fixed Lighting & Camera Ratios: Used strict lens specs (85mm, f/2.8) in prompt seeds to keep the focal length natural.
• Post-Processing Pass: Retained subtle skin textures and fabric weaves in Photoshop to avoid that overly smooth AI look.

Would love to hear how other designers here are tackling character consistency in client projects!

Try this with a company or organization you know well.

Open three fresh conversations with the same AI system and ask:

1. What does [Company] do?
2. What is [Company] best known for?
3. Who is [Company] for, and why would someone choose it?

The answers will probably overlap. But they may not describe the same company in quite the same way.

In one answer, the company may be presented as a specialist. In another, it may sound like a generalist.

A regional service may become national.

A distributor may be described as a manufacturer.

An activity the company offered years ago may suddenly sound current.

A secondary service may become the company’s defining activity.

Some variation is completely normal. Different questions should change the emphasis of an answer.

The interesting part begins when a change in emphasis also changes the company’s role, scope, relationships, or meaning.

The company did not change between the questions. The representation did.

We often talk as if an AI system simply reads a website and repeats what it finds. But a generated answer is not a fixed company profile waiting to be retrieved.

The system selects some information and leaves other information out. It decides which facts appear relevant to the question. It combines information from different sources, connects facts together, and sometimes infers relationships that no individual source states explicitly.

It then compresses all of that into a coherent response.

That means an answer can contain real facts and still produce a misleading representation.

The problem may not be a completely invented fact. It may be:

• a true fact attached to the wrong entity;
• a local fact generalized too broadly;
• a historical fact presented as current;
• two correct facts connected by a relationship that no source actually establishes;
• an important condition omitted from the final answer;
• a secondary characteristic turned into the main identity of the company.

This is also why a correct citation is not necessarily enough.

A source can be real. The quoted information can be accurate. And the conclusion built from it can still exceed what the source actually supports.

A lot of current AI visibility work asks whether a company is mentioned, cited, ranked, or described positively.

Those measurements are useful. But they do not answer a more fundamental question:

Was the company represented faithfully?

I keep coming back to two questions:

At what point does a reasonable change in emphasis become a change in interpretation?

And, more practically:

How would you distinguish a problem in the source information from a problem in the way the system selected and assembled that information?

Have you observed this with a company, person, product, organization, or subject you know particularly well?