But at Dorian Collective, we also see a potential challenge emerging. When almost anyone can create something that looks professional, looking professional becomes less of a competitive advantage. A beautiful website doesn’t necessarily tell us anything about the quality of the company behind it, just as a confident brand story doesn’t automatically translate into a strong proposition or genuine expertise.
We think this is changing the way people evaluate brands. Instead of simply asking whether something looks credible, we’re becoming more interested in understanding what actually gives us a reason to believe it. And that’s where consistency starts to matter even more.
Looking Professional Isn’t the Same as Building a Brand
With AI, producing an impressive campaign, presentation, LinkedIn post or product image has become considerably easier. But we don’t experience brands one piece of communication at a time. We experience them over time, through the campaign we saw last month, the website we visited yesterday, the salesperson we spoke to today and, ultimately, the product or service we received.
All these interactions contribute to our perception of a brand, whether the company has planned for it or not. A business can have a beautiful campaign and a compelling brand story without having a clear strategy behind them. It can make a strong promise without consistently delivering on it.
AI can help make the promise look better. It cannot make the company live up to it.
That’s an important distinction, and one we’ve been thinking about a lot at Dorian. We help companies build the strategic foundations that make a brand recognisable and consistent over time, from positioning and ideas to principles and guidelines that shape how it communicates.
But as the tools available to our clients evolve, so does the way brand communication is created. More people can produce more content, across more channels, with fewer resources. Which raises an interesting question for us: do the guidelines we create need to evolve as well?
We think they probably do. Not because the fundamentals of brand building have changed, but because the number of people and tools involved in bringing a brand to life has.
Beyond the first impression
Every interaction with a brand matters. Across channels, situations and over time, these experiences shape how people perceive and trust a brand.
Trust is built in the space between individual touchpoints.
And that space is where consistency lives. We believe it could become one of the most valuable brand assets in an AI-driven world, precisely because creating a convincing first impression is becoming so much easier.
Does the brand feel recognisable across channels and over time? Does the experience it delivers live up to the promise it makes? Is there a clear point of view and a distinctive tonality behind the communication, giving the brand a personality of its own?
And perhaps one of the more interesting questions to ask is whether you would recognise the brand without its logo.
Nike. Across decades, channels and campaigns, the execution changes – but the brand’s point of view remains recognisable.
Making Brands Work in an AI-Driven World
The answer is to create brand guidelines that give people the freedom to experiment and create, while protecting the things that make a brand recognisable.
It’s not about adding more rules, but about developing guidelines that reflect how brands are actually being created today. Guidelines that help people make the most of new tools and opportunities, while keeping them connected to the strategic foundations of the brand.
Because strategy only creates value when it is brought to life consistently by the people who work with the brand every day.
In a world where almost anyone can look like a brand, the advantage may increasingly belong to those that consistently behave like one.
