It’s been said that artificial intelligence is not going to eliminate everyone’s job; it’s going to eliminate jobs for people who don’t know how to use AI. This sentiment may be especially applicable to brand marketing. Even in its infancy, generative artificial intelligence, or gen AI, is having a revolutionary impact on brand storytelling. With the help of gen AI, hyper-personalized brand narratives and immersive experiences are no longer a marketer’s dream; they’re today’s reality, and knowing how to create them is essential for marketers everywhere.
Read on to learn how to create an irresistibly compelling, intricately tailored, and deeply impactful brand story with AI.
What is brand storytelling with AI?
Brand storytelling with AI is the use of gen AI’s data-harnessing creativity to generate personalized, data-driven brand narratives that are deeply engaging and impactful.
To understand how to maximize the bold new marketing frontier of AI-driven branding, it’s important to understand the basics of brand storytelling and AI.
What is brand storytelling?
Brand storytelling is the art of connecting with your audience through narratives that convey your brand’s purpose, values, and personality to evoke empathy, alignment, and a deeper connection. It’s an important part of earned media, paid media, social media, print advertising, editorial, and many other brand communications.
Far from simply telling an audience brand facts, brand storytelling is an immersive, attention-grabbing experience that fosters brand loyalty, sets you apart from the competition, and helps your audience establish a relationship with the brand.
A compelling brand story allows the audience to imagine themselves at the center of the story. For example, it can feature a story about connection or a sense of belonging, highlight an experience of overcoming adversity or growth, or present an enthralling personal narrative. In all cases, the backbone of great brand storytelling is a consistent, cohesive brand message that echoes your brand identity, evokes an emotional response—and often action—and aligns you with your audience through shared motivations, interests, and values.
What is gen AI?
AI, short for artificial intelligence, is a broad term used to describe machines programmed to learn and perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, like problem-solving, reasoning, and decision-making. Generative AI, or gen AI, is a type of artificial intelligence that learns from existing data and then uses its learnings to generate text, images, code, music, and video.
The intersection of gen AI and brand storytelling
Brands have been using images, words, video, audio, and interactive elements to help tell engaging brand stories long before there were significant ways to measure results. Advancements in data analysis and technology allow brands to better understand who their customers are and how to speak to them. But there has still been a significant amount of guessing about what customers want and what engages them most.
Gen AI changes all that, marking a paradigm shift in brand narrative development. Now, creative AI solutions and digital storytelling techniques can leverage data and machine learning to produce a wildly immersive, high-quality, and impactful brand story with AI in seconds.
Understanding gen AI and its capabilities
Though still at the beginning of its evolution, gen AI has the potential to help you make exceptional content with minimal budget and maximum returns, all based on data and a deeper understanding of your audience. This extends even to using AI in advertising.
The more gen AI learns about your brand through existing data and your teachings, the more it can act as a knowledgeable co-creator, helping you to weave personalized, on-brand stories with rich visuals, text, and audio based on audience emotions and even predictions of your audience’s upcoming desires. In other words, gen AI is positioned to become one of the most powerful tools a marketer can use to create impactful, relevant content that thrills the target audience and puts them right at the center of every story.
Customer alignment isn’t the only benefit of creating a brand story with AI. Historically, producing the highest-quality content required a lot of planning, talent, time, money, and effort. Gen AI will make high-quality, on-brand content more accessible to anyone with access to a gen AI platform and the skills to use it; with AI, content that was once impossible to produce alone or required significant, costly production—think a production team, cameras, lighting, sets, designers, photographers, recipe developers, ingredients, translators, writers, support staff, you name it—can be conceptualized and executed from your computer.
5 steps to create a brand story with AI
There are an increasing number of platforms that help you create a brand story with AI, from text to images and beyond (think ChatGPT, Gemini, Cohere, DALL-E 2, Midjourney, StoryLab.ai, Ink Lantern, Jasper, Synthesia, and beyond). Regardless of which gen AI platforms you use, follow these steps to ensure you get the most out of AI-enhanced brand stories:
1 Define brand values and objectives.
Your brand values and objectives are your company’s compass. Identifying them and integrating them into your gen AI prompts, when possible, has several benefits; it mitigates the potential for AI misdirection, ensures your brand story echoes your brand identity and voice and resonates with your audience, and enables you to measure and achieve your marketing goals.
2 Use gen AI for audience analysis and insights.
Gen AI isn’t just a creative resource. It’s a powerful tool for understanding your audience’s behavior, thoughts, and emotions. For example, you can use it to analyze text in social media mentions, forum discussions, and customer reviews and feedback—including those in other languages—to get insight on your customers’ perceptions of your brand, identify influencers your customers trust, and reveal other important information from unstructured text data.
AI can also categorize customer feedback and identify recurring issues, resulting in valuable insight into customer satisfaction and areas that need improvement. It can even predict customer churn, allowing you the opportunity to consider new retention strategies.
Gen AI analysis and insights extend to image and video analysis. This is profoundly helpful because it can help you understand and leverage the visual preferences of your target audience, identify brand ambassadors interacting with your brand (gen AI can recognize logos), detect trends, and direct your visual content strategy to focus on what resonates and has the most emotional impact.
Finally, gen AI can utilize its learnings to predict users’ future interests and behaviors, allowing you the opportunity to personalize content, messages, and recommendations for the greatest impact.
3 Develop a narrative framework using AI-generated ideas.
During brand-narrative development, a strong, clear framework ensures a cohesive, engaging narrative that resonates with your audience on a deeper level. With your brand’s values, objectives, and analytics in place, you can design the blueprint for your brand’s story or prompt gen AI to help you formulate it. Include key characteristics, plot points, and emotional arcs of the story in your prompts, then further refine the ideas to fit your brand.
4 Prompt AI to create or refine your story.
You may have clear ideas of how you want to tell your story, but don’t overlook the opportunity for AI to help you craft it or explore unexpected creative angles. Whether you need words, images, audio, or all three, use your established story framework as a prompt in your gen AI platform of choice to create, polish, or refine your brand story. To get the best results, provide clear, detailed prompts in your brand’s voice, then prompt AI to refine as needed. Once you’re satisfied with the results, expect to do a little editing, rewriting, or personalizing in your brand’s voice; gen AI is a helpful tool, not a replacement for your creativity and brand knowledge.
5 Personalize and refine the story for different platforms and audiences.
One of the beauties of AI is you can prompt it to iterate on its creations as well as your own creations. This makes it infinitely easier to further customize your story for various digital platforms, taking performance and audience data into account to garner the most impactful results.
Refining your brand narrative with Grammarly’s brand tones and other gen AI capabilities
Whether you’re crafting words to describe the framework of a brand story using AI or are using them in the stories themselves, it’s important to write clearly and professionally using your brand voice. Grammarly, an AI-powered writing assistant, can help you define your brand voice and ensure your copy follows suit with crisp, grammatically correct copy and proper punctuation.
Grammarly is the web’s go-to writing assistant for comprehensive feedback on spelling, grammar, punctuation, and clarity to ensure mistake-free writing, and it’s expanding its suite of AI-powered writing support. For example, its brand tones feature allows you to conceptualize, set, and save brand tone profiles. Once your tones are set up, you can opt for Grammarly’s feedback and recommendations to be customized to fit your brand’s unique voice for all of your various communications. You can also continue to refine your brand tones so Grammarly’s feedback is always tailored to your brand voice.
Grammarly’s generative AI capabilities also help you draft contextually relevant content for blogs, replies, and more—on-demand, no matter what you’re working on in your browser.
Equally important as we all begin to rely more on AI writing, Grammarly can detect plagiarism, allowing you to ensure all of your content is original.
Key takeaways on creating a brand story with AI
Though generative AI is in its early stages, it’s already revolutionizing brand storytelling by using machine learning to produce highly targeted and personalized, immersive, and emotion- and action-evoking brand stories.
To stay competitive and truly connect with your audience, marketing managers everywhere will benefit from embracing the unprecedented marketing innovations associated with co-creating with gen AI. Beyond enhancing your brand’s narrative and connecting with your audience in profound new ways, you’ll grow alongside this new marketing technology and be empowered to use it to its fullest potential with each new advancement.
Brand storytelling with AI FAQs
What is brand storytelling with gen AI?
Brand storytelling with AI is the act of using gen AI’s data-harnessing capabilities to generate personalized, data-driven, brand narratives that are deeply engaging and impactful.
Can gen AI replace the need for human creativity in branding?
Gen AI is not a replacement for human creativity in branding. It’s a co-creator that allows marketing managers and teams to create more immersive, hyper-personalized stories by tapping into AI’s data-driven knowledge about your brand and its audience.
How can a marketing team with limited AI expertise use gen AI?
Starting with any gen AI platform is an important step toward literacy. To get started, explore Grammarly’s brand tones to help refine your brand voice and streamline your communications, then select a tool that suits your needs; perhaps brainstorm for new content ideas with ChatGPT or Gemini or create images with Midjourney or DALL-E 2.
