{"id":1552916,"date":"2025-05-18T05:00:22","date_gmt":"2025-05-18T09:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.practicalecommerce.com\/?p=1552916"},"modified":"2025-05-18T05:58:33","modified_gmt":"2025-05-18T09:58:33","slug":"ai-is-diluting-your-brand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.practicalecommerce.com\/ai-is-diluting-your-brand","title":{"rendered":"AI Is Diluting Your Brand"},"content":{"rendered":"

A combination of fear and necessity may create a renaissance of sorts for brand marketing.<\/p>\n

Many retail and direct-to-consumer companies that have essentially ignored branding now worry that generative AI is merging their advertising and marketing copy into a single, industry-wide sameness. Yet these businesses also recognize genAI’s importance.<\/p>\n

Source of the Fear<\/h3>\n

Consider the decline of regional accents in America.<\/p>\n

Years ago, such accents were common. Texans had a drawl. Georgians sounded Southern. Bostonians didn’t pronounce the letter “r.”<\/p>\n

The accents still exist to some degree, but multiple studies attribute their decline to mass media and improved transportation. The rise of nationwide television in the 1950s and affordable cross-country vacations and relocations prompted Americans to sound the same.<\/p>\n

AI does something similar. It learns patterns of writing from the web and also contributes content to it. AI-generated sentences and paragraphs reside on the same web that instructs the writing patterns.<\/p>\n

Careful observers have recognized some of these repeated patterns. For example, many suspect that the noble em dash (\u2014) was a sure sign of AI copy. The assertion is untrue. The em dash, en dash, and hyphen<\/a> are versatile forms of punctuation dating to the 1700s.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, this humble line (the em dash) represented what at least some believed to be an AI glitch that made all writing similar. If AI could overuse the em dash, it could also homogenize brand copy.<\/p>\n

\"Screenshot

The em dash is a longstanding punctuation mark, as shown here in the author’s article from 2008.<\/p><\/div>\n

It is the 2025 equivalent of the generic brand video<\/a> that Dissolve, a video and photography licensing company, released in 2014. Based on a McSweeney’s poem<\/a>, the video began, “We think first of vague words that are synonyms for progress and pair them with footage of a high-speed train.”<\/p>\n

The video looked and sounded like many corporate videos of the era and pointed out just how funny and bad generic branding can be.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/youtu.be\/2YBtspm8j8M?si=qyJr-WNM39YkAQ5I<\/a>