There is a new fear in marketing: AI will make every brand sound the same.
The argument is gaining traction. The State of Brand calls it “The Great AI Brand Flattening.” The claim is simple: as companies use the same AI tools, the same prompts, the same brand decks, and the same generic language, their voices begin to converge. Every brand becomes clear, polished, fluent — and forgettable.¹
That diagnosis is useful. But it does not go far enough.
Much of the current response is tactical. Improve your content. Fix your metadata. Make your brand more discoverable. Optimize for generative engines. Build machine-readable assets. Make sure AI systems can find you, cite you, and summarize you.
All of that matters. Thomas Marzano has argued that brands must become both “legible” to machines and “lovable” to humans. Jochen Sengpiehl has written about brand visibility becoming a survival question in the AI age. BCG has argued that AI-powered search and answer engines are changing how brands are found, compared, and selected.² ³ ⁴
But here is the problem: visibility is downstream. If the brand strategy is weak, AI will not fix it. It will scale the weakness.
If the brand has no clear point of view, AI will average the market. If the brand has no real demand authority, AI will describe it generically. If the brand has no sharp claims, evidence, and value logic, AI will summarize it blandly. If the brand has no distinctive interaction system, AI will reduce it to category language.
The Great Flattening does not begin inside the machine. It begins upstream.
It begins when brands confuse positioning with strategy. When they define categories but not demand spaces. When they write tone-of-voice guidelines but not brand logic. When they plan campaigns but not interactions. When they propose marketing activities but cannot explain how those activities create economic profit.
That is why the answer is not simply better AI optimization. The answer is to rewrite the brand strategy.
Brand strategy, as we know it, was built for another world. In the 1990s, Kevin Keller gave us the customer-based brand equity model. David Aaker developed the Brand Identity System. Then Aaker and Joachimsthaler extended the field into brand leadership, portfolio strategy, and brand architecture. “Branded house” and “house of brands” became the common language of modern brand management.⁵
It was a major advance. Brand moved from identity and communications, design and customer experience to strategy. Companies began to manage brands as assets, portfolios, architectures, and systems of meaning.
But that model was built for the attention economy. The central question was: How do we get noticed, remembered, preferred, and chosen?
Today, that question is no longer enough. We are entering the intent economy. Demand is no longer shaped only through advertising, shelf presence, search, social media, or sales channels. It is increasingly interpreted by platforms, recommendation systems, algorithms, large language models, shopping agents, creators, communities, and AI-enabled decision tools.⁶
That changes the work of brand strategy. It is no longer enough to define what the brand stands for. The brand strategy must define where demand is forming, how demand can be shaped, how the brand becomes legible to humans and machines, how interactions create value, and how investment compounds into economic profit.⁷
Most brand strategy decks cannot do this. They were written as positioning documents. They now need to become operating systems. I have said this before, see my WARC article on the Holistic Brand Model (2025).
Stop thinking in categories. Build demand authority.
Most brand strategies still begin with the category. What category are we in? Who are the competitors? What is the target? What is the positioning? What is the reason to believe? This is the old logic.
Consumers do not wake up thinking about categories. They think about goals, tensions, jobs, situations, anxieties, aspirations, shortcuts, rituals, and outcomes. They want to get something done. They want to feel something. They want to avoid something. They want to become someone.⁶
Sephora is not powerful because it thinks only in the “beauty retail category.” It understands the demand space around choice anxiety, self-expression, confidence, experimentation, and personal fit. Its Smart Skin Scan and Color IQ tools reduce uncertainty and help consumers answer a more basic question: “What works for me?”⁹
The same logic applies in B2B. Schneider Electric is not simply competing in electrical equipment, automation, or energy management. Its stronger strategic frame is energy technology. The demand space is the urgent business problem of making buildings, factories, data centers, infrastructure, and grids more efficient, resilient, electrified, and sustainable. EcoStruxure turns that strategy into an operating architecture: connected products, edge control, software, analytics, services, partners, and customers working together to improve energy and operational performance.¹⁰
This is demand authority. A brand earns demand authority when it understands the moment better than competitors. It knows the language, the friction, the alternatives, the cues, the emotional tension, and the decision logic.
The old brand strategy said: “This is the category we compete in.” The new brand strategy must say: “This is the demand space we have the authority to shape.”
Do not just explain demand logic. Shape it.
Many strategies describe demand. Few shape it. They explain the consumer. They map the journey. They identify insights. They define the occasion. But they stop short of asking the harder question: How do we change the logic by which demand is created, captured, and monetized? This is the strategic question.
Some brands grow by increasing penetration. Some by creating new occasions. Some by changing the basis of comparison. Some by increasing willingness to pay. Some by reducing friction. Some by creating ecosystems. Some by turning a product into a habit, a ritual, or a membership system.⁷
Uber did not merely compete in the taxi category. It changed the demand logic of urban mobility. The brand did not ask people to choose a different taxi company. It changed how people formed intent, requested service, tracked progress, paid, rated, and repeated the behavior.¹¹
Duolingo did not simply advertise language learning. It reshaped the demand logic around short daily practice, streaks, reminders, gamification, and a highly distinctive brand character. The owl is not just a mascot. It is part of the behavior system.¹²
This is why brand strategy can no longer be only a positioning exercise. Positioning says: “This is how we want to be perceived.” Demand logic asks: “How do we want demand to work?” That is a much more powerful question.
Recognize that your brand now has two consumers: people and machines.
For decades, brand strategy was written for human interpretation. The consumer saw the ad. The shopper saw the package. The customer heard the sales pitch. The investor heard the story. The employee heard the purpose. Now there is another interpreter. The machine.
Large language models, search engines, recommendation systems, shopping agents, retail algorithms, marketplace ranking systems, and internal AI tools increasingly interpret what a brand is, what it offers, who it is for, how it compares, and when it should be recommended.³ ⁴ This means the brand now has two consumers.
The first is the human consumer. The human consumer needs meaning, emotion, identity, memory, trust, usefulness, and desire. This is the consumer for whom brands must still be lovable, distinctive, relevant, and culturally alive.
The second is the machine consumer. The machine consumer needs clarity, structure, evidence, consistency, comparability, and computable meaning. It does not “love” the brand. It parses it. It retrieves it. It compares it. It summarizes it. It decides whether the brand deserves to be surfaced in an answer, shortlist, recommendation, or agentic decision flow.
This is where the current visibility and discoverability debate is right — but incomplete. Yes, brands must become visible in AI search. Yes, they must be discoverable by answer engines. Yes, they must be legible to machines. Yes, they must have clean data, structured product information, credible sources, and clear claims.
But machine legibility is not the same as brand strategy. A brand can be visible and still generic. A brand can be easy for AI to read and still have nothing distinctive to say. A brand can appear in an answer and still fail to create preference, trust, or willingness to pay.
That is why the deeper task is not only to optimize the brand for AI. It is to give AI a better brand to work with.
A modern brand strategy must define the brand’s demand spaces, claims, proof points, language, exclusions, decision rules, comparison set, sources of authority, and value logic in a way that humans and machines can both use.
The old brand strategy asked: “Is the brand distinctive to people?” The new brand strategy must also ask: “Is the brand legible to machines?” But the best brands will do both. They will be legible enough for machines to understand. And lovable enough for people to care.
Replace campaign planning with an interaction system.
The old planning model was linear. Write the strategy. Brief the agency. Develop the campaign. Buy the media. Measure the results. Repeat next year. That model is no longer sufficient.
Demand is now shaped through interactions: searches, prompts, recommendations, reviews, creator content, loyalty programs, apps, retail media, customer service, communities, product usage, marketplaces, and AI assistants.⁶ The brand is no longer built only through what it says. It is built through what it does again and again in the customer’s life.
Sephora shows what this looks like. The brand is not just a campaign platform or a retail environment. It is an interaction system: discovery, ratings, recommendations, virtual try-on, loyalty, in-store service, digital tools, samples, content, and community. Each interaction reduces friction, increases confidence, and makes the brand more useful in the customer’s beauty life.⁹
LEGO shows the same logic in a different way. In The Interaction Field, I wrote about LEGO Ideas as an early example of a brand moving beyond communication into participation. LEGO Ideas lets fans submit concepts, vote on ideas, comment, collaborate, and help shape what the company may eventually produce. The brand is not simply speaking to consumers. It is creating a field in which fans, designers, parents, collectors, educators, and the company itself participate in value creation.¹³
That is what makes LEGO such a powerful example. LEGO Ideas is a globally available open innovation community where fans can submit their own ideas for new LEGO sets, vote for other members’ ideas, participate in challenges, and engage in other LEGO activities. Ideas that receive 10,000 votes have a chance of being selected for the LEGO product portfolio.¹⁴
Siemens Xcelerator shows the same shift. Siemens is not simply communicating a brand promise around engineering. It is building an open digital business platform where customers, Siemens businesses, certified partners, developers, software, hardware, and services come together to solve industrial problems. Siemens describes Xcelerator as a platform where companies can find, try, and buy the technologies they need to run better.¹⁵
This is where many brand strategies are too thin. They provide message guidance. They do not provide interaction guidance.
A rewritten brand strategy must define the interactions that matter most. Which moments should the brand own? What should the brand learn? What should it personalize? What should it make easier? What should it help the customer decide? Where should it create confidence? Where should it create habit? Where should it invite participation?
The new brand strategy is not a campaign platform. It is an interaction architecture.
Stop proposing marketing activities. Make the capital case.
The final reason to rewrite brand strategy is the most important. Brand spend is argued in marketing language, but judged in financial language.¹⁶ Marketers talk about awareness, salience, relevance, engagement, impressions, distinctiveness, love, and equity.
CFOs and boards think about capital allocation, cash flow, margin, risk, pricing power, return on invested capital, and economic profit. This gap has become dangerous.
A modern brand strategy must show how brand creates economic value. Does it increase willingness to pay? Does it reduce price sensitivity? Does it improve conversion? Does it increase retention? Does it support premiumization? Does it make innovation more likely to succeed? Does it create portfolio leverage? Does it make future demand easier and cheaper to create?
LEGO is perhaps the clearest example. The company did not nearly collapse because it lacked creativity. It nearly collapsed because creativity became disconnected from capital discipline. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, LEGO expanded into too many adjacencies, increased product complexity, and pursued innovation that did not always strengthen the core economics of the brand. In Brick by Brick, David Robertson and Bill Breen describe how LEGO avoided near bankruptcy by refocusing on the core brick system, reducing complexity, cutting or exiting value-destroying activities, engaging the fan community, and rebuilding its innovation model around disciplined growth.¹⁷
When Jørgen Vig Knudstorp became CEO in 2004, he brought a very different logic. LEGO had to stop treating every attractive idea as a good investment. It had to ask which ideas strengthened the LEGO system, which ones created profitable growth, and which ones consumed capital without improving the core business. He did not call this EVA, but the logic was close to economic profit: growth is only valuable when returns exceed the cost, complexity, and capital required to produce it.¹⁸
That is why LEGO is such a useful case for modern brand strategy. The turnaround was not a retreat from brand and mere cost cutting or restructuring. It was a return to brand as an economic system. LEGO refocused on the core demand spaces where it had real authority: play, creativity, building, mastery, fandom, education, collecting, and participation. It then built a portfolio and interaction system around those spaces, including LEGO Ideas.¹³ ¹⁴
The result was not just a stronger brand. It was a better capital allocation model. LEGO learned to invest in brand extensions, partnerships, communities, and innovation platforms that reinforced the system and created profitable demand. That is the Economic Profit Loop in practice.
Hermès is another example. The brand does not treat growth as volume maximization. It protects scarcity, craftsmanship, desirability, price integrity, and long-term client relationships. That is brand strategy as capital discipline. The business model is designed to improve the quality of cash flows, not just their quantity.¹⁹
Schneider Electric shows the same. Its brand is tied to capital-relevant demand spaces: electrification, energy efficiency, automation, data centers, resilience, and sustainability. The brand is not merely a communications wrapper around products. It helps organize investment around high-growth demand spaces where customers face real capital decisions.²⁰ This is the Economic Profit Loop.
Invest in the right demand spaces. Shape the demand logic. Build brands and portfolios that can win there. Make the brand legible to people and machines. Design the interactions that create demand and reduce friction. Increase willingness to pay and the quality of cash flows. Generate economic profit. Reinvest that profit into the next set of high-return opportunities.
That is how brand compounds.
The old brand strategy justified marketing activity. The new brand strategy must justify capital allocation.
The real question
The Great Flattening is real. But it is not mainly a content problem. It is not mainly a GEO problem. It is not mainly a prompting problem.
It is a strategy problem. If your brand strategy starts with a category, it is too narrow. If it describes demand but does not shape demand, it is too passive. If it speaks only to humans and not to machines, it is incomplete. If it guides campaigns but not interactions, it is too shallow. If it proposes activities but cannot make the capital case, it will lose in the boardroom.
The old brand strategy answered: What do we want people to think about us? The new brand strategy must answer: How does this brand create, capture, and compound economic value in a world where demand is shaped by people, platforms, algorithms, agents, and capital?
That is why the brand strategy has to be rewritten now. Not because brand is dead.
Because brand is becoming more important than the old brand strategy was designed to handle.
Footnotes
- The State of Brand, “The Great AI Brand Flattening.”
- Thomas Marzano, “Brand Constitutions: The Legible-Lovable Standard for Building Equity in an Agentic Economy,” BrandingMag, 2025.
- BCG, “The Future of Discoverability: How SEO, AEO, and GEO are Redefining Brand Visibility in the AI Era,” 2025; updated January 2026. BCG, “How Generative Engines Bring the Web to You,” 2025.
- https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7458162433623494656/
- Kevin Lane Keller, “Conceptualizing, Measuring, and Managing Customer-Based Brand Equity,” Journal of Marketing, 1993; David A. Aaker, Building Strong Brands, 1996; David A. Aaker and Erich Joachimsthaler, Brand Leadership, 2000.
- Erich Joachimsthaler, “The Attention Economy Is Ending. Growth Now Runs on Intent,” Medium, 2026.
- Erich Joachimsthaler, “What AI Teaches Us About Strategy and Brands,” Medium, 2026.
- Nike Run Club and Nike Training Club, Nike.
- Sephora Smart Skin Scan and Color IQ, Sephora.
- Schneider Electric, EcoStruxure platform materials.
- Uber Marketplace and matching system materials, Uber.
- Duolingo TikTok brand case, TikTok for Business.
- Erich Joachimsthaler, The Interaction Field: The Revolutionary New Way to Create Shared Value for Businesses, Customers, and Society, PublicAffairs, 2020.
- LEGO Group, LEGO Ideas and Fan Engagement materials.
- Siemens, Siemens Xcelerator materials.
- Erich Joachimsthaler, “Brand Spend is Argued in Marketing Language, but Judged in Financial Language,” Medium, 2026.
- David C. Robertson and Bill Breen, Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Toy Industry, Crown Business, 2013.
- BCG, “At LEGO, Growth and Culture Are Not Kid Stuff,” interview with Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, 2017.
- Hermès, Annual Report / Activity Report, 2025.
- Schneider Electric, Annual Report / Investor Relations and EcoStruxure materials.