By now we all know that a brand is not your logo, your color palette, or the flowery language sitting in your brand guidelines. Your corporate brand is your reputation. It's the opinion your target audience has about you. In your customer's story, they're the hero and you're a supporting character; and however they feel about you, that's your brand.
Even with that, companies have always had a lot of tools to paper over a bad brand if they needed to. There were ways to dominate search results, run enough paid media to control the narrative, and make sure the first ten things a potential customer encountered were what you wanted them to see.
Your messaging often got the first word in your efforts to manage your reputation.
That’s getting a lot harder, based on data around how A.I. tools are answering users’ questions.
Omniscient Digital analyzed more than 23,000 citations across A.I. search tools to see where models actually get their information when someone asks about a specific brand. The whole report is worth reading, but the main takeaway is, “When someone asks an LLM about your brand, most of what it references comes from outside your website.” Muck Rack and AirOps found similar results.
While each of these studies is from firms with a stake in the answer (so apply skepticism accordingly), we can rightfully assume this data is directionally accurate and worth taking seriously. So when someone asks their favorite chatbot about your company specifically or your industry generally, the answer is likely assembled mostly from reviews, press coverage, analyst commentary, forum threads, and even your competitors' comparison pages. Your carefully wordsmithed positioning statement is maybe playing a part in there somewhere. Maybe.
This concept is nothing new. A company saying nice things about itself has always been met with the usual consumer skepticism, and we’ve all relied on friends, family, colleagues, and online reviews before making a purchase. But now, like most things with A.I., it’s being done at scale and with little visibility into how it all works.
Which means the gap between what executives believe and what customers experience matters more than ever. PwC found that 90% of business executives think customers highly trust their company while only 30% of customers say they do. That discrepancy has always been an issue but, as I mentioned, the company controlled enough of the messaging ecosystem to still get new customers in the door. Now the A.I. machines are deprioritizing what the company controls, aggregating what customers, reviewers, and journalists have said, and serving up personalized answers with a pretty bow on top to each and every user.
Publish all the warm copy you want; your brand is going to be decided by what other people have to say about you.
The practical takeaway from all of this is, of course, boring (my favorite kind of takeaway). The inputs that determine what A.I. says about your company are the same inputs that have always determined your brand: whether the product works, whether customers would recommend it, whether the press has a reason to cover you, whether your claims are credible, etc.
Your brand lives in the awareness, perception, and lived experiences of your customers — and is earned through consistent actions by your entire company, not through catchy marketing.
It’s looking like we’re, at least for the next little while, at the mercy of the machines; and they’re putting extra weight around what others are saying about you. So I guess companies are just going to have to be companies that people say good things about.
Crazy, I know.