Is Brand About to Stop Being the Grandparent of Marketing?
Save a chair for….
A while ago, my Ukrainian grandfather would often make carefully woodworked ornaments and once crafted, amongst other things, a wooden go-kart with my initials on its carefully placed number plate. Super impressive, but this was around the beginning of the Nintendo Gameboy boom. I wonder what I was actually after...
Brand feels like a grandparent in the marketing family. Appearing tech-avoidant and traditional with its methods, watching on as other willing tech-adoptive marketing teams delve deeper into an emerging digital world that feels current and transformative. Working in brand marketing, there's always been this sense that you're removed from the technological progress that's shaping the future. It always felt removed from anything algorithmic, programmatic and only skimming the surface of anything MarTech. And now these AI tools - where do they fit in?
But I think the tide is changing now.
As generative AI technologies become ubiquitous, the importance for brand leaders to think systematically evolves. They'll need to think of their brands as operating systems - capturing both the brand's essence while understanding how that translates into an AI-intuitive world.
This calls for brand leaders to secure a firmer 'seat at the table' to ensure that technological systems being created are built with the distinctiveness and consistency that brand leaders expect. It's a cultural shift that many won't be ready for right now, but it's inevitable when we look down the highway and see that agentic AI is coming.
The Agentic AI Future Is Already Here
We're not talking about some distant future anymore. Recent launches like Manus in March 2025 and OpenAI's Operator in January 2025 signal that autonomous AI agents are moving from concept to reality. These systems can act autonomously on a wide range of tasks, and unlike traditional AI chatbots that merely provide responses, these agents autonomously execute tasks across multiple domains.
The implications for brands are profound. When AI agents can independently make decisions, interact with customers, and execute complex tasks on behalf of your organization, who's ensuring they're doing it in a way that's authentically you? Who's making sure your brand voice, values, and distinctive positioning come through in every autonomous interaction?
This is why brand leaders need to be ready - not just aware, but actively prepared with frameworks that can guide these systems. Because the alternative is letting technology make brand decisions by default.
Preparing for What's Next
In a practical way, this means brands need to think about their own frameworks as systems that feed and direct the technology. It's about codifying the language, values, and decision-making principles that provide both guardrails and inspiration - not just for employees, but as data that fuels the AI systems that will inevitably become part of your brand's ecosystem.
The brands that get ahead of this shift won't be the ones trying to avoid technology. They'll be the ones ensuring their authentic identity scales intelligently through it.
Brand leaders, welcome to the tech stage.