Artificial
There’s an advantage that exists in entrepreneurship that could be described as passion. Or maybe even soul.
The desire to create the thing to solve the problem or fill the need that it gets baked into the product, gets baked into the brand. And, even without marketing, it’s apparent to the consumer. At least with the great products.
For early-stage brands, this is both an internal advantage (a desire to just keep going) and an external advantage (a clear connection to the consumer who cares just as much).
In fact, you don’t really need more than that.
Over time, though, a brand needs to invest in all the various sorts of distribution (from messaging to product and everything in between) to reach more customers. Over time, the passion and the soul wanes. Eventually, maybe, if you’re really successful, you become what you view Big CPG as being now. But the best distribution is really just extending the life of that passion and the life of that soul for as long as possible.
That’s hard.
As growth gets more difficult, as the scale gets larger, as the customer cares less, it becomes easier to let go of the passion in exchange for just generating sales.
And make no mistake: the sales matter.
But even the largest “new” brands own a fraction of their markets, and often have entrenched, legacy brands with generations of strong mental availability.
Passion and soul, perhaps, are the best ways to compete against that.
We’ve been thinking this week about this maturation curve—and the challenges associated with it—as chatter around artificial intelligence ramps up to extreme levels.
GPT-3, Stable Diffusion, Dall-E… all of these are cheat codes for creators. They accelerate achieving an output. And these cheat codes will come to all aspects of brand building. And probably pretty quickly.
But at what cost?
If you’re early—or if you’re trying to prolong the passion baked into your brand—adopting AI-generated outputs accelerates outputs while reducing the amount of passion and soul baked in.
It’s not lost on us that this risk is similar to—perhaps even the same as—the risk associated with the fragility that surrounds many of the “rapid brand building” brands that Ana Andjelic so perfectly criticized in 2020:
An obvious oxymoron, Rapid Brand Building happens when a company funnels their VC funds into brand aesthetics and the tone of voice, relentlessly repeated through witty PR blasts and equally relentlessly supported by the mainstream business press.
This is not enough.
…
Just as GMO food doesn’t do anything nutritionally for humans, GMO brands don’t do anything for culture, or for their company’s long-term business. Without a connection to culture, Coca Cola is just a carbonated water and syrup.
Today’s VC time horizons do not allow for the next generation of Coke legends; instead, they churn Coke Lifes.
If that’s the case, AI may create efficiencies on brand outputs, but removes the passion. Which means, maybe, you become what you’re competing against—without the scale and without the durability.