How Will AI Write the Brand Story?
AI will profoundly change brand storytelling. But will it write the brand story itself? Maybe.
Substance Collective continually explores the frontiers of AI in design, production, and project management with our clients. As a small team, we use AI to accelerate almost every process. By interacting appropriately with AI, we’ve achieved remarkable results. We’re now exploring AI-assisted development of brand narratives – a strategic building block we use to communicate brand values, purpose, and belief. AI can support the research and distillation phases of building the brand story, but so far, the writing itself remains hopelessly dull and uninspiring.
Is storytelling inherently human? Read “How to Tell a Story” by the directors of The Moth radio hour, and you can’t imagine the story as anything other than deeply individual and emotional. Moth stories aren’t fiction. They are true; they happened to someone. As it should also be with brands. But the art of sequence, structure, stakes, and pacing transforms mere events into memorable stories that you can’t turn off – driveway moments, as they say on NPR. For brands, finding the truth is never enough. The brand storyteller brings the humanity that compels, inspires, and motivates.
AIs can’t do that.
Or can they? It’s already happening in almost every area of culture. A story is fundamentally a pattern, and if you believe Carl Jung, at least some of that pattern is already in your head on the day you are born. Extending that idea, LLMs and well-trained algorithms can easily pick up the same pattern that humans do. Find the hero. Find the villain. Set up some tensions. In theory, a brand strategist could feed an AI a bunch of company documents, and out pops the narrative. By pushing the temperature up and down, you might even tease out what feels like an original and authentic emotional hook.
And it will only get better with time. In “Sapiens,” Yuval Noah Harari traces the success of humankind to our unique ability to create and communicate “fictions.” Larger and larger organizations are bound together through belief in a common myth. This was likely true at the beginning of prehistoric civilization, and in each successive generation, storytellers have used every available technology to create more effective stories and spread them more efficiently. There is no reason to believe that AI-enabled brand storytelling will not follow the same path.
What possible advantages could AI-enabled brand stories offer? We can imagine three:
Comprehensiveness. At the beginning of any engagement that may include the narrative component, we often ask for “everything” in terms of relevant research, documents, presentations, reports and so on. And when we get it, we leave no stone unturned in finding the nugget of truth that inspires the narrative. But do we really turn every stone? With client permission and a closed environment, AI could.
Speed. Like everything it touches, AI introduces an element of speed and efficiency that supports human processes. We’ve all heard the expression “breaking white paper inertia” when it comes to translating what we’ve internalized into actual words. AI could do that for us.
Personalization. Is there a single, monolithic brand narrative? Or alternative versions for different audiences that emphasize different, more relevant values or themes? With an AI-enabled process, that might be not only possible, but efficient.
The question is, will it be any good? Does human curation of words and ideas still beat the machine on inspiration, connection and motivation? We’re learning every day, and invite you into the conversation as peers, observers or interested clients.
