The Human Side of AI Branding

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0:33Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ductate Marketing Podcast. This is Jon Janss. My guest today is Mark Kingsley. He's a renowned brand strategist, consultant, and author with deep experience in guiding global organizations through digital transformation. The latest book we're going to talk about today, Brands in the Age of AI. It's an essential guide for leaders, marketers, and entrepreneurs seeking to thrive in a landscape where AI is rapidly changing consumer expectations, brand trust, and the very nature, frankly, of that key brand element of differentiation. So, Mark, welcome to the show.

1:10It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you. Let's just hit it right off the bat. How is AI changing the fundamental rules of branding, if you will? Does it change the rules or does it put more pressure on people's behavior? It puts more pressure on what I would, you know, my ethically I would call like better behavior because AI does multiply. It's a force multiplier for the ability to extract more attention and to extract more profit from brands and transactions to extract more attention and et cetera. But I see it also as an opportunity to, in the book, I speak about connecting with the I-thou connection, me, I, and you, thou, and seeing each other with open eyes and seeing, you know, seeing the other person as a person, not as a target, as a member of an audience or a potential transaction.

2:10and AI does offer these opportunities. It just comes down to what is the choice that we're going to make. Well, say a little more about that because, I mean, you're talking about it as a force to actually humanize some marketing and there certainly are people that are saying just suggesting just the opposite. It's turning marketing into a more robotic exercise. Yeah, well, it's very easy. In the beginning of the book, I talk about the way in which I'm approaching it And I do it differently than most other people that speak about AI. If you go to LinkedIn, there were volumes and volumes of gibberish every day about, you know, the best prompts and like how this company is going to market cap, blah, blah, blah, you know, all this, all the stuff.

2:52That's what I call calculative thinking. And that's basically like figuring out how am I going to get from here to there? It's logistics, right? And I'm proposing that we also enter, it's also an opportunity for us to enter into what I call a more contemplative or meditative thinking, which is I am going to consider the way that AI is going to impact my relationship and our relationship to each other, to time, to history, to society, to knowledge, all of that. And so this is, it's more of an inflection point. It's very easy. We are rewarded for good calculative thinking. We are rewarded with year-end bonuses.

3:32You know, name any domain, any kind of industry, you are rewarded for returns. But that only goes so far. I mean, aren't we on this planet, don't we offer products and services in such a way to encourage the flourishing of human beings? Right? One would hope. Sorry to chuckle there, but I had forgotten all about that. That's the thing. It's easy to forget, right? Because we get caught up in our professionalism. We get caught up in our engagement. We get caught up in results. And those are things that we can track. How does one track an emotional, I mean, brands in theory, everyone that works in branding talks about brands making an emotional connection to people.

4:22So that's hard to track. That's hard to rationalize on a spreadsheet at the end of the day. And that's hard. So it's, I know that I am shouting in the wind. I know that, right? But, you know, at least someone is doing that. I'm like the, you know, the classic myth of the little boy in the dike and his finger in the dike trying to keep the sea at bay. Well, it's interesting because, you know, I've been doing this for 30 some years. And I mean, I've seen a lot of new technologies come along and you see this huge swing towards what the promise of this technology is. And then inevitably, you see the swing back to, oh, here's how it fails.

5:04So one of the most important words, I think you talked about emotional connection, but certainly trust is a huge part of that. So what role does AI play in enhancing trust as opposed to eroding it? You know, you hear people saying all the time now, one of the negatives about AI is I don't know what to trust because am I seeing something that's real or not? So I think there's going to be this swing both ways to like not trusting. And then how do we get back to humanizing the emotional connection? This is humanity's relationship to technology in general, regardless of whether it's AI or it could be computers.

5:39It could be automobiles. I was just going to say that. Exactly. Right. So we all rush to new technological innovations and advancements, and we see the benefits that it's going to bring us. But technology is never positive or negative. It's kind of like a neutral thing. What technology does, and this is an idea that comes out of Heidegger, is that it reframes our relationship to things. For example, the technology of taking sawdust, mixing it with glue and coming up with medium density fiberboard, right? That gives us Billy bookcases. And it's amazing that we can kind of use this material that was once considered to be, you know, detritus.

6:21We can now use it for an actual building material and make money with this, right? What that does is that there are forests in Romania that have been decimated just to build Billy bookcases, just to make sawdust for the Billy bookcases. So that's what I mean about the constant reframing that technology does in our society. So one of the things that I hear a lot of people talking about is sometimes marketers are just responding to what the algorithms give them, right? You have to do X, Y, and Z if you're going to show up in AI overviews. And so you see a lot of people just chasing the algorithms that really truthfully are making decisions, in some cases, for our customers.

7:01So how do you kind of fight that no, let's be human to no, let's chase algorithms? If that's all you're going to do as a marketing person is chase algorithms, you are replaceable. You are replaceable by AI. And so it's short-sightedness to even think that way. I mean, in the book I describe, and it's a constant example that people use if you look at lawyers, right? And the education and training of a lawyer is you go through law school and then you become a junior partner. And you sit there all night long going through paper and going through cases, reading cases and looking for ways in to a case or some sort of insight.

7:42That is you learning how to be a lawyer. Right. But we can now offshore that work to AI and have AI go through and do this analysis. But what we're doing is we are basically robbing the future. We are robbing new generations of lawyers. So how do we now educate a lawyer? So it's even in marketing, there's going to be there has to be some sort of like constant readjustment, resetting about how does one learn how to be a marketer? How does one act as a marketer? How does one kind of identify good marketing techniques? A phrase just popped into my head, you know, you know, first kill all the lawyers, which was part of it.

8:22A much larger phrase, but I think it's now first kill all the paralegals. Is that? No, I would, you know, I'm much more cynical than you are. I say first, let's kill all the mid-level marketing managers. Right. So if chasing algorithm, I've totally agreed. I mean, the people that are just looking to find efficiencies and things like that with AI are essentially almost playing right into the hands of being replaced themselves. Right. Right. So in branding, I think we've said this way before AI, way before, frankly, anything digital came along. Storytelling is one of the key assets. So do you have some examples?

9:02I know you do in the book, plenty of examples. But give us an example of a brand that you think gets storytelling that's AI driven, right? Well, first off, we have to identify what storytelling is. Right. And so I would at first, I think I think I potentially may take cause with how you're identifying storytelling. OK, because a lot of storytelling is basically at least within the brand world, like the whole idea of the customer journey. A lot of that isn't necessarily storytelling, but it's events. It's a it's a repetition and it's a chronicling of events that happen. I look at storytelling as some sort of, requires some sort of aha moment, a moment of transportation, transcendence, transformation.

9:47And then, oh, I see the potential here. And so my favorite example, and this all comes down to like, how do I create a sense of being seen, of that I-thou relationship, right? So an example that I give when I give talks is I talk about one of my favorite bars in Chelsea called Chiquito. And I used to walk in and the person behind the bar, she would look at me and she'd go, you know, she'd open her hands about, you know, like a bottle length and I'd nod. And then as soon as I sat down, there was a bottle of the Baronia Reserva ready to go. Right. She knew my wine and that's how I ordered it. Right.

10:25She knew me. I knew her. We had a little secret link. We didn't sit down. I didn't meet her after work and go, hey, when I walk in, you need to know. It just happens naturally because we saw each other. And so to take that kind of notion of, oh, you're seeing, another example that I use in the book is talking about going to JFK in a long-term parking lot. So you can make reservations at JFK. You kind of have to do long-term parking. And there are a couple of parking lots there where, you know, you type in your license plate. That's how you do your reservation, like any other place. And the first time I showed up at this one parking lot, there was no one there.

11:01There was no booth. And I was like, I was ready to get really angry very quickly. You know, I'm a New Yorker, right? I'm ready to get angry. So, but I pull up just a little bit closer and the gate opens. It's because there was a tiny little camera that saw me and my license plate and put it together and said, oh, here's Mark. And that was that moment of transformation where I'm like, oh, I felt I instantly went from feeling ready to fight to welcome. Come on in. You're here. We get it. In you go. And, you know, these kind of innovations are slowly happening in airports. Right. We're going to get to a point where I don't need to do bag drop off.

11:40Right. Because, you know, the AI has been watching my gate. Our bio kind of information, biometric information is already out there in the world. I mean, I go to other countries and it scans my face and it recognizes me that my face is already there in that country, even though I haven't been there since the innovation, you know, the introduction of AI. So it's already out. So I'm going to walk into an airport that will recognize me by my gate, by my face, and it'll recognize my bag and I'll do all that stuff. I just put the bag on the thing off I go and then it'll track it for me. But I already get, when I check my bags, I already get text messages from various airlines going, oh, the bag's on the plane, the bag's off the plane, the bag's coming to you.

12:20So this is all part of that push to a sense of subjectivity, I guess, or a sense of, I don't need. And part of that is removing all the friction, removing all the bumps along the way where I don't have to worry about, oh, geez, I'm going to have to stand in this line. Oh, here's the check-in line. Oh, my God, it's 15 people long. I'm just going to walk from taxi to gate relatively soon. Right. And so that for me is that's a transformation. That is some sort of transformation in the story. Well, I think you used a really key word there because I think where people get tripped up with any kind of automations is when they're used to make things life easier for the company as opposed to removing the friction for the customer.

13:00Yeah, exactly. And then it's this is part of the frustration. Right. Because a lot of the innovations that are spoken of to each other in boardrooms is usually on the calculus sense. How are we going to get more churn? We're going to get more transactions, more. Have less people. Exactly. How do we do it with more efficiency, right? Yeah. So that's why I say that. I feel like I'm shouting in the wind at times. Hey, you want to keep up on all things duct tape marketing, the stuff I read, the books, the people I interview, check out the duct tape marketing newsletter. Every week, we're going to send you out.

13:40We're going to keep you up to date on what's going on in the world of marketing. And just for subscribing, you're going to get our free chat GPT prompts that will allow you or assist you in the creation of marketing strategies and plans. So check it out. It's at dtm.world slash news. That's dtm.world slash news. One of the key elements is a framework or a model you call the brand AI integration. So it's, there's an idea, and this comes from a friend of mine, Ali Madad, who has like a strategy firm that he's beginning these experiments with like ideas of what he calls it, like a brand operating system.

14:22Yeah. And there is potentially a way to kind of automate the donkey work. It's the donkey work of strategy, right? Can I set up my criteria and my parameters and set off a system to do the automatic customer segmentation, to do the automatic logistics, the automatic ordering supply chain, all that stuff can potentially come together if we get to that point where we properly integrate databases. But that's, you know, the integration of databases is a problem right now. You know, that's, for example, Starbucks. Starbucks is in the middle of closing locations all around the world right now. They've closed like 900.

14:58No, they've laid off 900 employees and closed like a couple hundred locations in the United States in the last couple weeks. What's happening is that I'm seeing more and more licensed Starbucks opening up, you know, in the Barnes & Noble bookstore or in a hotel. Supermarkets. markets, that kind of stuff. Right. So that's not really Starbucks. They call themselves Starbucks, but they don't act like Starbucks. Right. So that what that means is that I have my app and I can go order a coffee 10 minutes out and show up and then the coffee is waiting for me. I can't do that anymore because the databases aren't connected.

15:34Right. And so Starbucks has gone for the efficiency and the profit, but not necessarily the customer experience. Yeah. I mean, you see that. I hate to pick on airports, but particularly in the airport ones, I mean, those are concessionaires. And that employee may have been working at Chick-fil-A, you know, two days ago, and now they're at Starbucks. And I mean, so you don't get the same, you also don't get the same vibe as well as the database issue. Yeah. So the idea of a brand OS, an operating system with AI. So those licensed Starbucks, if they need like stirrers or like coffee lids or something like that, they can't call up another Starbucks a couple of miles down the road and go, hey, can you loan us some until the shipment comes in?

16:17They have to go through the home company that owns a licensee, that owns a license. And then it'll take a month for the material to get there. And it also comes down to training. So I can't go to another Starbucks and train there. I have to train within my own little group. So it's this kind of like segmentation and silo database issue, which I would, you know, fingers crossed in the future if i was king you know like ai would help kind of integrate all that stuff and that's basically friction removing and i think that's going to be one of the you know the promise of this agentic ai i think that's going to be a real stumbling block for that as well because a lot of stuff has to talk to other stuff and we're a ways away from that and frankly some of the big players are actually going to resist that because they want to keep their proprietary, you know, approach or protocols to themselves.

17:07Well, there's also, and then on top of it, there's a purely a linguistic and epistemological issue there, right? Because if I am going to use agentic AI, anything that I type in is symbolized. It's called tokenization, right? So like words and sentences and like syllables will be put into a token, like given a numeric value, and then that numeric value is put into the AI. The AI then predicts what's going to happen next if I get this kind of input and will give me some sort of predictive output, right? So it's like a game of, it's like a very fancy game of computer telephone. You know, like when I think of tree, I may be thinking of an elm.

17:49And when you, when I, you hear me say the word tree, you're thinking of a pine tree, right? And so this is, in semiotics, it's called an open semiosis. It's like it never really quite matches the original idea. And this is going to be part of that problem of agentic AI is how are we actually going to know with any degree of confidence? Right. So it's this is part of the complexities that are before us. So one of the, I mean, I, there's certainly plenty of people you talked about being out there, you know, trying to hold back the dam. I run into a lot of people that are like, no, this is the opportunity to be more human.

18:28I've certainly heard that. But how do, how do you think leaders, you know, are we talking about different human skills, different human beings that need to be employed in that kind of capacity for us to make that change? Yeah. Different human beings, different ways of educating leadership, different ways of defining leadership, different ways of defining employment, different ways of defining goals, defining profit, all that stuff. This is part of the exciting thing is like there's great potential for a transformative change which can enhance human life. That's my hope and dream. So many of my listeners are small business owners.

19:09Right now, they're overwhelmed. I think, is the greatest emotion they're feeling with everything of AI that's coming at them. What are some of the biggest risks and opportunities you think that AI presents for particularly small businesses? One of the risks, well, let's, small business, let me step, let me make it a little bit bigger first. And let's think through this thing together, shall we? Okay. So if I was a branding agency, you know, like one of the larger branding agencies, and I sent an invoice for kind of strategic work. for work that had been done that had been delivered and approved by the client, the client has every right to go, wait a second, why are you charging me this much?

19:50Because I knew you used AI and you didn't have as many people, right? So there's going to be a certain kind of arbitrage that happens within organizations. Now, if I was a smaller, more mobile agency or client or whatever, that's where the opportunity is, right? It helps, I think it may help you kind of level up to the behavioral capacity of a larger firm. I mean, and quite honestly, the truth of the matter is, you know, so my experience is in agencies and brand firms and design firms, et cetera. So the truth of the matter is that most branding teams, regardless of the size of the company, are five people at the most, right?

20:27You have a client person, you have strategy, a couple designers, a creative director, and like a kind of an executive director of the thing. That's five people at the most. And that's basically what I had when I was at Lander working on Citi. And we were the global brand team, you know, working with the global brand team at Citi. We were the global brand team at Lander. We were just five people and we'd bring in people extra here and there, right? And so AI now gives smaller agencies and smaller players the capacity to kind of level up to that same amount of practice, as long as you also have an equal amount of insight and an equal amount of innovation.

21:05Yeah. And what I find in our agency we are doing is instead of just saying, here's the same deliverable, we did it faster because we could, but we're still going to charge the same amount. We find that we're able to take the same amount of people and the same amount of input and give them a lot more output, a lot more value than we could have, you know, for that same fee. And so I think that's how people, or at least that's how I believe people need to be looking at it. Yeah, but I see the problem in that, though, right? Because what you're doing is you're eroding value. You're eroding what you can potentially charge.

21:43And so there does need to be a certain kind of larger societal reckoning about value, right? Because employee productivity has grown over the last 50 years, you know, because of information technology, communications technology, you name it, right? Our productivity is through the roof, but wages have remained the same. And so there is going to be a problem.

22:07Well, I think we've solved all of the problems we have the time to solve today, Mark. So you and me over a drink over a weekend, we'll just get to like maybe 1 % of the problems. Well, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by. Where would you have people invite people to learn more about your work, about the book? Obviously, connect with you. So, basic is my website is malcontent.com, M-A-L-C-O-N-T-E-N-T. Yes, I do have that URL. It's one of the proudest possessions that I have. And basically, I do business under the name Malcontent because it really describes my approach and my feelings about established processes and established procedure, knowing that there's always a better way of it.

22:49So, therefore. That's right. There are no best practices, right? There's only better practices. And it's everything situational. Everything is totally situational. Again, I appreciate you stopping by. Hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road. Great. Thank you.