05 Jul Did AI Kill Your Brand Story?
It may sound like a strange question for someone who has had What Is Your Story as their business name since 2011, but do you even need a brand story to succeed anymore? Does story matter in this lightning-fast landscape of AI dominance, influencer marketing, and generative content proliferation?
The answer isn’t simple, but I’ll try anyway: yes and no.
The degree to which your brand story matters directly relates to your goals as a business. If your goal is to sell 100,000 widgets of a unique, practical item that is trending, no one cares about your values or how you started slinging widgets for your father in a hot factory at age 14.
Let’s face it, content creation and distribution have changed overnight and will never be the same. But if AI generates all the content, will there be an increased demand for ‘human-created’ content? Will stories become more valuable? In a recent Wired article by Will Knight titled “AI Will Make Human Art More Valuable”, he suggests that we will scrutinize the “provenance of words and images” in the future and “will regard these as “better,” just as we convince ourselves that small-batch mustard tastes more “real” than its supermarket equivalent.”
Your origin story, the one on your About page? It just increased in equity tenfold. Your precious business DNA now sets you apart more firmly from your robot peers. Made by a human will be included along with your logo on all your content. Maybe writers will offer small-batch story creation, locally made of course, as a prestigious and sensual experience, made only for a privileged few humans that partake. Hashtag “humanstory”, hashtag “organicstory”, hashtag “writtenbyahumanmind.”
But suppose you want to join your robot peers (half-jokingly referred to as our new overlords these days). In that case, your authentic story can be hung up, like an old suit with a tobacco pipe in it—relegated to the time before AI, when humans still outnumbered the robots.
If you don’t want to join the robot legions and think you’d like to increase your brand equity, it’s time to polish up your brand and optimize its health. A great place to start is with a Story Check-Up. You’ll gain robust information (human-generated) on your brand story that will give you a competitive edge if you want to engage with humans.