Brands present a real opportunity to re-invent, re-imagine and re-define yourself as a business. What do you want people to think or feel? What connection do you want to make? A brand gives you the ability to curate your own personality within a market and define how you want to be approached.

A brand identity is more than a visual system, it’s strategic thinking communicated in colour and form. So when creating these visuals and stories, how do you create something truly unique? How do you create something that, up until this point, hasn’t been done before and takes the next step in brand evolution? Well, more often than not, that answer lies in using the latest technology and applying it to a scenario it has not yet been applied to.

A living brand

“In recent developments, AI-powered chat systems like ChatGPT have witnessed significant advancements. Researchers and engineers are working to improve the capabilities of language models, enabling them to generate more coherent and contextually relevant responses. These advancements involve fine-tuning models, addressing biases, promoting safety, and exploring ways to enhance user control and customisation, leading to more robust and beneficial AI interactions.”

The last paragraph was written by ChatGPT and is an example of using AI in content creation, but that is nothing new (only as of six months ago, mind you), so how can we use AI to develop brands?

AI presents us with new and much improved ways of interacting with audiences. From enhanced chat bots to personalised experiences, our ability to better service and connect with clients has grown exponentially. With these capabilities come huge increases in the need for data processing power, that when applied to brand is explosive to any business. We can create a visual identity that doesn’t just comprise of colour and form, but a visual language that communicates the evolution of a business in real time.

All businesses are rich in data. Data that, once processed through one central location (e.g. an AI powered mainframe), produces an evolutive branded visual output. It is capable of telling the story of your business in a unique, adaptative form.

But if you create this “living brand” that changes from day to day or week to week, why would this be a benefit to a business? Well, other than being a world-first, it would create unique connections and produce original communications unique to only that business – if that business is forward thinking enough.

What if, as a consumer, I could see the impact I have on a business in real time through the data I produce when interacting with products, people, places? Would this then produce a stronger sense of brand ownership or a new type of brand loyalty never seen before? It would empower individuals to create single customised touchpoints with businesses. Broaden this out to smoother customer journeys, collateral can then be produced specifically to that individual on a business wide scale. This would be a powerful tool that brings personalisation to every client output.

A brand that produces outputs powered by AI would emulate something close to a living brand. You could see it react to market trends, grow with people and evolve with new data and insights every day. AIs have been produced in the image of their creators. Brands are the same, they are communicative of the people they represent and businesses they form, so isn’t a living brand the next logical step?

A brand with personality

Consciousness is defined by scientists, in layman’s terms, as ‘subjective experience, awareness and self-awareness, information integration and complex cognitive abilities.’ All of these combined form something close to a human brain, with added years of experience to create a personality that has depth and original thought.

However, AI is getting accomplished at filling in the gaps to create human-like interactions before science has created “true” machine consciousness. It does this by being trained on patterns, information and implementing parameters (175 billion for GPT 3.5 to be exact). Being able to train advanced chat bots on information to mimic human interaction presents a very interesting opportunity when it comes to brand evolution.

Take your brand and then envision it as a human being. What books would it read? What music would it listen to? How would they dress? What personality would they have? This “persona” creation is a tested method in the marketing world for defining tone of voice, amongst other elements for a brand. Now we can take it to the next level. Now you can train your AI on this information; language models that mimic the tone of voice of your business, voice models tailored to cultural nuances and user parameters that safeguard conversations, and then you not only have an AI that personifies your brand, but one that you can interact with. This is where we really start to explore potential.

Your clients can start conversing with your brand. And in turn, you can train your AI to automate daily tasks relevant to every client situation. It can be your best brand ambassador.

Let’s say you have created your brand AI (which is no small feat), how would your clients gain access? Would they visit your website, access a private link …or enter your own designed world? Creating virtual worlds for our clients is already something we do with our tech sister company Enter Agora. We can create immersive worlds (up to the limits of your imagination) that personify your brand. We can house your work, create virtual meeting spaces for your people or clients, present products, create virtual twins of your offices, hold events – or in fact anything else.

Combine your brand AI, Enter Agora and a visual representation of your brand in human form (again, something we do in Enter Agora) and you have a virtually visitable brand. Your AI would naturally improve the more people interact with it, and you can use it in any way you see fit: to automate the function of a tour guide around your world, to greet your people or clients upon arrival, as a services seller or even as a data collection point to improve user experiences.

Visualising your brand in the form of a virtual human and giving it the personality traits of your business is the next step. Brands have always been the culmination of your story and strategic visual elements. Now you can combine those elements and give it a personality. Instead of your brand being an abstract construction in our minds, it can be a relatable personality that you can connect and converse with. The use cases for such a brand would be limitless, and something that would both support and transform your business to its core.

Brand design, like any part of the creative world that impacts us daily, evolves over time through technology and the ideas of the people who create these visual identities. We are at a very exciting (and early) stage with the creation of AI and virtual worlds. These technologies already affect the way we design, think, solve and look at brands for our clients.

Take the next step in turning your brand into something living or owning something unique in your market that hasn’t been done before. Come and have a chat with us, either in person at our studio or virtually in Enter Agora.