AI in branding: How to integrate AI into your brand strategy (+5 tools)

Gartner says that by 2025, 30% of marketing messages from large organizations will be synthetically created by AI. 

From immersive brand experiences to entire campaigns centered around the design and strategy smarts of AI, more brands are using AI in creative and exploratory ways to build their brand identity. 

But does the rise of the robots take away from the creative aspects that all good branding relies on — from storytelling to great creativity? 

In this post, we explore the use and role of AI in branding. We show you how to balance the transformative capabilities of AI with the creative excellence of brand strategists, designers and copywriters. We’ll also walk you through the limitations and challenges of AI, share our advice on how to use AI in branding, give you a run down of the top AI branding tools and some of the best AI brand use cases.

AI tools are used in brand strategies to grow and maintain a strong brand identity. 

Many types of AI can support a brand strategy, such as: 

1. Predictive analytics — the ability to analyze large amounts of data to make predictions

2. Generative AI — the ability to create content, audio, videos, music and imagery 

3. Sentiment analysis — the ability to analyze text to understand the emotions and opinions expressed in it 

4. Natural language processing — the ability to understand human language 

Many consumers say they approve of brands using AI to deliver more personalized, helpful and engaging brand experiences. 37% of consumers say they’re very comfortable with AI making better personalized suggestions for products and services, as shown below.

“Successful branding is all about understanding customers’ moods, behaviors and impulses to form deep connections. Relevance is the key to success. It’s all about connecting emotionally with consumers and meeting their needs.

So, while AI falls short in emotional intelligence, human strategists and creatives step in to grasp audiences’ emotions, laying the foundation for meaningful interactions.” — Houda Sayed

While AI can be an amazing tool in branding — supporting the creation of brand assets, improving productivity through automation and supporting audience and customer research, it’s not without limitations. 

Much of branding relies on storytelling, human empathy and creativity — something AI can’t easily replicate. AI also struggles to replicate much of the skill and talent of the designers and copywriters who are essential for communicating brand identity and values through design and copy. Gartner reports that 30% of generative AI projects will be abandoned after proof of concept by the end of 2025.

"AI can improve efficiency in tasks like writing web copy but should be seen as a tool to enhance human creativity, not replace it. Marketers should focus on strategic decisions that AI cannot replicate, such as brand positioning and long-term planning."

— Seth Godin

 In many cases, when a brand starts to over rely on AI, they can end up undermining brand differentiation: 

“As marketers rely more on AI to generate content, homogenization begins to occur. This is the direct opposite of the purpose of branding, which requires differentiation and authenticity as a core component.”

— Jen Iliff, WunderLand

Many agencies are also worried about the possible legal consequences of AI, such as the undermining of intellectual property rights. While 59% of AI users are concerned about AI “hallucinating facts” and making reasoning errors. 

To use AI to support your brand strategy, messaging and design, you need to know when AI can help improve your processes and when you need the creative and strategic talents of your marketing team. 

The smart use of AI branding also requires putting data quality checks, risk controls and legal reviews in place, such as fact checking AI suggestions and content and cross-referencing creative materials to see if they clash with a brand or individual’s copyright protections.

With the right frameworks and checks in place, you can balance the benefits of AI while protecting your brand.

Let’s take a look at some of the best uses of AI in branding and marketing. 

 1. Personalize consumer experiences 

 “In the dynamic marketing landscape, the rise of generative AI has opened up a multitude of possibilities. At the forefront of this technological advancement is hyper-personalization, which allows brands to tailor their marketing efforts to the individual customer. By using generative AI to create hyper-personalized content at scale, companies can not only optimize their internal processes but also transform the customer experience.” — Darije Ramljak & Srini Rudrabhatla

 No matter how well you’ve researched your audience, before AI you’d have little control over how your brand was personally experienced by each individual consumer. When it comes to the brand experience, AI allows for hyper personalization. 

By analyzing huge amounts of consumer data — from buying behaviors to social media engagement, AI can give you deeper insights into individual consumer preferences. 

It can use these insights to create hyper-personalized branding experiences using capabilities like predictive analytics, generative AI and natural language processing. 

From taglines that resonate to preferred color schemes, AI can personalize almost every element of each individual consumer’s brand interactions to help your brand resonate with them in a deeper way. 

2. Support positive brand interactions 

 “Advanced AI-enabled applications are being embedded into branding strategies, brand engagement plans and brand interactions by way of virtual assistants, chatbots, robotic applications, augmented reality platforms, virtual reality interfaces, branded avatar interactions, and immersive experiences.” — Maria D Souza Deryl, Sanjeev Verma, and Vartika Srivastava

Through the use of natural language processing, a capability that helps AI understand human language, AI can engage in conversation with consumers. Seounmi Youn and S. Venus Jin say that consumers project “anthropomorphic characteristics,” onto brands during AI-based digital interactions — helping to personalize and enrich their experiences with brands.

Conversational AI, such as chatbots and videobots, can provide supportive customer support, offer personalized product recommendations, give consumer’s information on products and pricing. 

“With high-quality AI, consumers are pleased with the reliability, speed and customisation, thus directly positively impacting their perception of the brand and building a strong bond. The quality of consumer-brand relationships impacts the sustainability of brand efforts in engagement and visibility.” — Maria D Souza Deryl, Sanjeev Verma, and Vartika Srivastava

Conversational AI can help fulfill brand promises, improve consumer perceptions and protect brand reputations — deepening the relationship between your brand and your customers. 

3. Automate basic tasks 

One of AI’s best uses is automation, simple, repetitive and routine tasks. 

Teams using AI see an 80% improvement in productivity, especially when it comes to automating workflows, summarizing content and speeding up the writing process.

By using AI in this way, you can free yourself up for the more enjoyable and creative aspects of branding like storytelling, refining your brand voice and producing creatives.  

4. Support the design process 

When it comes to brand design, AI opens up creatives’ ability to play and experiment with different visual brand elements. 

The branding agency Studio North writes: 

“One of the most impressive formats of creative AI are ‘text-to-image generators’. These deep learning models have been trained on hundreds of millions of images and their associated captions to produce dynamic art and photography from a short text prompt.

While the images are often not perfect (to say the least), using AI can be used as a tool to quickly iterate different variations of a concept and provide a number of starting points for complicated design work.”

From vintage Ogilvy ads to impressionism, AI text-to-image generators (such as DALL-E) can draw on millions of online imagery. This gives designers the ability to pull from multiple sources of inspiration without spending hours on research. They can also experiment with creative concepts and design materials more quickly and efficiently.

5. Enhance your brand elements 

“Make no mistake, we're great at being strategic and creative. This served us well in the Mad Men days of advertising, when a smart idea and clever slogan meant your ad campaign would succeed. Today, we are still integral to strategizing and creating unforgettable ads.

But we're not good at the rest of it. We can't analyze all the data we now have quickly enough to take action to improve campaigns. We can't manage hundreds or thousands of ad, targeting, and budget variations to get the best results. And we certainly can't find new customer opportunities in a sea of data.

AI can do all of these things and more.”— Mike Kaput

Once you’ve created your brand elements and creatives, you can use AI to understand which ones resonate best with consumers and why. Taglines, ads, logo revamps — AI can track and analyze consumer responses to almost anything you can create.

You can use consumer insights tools like the Zappi platform to get insights into your digital ad performance across TikTok, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram. Use the metrics on our platform to measure things like ad distinctiveness, uniqueness of brand impressions and distinctive brand assets. 

6. Create immersive brand experiences 

https://youtube.com/shorts/YzVcS-F0Em8?si=p4IdA4_d-gYNYmBt

“Advancements in technology are irrefutably influencing the evolution of immersive brand experiences. AI is enabling personalized marketing at scale, with algorithms that learn and adapt to consumer behavior. IoT technologies can connect physical and digital worlds, creating seamless, interactive experiences.” — Danni White

AI can create more immersive brand experiences. Immersive brand experiences come with a ton of benefits like differentiating your brand, creating interactive and memorable brand interactions and improving brand loyalty. 

61% of consumers buy more from brands who use immersive tech, while 47% of consumers say immersive experiences amplify their sense of connection to brands and products.

Take L’Oréal, which was one of the first brands to allow consumers to virtually try on makeup with a little help from AI. The beauty brand partnered with augmented reality and AI brand ModiFace in 2018 to give consumers the opportunity to try out makeup shades on Amazon. 

7. Create net new content

When it comes to generative AI in branding, the tech can be a great way to speed up the creation of brand content. 

AI can draw on customer research and internal content like brand and tone-of-voice guidelines to create on-brand content in less time. 55% of marketers are now using AI tools in their content marketing — with 54% using AI to help create their first drafts. 

“What sets generative AI apart is its ability to generate original, conversational content using large language models (LLMs). These models can seamlessly integrate corporate guidelines and inputs, producing compliant content that aligns with brand requirements, tone, and voice. While generative AI offers substantial benefits on its own, its value is amplified when combined with traditional AI, unlocking even greater potential for businesses.” — Darije Ramljak & Srini Rudrabhatla

8. Social listening and sentiment analysis

Use AI tools for social listening and sentiment analysis to see exactly what consumers are saying about your brand, ads and marketing online. You can use these AI capabilities to get deeper insights into key brand metrics such as brand recognition and brand loyalty — informing your future brand strategy. 

Powered by natural language processing and sentiment analysis, AI social listening tools monitor social media posts, online forums and review websites to see what people are saying about your brand. These platforms analyze this data to spot trends in consumer opinions. 

While marketers have used social listening for years, AI tools can keep track of hundreds of different data points and centralize this information in one database — saving you hours on tracking and recording this data 

Use AI-based social listening tools to:  

1. Monitor online mentions on your brand and products 

2. See how consumers are responding to your creative (like ads or packaging) 

3. Find out what consumers think about your competitors 

4. Keep track of consumer trends 

9. Maintain a consistent brand identity across channels  

“AI branding is a version of branding that is enforceable, consistent, and easy. By centralizing decision making and guiding it through clear brand parameters, you can create almost anything and make it brand consistent.” — Mark de Grasse

The most successful brands are consistent brands. Brands that show up in the same way are three to four times more likely to experience brand visibility and awareness. 

When it comes to AI and brand identity, you can use AI to stay consistent across every channel. AI can analyze your brand attributes and pinpoint your defining brand elements such as brand colors, imagery and voice and replicate these elements across different touch points. 

MarcomCentral says that the need for brand consistency can clash with consumers’ need for personalization:

“Personalization matters at companies of all sizes. When unmanaged, this need for customization can create rogue and off-brand assets. in the financial services space, organizations are called upon to personalize content while continually enforcing regulatory guidelines that change constantly.”

Running on human empathy, creatives may try too hard to personalize content to a particular customer segment at the expense of sticking to the brand guidelines. Because AI relies on systematic rules and algorithms, rather than emotion , AI can create personalized branding experiences that stay consistent with your brand voice, personality and values.

How are brands using AI for brand building? From Coca-Cola to Nutella, let’s take a look at three of the best use cases of AI in branding.  

 1. Shoe Mirror: DEPT and Hello Monday 

As one of the best examples of using AI to create immersive brand experiences and personalized shopping recommendations, DEPT and Hello Monday used the tech to create virtual shopping experiences for people walking past empty sneaker stores. 

The duo placed an AI “Shoe Mirror” in the windows of low traffic stores to draw in shoppers with personalized shoe recommendations. 

Using an AI-supported interactive ad display, the installation mimicked each passerby’s unique walk and matched the color of the digital shoe with their outfit. 

Each digital storefront also featured a QR code, which users could scan to buy their unique pair of sneakers straight from the display.

DEPT and Hello Monday show how brands can use AI to engage consumers, provide personalized product recommendations and differentiate their brand from competitors who depend on digital channels to build their brand. 

DEPT says:

“With the increasing shift of businesses towards online platforms, many physical stores have shut down, resulting in vacant and unoccupied streets. At the same time, online advertising is getting more crowded, as more businesses opt for social media to connect with their target audience. As a result, these platforms have become saturated. Standing out from the competition can be a challenging task.

“With the use of AI technology, the Shoe Mirror can bring digital stores to physical store fronts. By creating interactive ads that use AI, the Shoe Mirror can analyze what people are wearing, find matching shoes, and place the selections “on” them through augmented reality.”

 2. Nutella Unica: Ogilvy Italy and Nutella 

“After four years of individualization through words, we wanted to individualize Nutella through design and make each jar as unique and as expressive as the Italian people.”

— Ogilvy Italy

In the Nutella Unica campaign, Ogilvy Italy shows how AI can be used for AI brand design in innovative ways. 

This campaign is a great example of personalization at scale — Ogilvy used an AI algorithm to create seven million unique color combinations and patterns for every jar of Nutella. The product launch also featured a TVC, an online video and a digital activation consumers could use to create a video for someone unique in their lives. 

The campaign was massively successful with seven million jars selling out in a single month. 

3. Share A Smile: Coca-Cola and Grand Visual

In their Share A Smile campaign, Coca-Cola and Grand Visual used AI-based facial recognition technology in their vending machines to reward smiling consumers with a can of Coke.

A great example of using AI to create personalized, immersive brand experiences, Coke created a fun experience and deepened the emotional connection between their brand and consumers by sparking smiles and encouraging them to share their can of Coke with someone they love. 

Let’s take a look at some of the best AI branding tools. 

Bynder: Manage your brand assets 

Bynder is a digital asset management solution you can use to centralize and manage your brand assets and automate content creation. Their AI software makes it easy to find and manage your brand guidelines and assets and control access and usage with advanced user permissions. 

Bynder offers cool features like text-in-image search and the automatic detection of duplicate brand assets in your database.  

Use Bynder’s AI Assist tool to create and customize content, they provide customizable templates, content suggestions, and the ability to easily edit the content you write. Bynder is a great AI tool for scaling content, centralizing your brand assets and helping to maintain brand consistency across channels. 

Sprinklr AI: Protect your brand rep  

Sprinklr is a conversational AI tool you can use to centralize and automate prospect and customer conversations. You can use Sprinklr on over 15 channels such as chat, voice, email and social media.

Sprinklr provides instant responses to questions and problems and hands over the more complex issues to free customer service and sales reps. It’s a great tool for improving the customer experience and improving brand loyalty.

Palowise: See what consumers are saying about your brand online

Used by brands like L'oreal and AstraZeneca, Palowise is a sentiment analysis tool you can use to find out more about what consumers’ think and feel about your brand. 

As a social listening tool with sentiment analysis, you can use Palowise to “listen in” to online conversations across different channels and understand how consumers perceive your brand and products and those of your competitors. 

Zappi: Track your brand KPIs  

How are your brand metics shifting each month? 

Use Zappi’s Brand Health KPI Trackers to gather real-time data on metrics like brand awareness, consideration, satisfaction and usage.

Use our trackers to put into play continuous tracking of over 400 respondents each month with customizable survey templates and data that turns into automated reports that helps you keep track of what consumers think and feel about your brand and the competitors in your category. 

Bardeen: Automate your workflows 

If you’re looking to get more from the productivity benefits of AI, take a look at Bardeen. As a Chrome extension used by the likes of WPP, Deel and Miro, Bardeen is an AI tool you can use to automate and improve your workflows. 

What’s cool about this tool is that you can use it to automate boring but necessary tasks across the apps you use everyday. Bardeen integrates with several tools you likely already have in your techstack like Slack, Google Sheets, and HubSpot. 

When it comes to the future of AI in branding, AI can pave the way for immersive brand experiences, effective automation and a deeper understanding of consumers. But it can’t entirely replace the empathy and storytelling that’s so essential to great branding. 

As marketer Seth Godin says: if you don’t see the value in AI then you don’t understand it. 

The intelligent use of AI in branding requires knowing when to hand over tasks that fulfill and support your brand strategy over to artificial intelligence and when to leave the work up to the strategists and creatives.