Speaker 1: 0:00

I was talking with my wife last week and about the new ruling on copyright and AI. The ruling is creating what I think is a loophole that will allow folks to copy original works and sell it as their own once they have had AI tweak it a little bit. The whole issue made me think about trademarks and how we can protect our brand identities in the years to come, about trademarks and how we can protect our brand identities in the years to come. Branding is the lifeblood of any small business's identity and if we can't protect against imposters, how will we be able to distinguish ourselves in the market? To help me explore this topic today is my friend, Mark DeGrasse.

Speaker 1: 0:41

Mark is a pioneering knowledge entrepreneur with an extensive background in consultancy, content creation and education. Since the mid-2000s, Mark has been at the forefront of the digital content strategy, creating thousands of articles, graphics, videos and podcasts. His experience as the former president of digitalmarketercom has cemented his expertise in marketing strategy and execution. I want to get Mark's insights on whether artificial intelligence is the transformative force in branding or a barrier to individualism and brand sovereignty. Welcome to the Buzzworthy Marketing Show.

Speaker 2: 1:30

Welcome to the show, Mark. Thanks for having me, Buzz. Good to see you again.

Speaker 1: 1:35

Yeah, it's good to see you. When's the last time we saw each other? I think it was in Costa Rica, wasn't it Was?

Speaker 2: 1:40

it. Man, I don't have any sense of time, so as far as I'm concerned, it was like a couple months ago. No, no, no, no, austin. We were in Austin content hacker live yeah content hacker live In Magriol.

Speaker 1: 1:50

You did awesome in that. Oh, thank you. That was a ton of fun. That was good. You were definitely the conspiracy theorist of them all.

Speaker 2: 2:02

You were like the robots, we could use chat for this, and I'm like, oh yeah, that also, oh that whole thing.

Speaker 1: 2:09

You know all the doom stuff, right? No, I like that, and that's why I wanted to have you on the show, because I want to talk about branding, because that's like your thing, right. You actually launched an AI branding bootcamp, which I think is awesome. We'll make sure that everybody gets a chance to access that in the show notes. I think that's really cool. You've been really at a forefront of like leaning into AI for marketing, but you also have this pragmatic approach to it, right, and which I really appreciate, because I'm that way too.

Speaker 1: 2:40

It's like we know, as marketers, marketers break things. Like any technology comes out, marketers will take advantage of it and break it Right. Phone, cold phone calls, cold emails, social media, you name it. They've broken them all Right and really ruined it for the rest of us, and AI is not going to be any different. You already see it. But I also feel like society is starting to buck those shortcuts and I want to kind of get your feedback. What's your initial when you talk to people about AI and utilizing it for their branding? What's the first thing that you even approach that subject with them?

Speaker 2: 3:20

You know what I always talk about my experience over the last 20 years so I've been doing content marketing, had businesses, I've been in executive roles developed a whole bunch of brands for other people and what I realized was that everybody has kind of put branding just in a back corner. It's like you set up your logo, you set up your website, you have your business card, I'm branded, and then you totally forget everything else. You know all the brand values, the mission, all that kind of stuff gets plopped on your about page and that's the end of it. You're good to go. Now, forget all that and let's move forward.

Speaker 2: 3:53

And what I realized is that it's because it hasn't been necessary for a really long time. We've all become, like, really reliant on paid media. You know, as soon as, really as as soon as, like Meta or Facebook got established, as soon as YouTube got going, as soon as Google become really dominant, it really wasn't necessary to be good at branding, good at content, good at keeping your customers around, really, because all you had to do was stick money into the machine and you get money back out, and then there's always more customers, there's always more money. So who gives a crap? But times are changing. People have less money, paid advertising is getting more expensive. People are actually having expectations of good services and good products and, here in America, things that won't kill you, because everything's made of cancer causing everything here. Cancer causing everything here. So because of this, we're starting to see the rise of lifetime customer value, where before it just wasn't necessary, because all you had to do was get the right ad budget, get the right ad experiments and figure out your formula and then that was pretty much it. But all of that's going away and if you're not able to essentially maintain your customer base, then you're done. You're not able to essentially maintain your customer base, then you're done, you're not gonna be profitable anymore.

Speaker 2: 5:08

So that's where branding comes in, where it's like okay, now we have to one, be recognizable and to represent something, have a mission and have values and have things that people can be attracted to. Because now we do care where things are made and we do care what they're made of and we do care that we could call customer support and actually, you know, get our problem solved Like, imagine that and, uh, it's just well, it's just been this, this degradation, right? I mean, we used to be like oh, I got transferred to somebody in India and I'm unhappy that English isn't their first language. And now it's kind of like, oh my gosh, I'm talking to a person. This is amazing. Can you please help me? And it's really sad. It's so true, though, it's so true. Well, that's just the sad reality that we've come to. Just, I guess, accept, but it's going away because people have way less money than they had before and they're being a lot more discerning and, honestly, I'm tired of crappy products.

Speaker 2: 6:09

I always talk about my washer and my dryer, where it's like, every three or four years, I buy a new one and it's more expensive and it's worse and it breaks sooner, and what the hell is going on. My parents had the same washer and dryer. They probably still have the same washer and dryer that they had when I was living there 30 years ago, and so branding is really what happened, or what wasn't necessary, but now it's becoming increasingly necessary. Now, the reason it's People didn't do it, because even though people, you know, haven't appreciated the impact of branding, they've always known that it's important, it's important that you get recognized, it's important that you get remembered, but it was just impossible to implement because every time you had a project.

Speaker 2: 6:51

How do you convey your branding information to the guy you're hiring to set up your event booth, information to the guy you're hiring to set up your event booth, and how do you you know you take that same information and apply it to?

Speaker 2: 7:03

You know the magazine that you want to create that you had to bring in an outside firm because you had nobody to do that. How do you communicate all these things? And so you couldn't, and you definitely couldn't, communicate that same information to Sally, your new customer service rep, who just started and you know, is typing out email directly to a customer who's paying you money. You know that all of these are touch points and impressions that everybody's just kind of like well, we'll do our best, like here's, here's the training manual, please do this right. Uh. But what ai represents is the ability to essentially automate this brand voice and and the brand components into every single procedure and aspect of your business, because it's just querying an AI system that already has the data. So now we're centralizing branding and we're propagating it everywhere, and it's possible because AI is doing the work and you don't have to have some branding overlord that's harassing everybody all the time.

Speaker 1: 7:59

I love it. Yeah, it's so funny. You said that, like the dishwasher, the washing machines and the dryers, we just moved and we were. We had somebody come out and look at the heater and he's like so your heater's not new, it's not working at the prime, but I wouldn't replace it until you absolutely have to, because it's gonna. It's gonna do better than the new stuff that's out there. You know, and and he was saying exactly what you're saying is that they're making products that are not met, built to last anymore, and I'm and I'm waiting for that to come back.

Speaker 1: 8:32

I think that we I think that's going to come full circle when people are going to sit there and go. You know what, if, if I'm going to spend the extra 10, 20% on a brand, that should then give me at least another a hundred percent lifetime, yep, right. So I'll give you my money now and I'll be brand loyal to you because I don't have to keep buying your stuff every four years. And people, I don't think that corporations understand that, but I think small businesses can like what you were talking about being able to be on the phone and that's something small business can do, and AI is allowing us to do a lot of that nitinoid stuff at the beginning to get that person that's looking for help to the right person within your, your small organization, so that you even have more bandwidth for that client services right. So I believe that you hold heartedly that AI can definitely help automate that and even assist you in implementing it.

Speaker 1: 9:26

Oh yeah, for sure you know, because you have like AI voices. Now your AI chatbots can talk in your voice with your FAQs and all that stuff that you were talking about, all the SOPs and stuff. They can just read all that and get a person to chat and they go can I talk to a human? And if it says yes and it gives you a human, I was just on a website the other day and I'm like I just want to talk to you human. I know I'm not getting the answer I want. Right, it was a stampscom, actually, and I was like why can't I hide this one thing on my stamp? And it's like, well, you can in these circumstances. I'm like, well, what circumstances are those? I don't know? Okay, can I talk to you human?

Speaker 2: 10:03

No, there you go, done.

Speaker 1: 10:06

But if I have a small business and that would have been there, boom right.

Speaker 2: 10:10

Well, not just that, that kind of customer service rep because I've worked with some companies and we actually sit down and we listen to the customer service calls and they were bad most of the time no-transcript because, one, they know the policies to they know every single answer and three, they can point people in the right direction and eventually they'll probably be able to go into you. You know actual systems and make modifications to fix problems, and so we're going to actually prefer it because it's going to be safer and probably more effective eventually. So you know, okay, good, I was going to say what I'm trying to produce right now is essentially the guidelines that could power these systems. That aren't quite here yet, but it all comes back to branding at the front end the core values and the stuff you want to actually see everywhere. But it's not quite ready to take yet.

Speaker 1: 12:02

No, I think that a lot of ways you could think of it. I mean, for the listener, when you have to ask for a manager, that's just basically the elevation of right. You're escalating an issue right, and so tier one questions, the frequently asked questions, the you know in, even like the technical questions, like that. I think AI is really close to being able to do that on its own. It's that escalation of right.

Speaker 1: 12:28

So there's true problem solving interpersonal techniques that have to be there that AI can't quite get to yet, right, we're seeing some of that in, like the AGI, and then some of the robotics that I've been seeing, where it's like, hey, are you a robot? Yes, I'm a robot. Can you hurt people? You know it's, and it can talk about its programming in the third person, right, and it understands that it is a robot right, because it's been taught that. Right. But to sit there and go well, do I look sad? Why am I sad from the conversation we had? I don't think that's I think the next level to where we can then take those like supervisor level questions out of there and then program in, like you said, these are the answers for these situations. Anything other than that, then, yeah, you get pointed in the right direction. I love that, oh yeah.

Speaker 2: 13:20

Well, and I won't say it's all a hundred percent good, because if you start thinking cause, I talk about content creation and really where I saw companies like Google going, where it's kind of like, okay, well, if Google has everybody's data, including my data, every email I've sent for the last 10 years, all of my business documents on Drive, all of my browser history, who better to create content than Google? Now you take that information, like, okay, it knows everything about me, all of my preferences, like things, I look like things, I look at things, I click on things that get my attention, and then you combine it with advertising. Now what you could do is essentially say, hey, I'm going to take you down an organic content path that looks 100% natural and then lead you exactly where I want you to go, for a commercial solution to the original query that you had. And so I use the example of say you know all my foot hurts, like why is my foot hurt? Okay, type in my foot hurt, oh, well, here's the five potential causes of your foot hurting. Is that this is, this is, oh, it's I heal. My heel hurts. Okay, here's a heel. Okay, well, here's the bones of your heel and here's the situations they could have based on your age. Okay, that's interesting. Oh well, you know this. Well, you know this shoe over here. The shoe actually could solve that problem and it's custom made to your heel and blah, blah, blah and you're like, oh, I didn't really want to buy a shoe, but now I know that you know all this information you told me is that it's the solution.

Speaker 2: 14:44

And so there's, you know, and same thing for customer care, where you could turn a situation where it's like, okay, this person's now angry. Okay, activate the angry customer protocol. Okay, now it's going to go here and you're going to do a rebate really quick, and then you're going to refund the last 30 days and then, statistically, based on the last thousand calls, we know that if we refund that money, you're probably going to stick around for another six months, and so I'm going to try to hook you up with a six month plan. And then all of this stuff and, honestly, we don't even have to proceduralize it because you know the numbers will show the machine what to do and then it'll just average everything out and take people down paths that a person could do this stuff, but it would just take so much effort that we just never would.

Speaker 2: 15:26

So it's a good and a potentially manipulative thing that could happen, and that's why one of my other big initiatives is pushing ethics where it's kind of like hey, you know we're in this crappy situation because of things like planned obsolescence, you know that's why our machines are breaking. It's also a manipulation of saying like, hey, we're all worried about the environment, we're all worried about global warming, so you know we're going to use this low rated electric motor. That's actually a piece of crap that is just cheaper for us to do. But let's just, let's just twist it. We'll just say that you know that wattage is actually a decrease of your energy costs and even though it doesn't dry your clothes as well, we're saving the world and we just saved 50% cost on that motor.

Speaker 1: 16:19

And so everybody wins, except it's actually the consumer getting screwed and the business actually increasing profitability. They're going to pay the $2,000 down the road and they look at the amortization and it's not there.

Speaker 2: 16:23

Yeah, they're saving costs and they're like well, we couldn't make it replaceable because we had to use this certain motor key and blah, blah, blah. And that's where marketing comes in, because we could twist anything we want into a positive or some reason to buy something. And so unless you install these ethics into everything we're creating, then it could get even worse.

Speaker 1: 16:49

Right, I think you bring up a good point in the sales process, right, because there is a percentage of salespeople who can do all the things you just said, right, they can take an angry client, make them into a buying client, right. And there's NLP. That goes into there, right. Neurolinguistics programming and all these other things that, like said, you mean you can use them for good and you can use them for bad or not so good, even like there's a gray area like. You can sit there, go that that's not ethical when this is ethical. But then there's all the hmm well, it depends on how you look at it. Ethical, right, and that's where I think a lot of marketers do skirt that line. Right, because they you know, you hear it in in search marketing, you know we're all white hat, we don't do black hat, and then other people are like, well, we're kind of gray hat, you got tax accounts to do that.

Speaker 2: 17:36

And I'm, like you know, black and white Well. So I came up with a new term. I call it traditional human branding, and it's basically saying hey, you know, we've kind of twisted things into well, I need to take care of my. Now you're a solution provider to people who have a problem. Those people are your customer. So literally every decision you make should be customer-centric, because, one, you want to provide the solution and, two, you know that by providing the solution you can maintain a customer relationship, and over the long term, that's the most profitable thing you can do, and so everybody wins. So now you don't have this argument over like well, we have to charge everybody double, because otherwise we have to fire Sally. So sorry customer.

Speaker 1: 18:26

Or we have to show this certain benchmark on our stock, our earnings report, so that our stock can continue to go up.

Speaker 2: 18:34

Yeah, you got to take care of the investors.

Speaker 1: 18:36

Yeah, that is.

Speaker 1: 18:38

You know, I use I borrowed a phrase from the financial advisory industry which is a fiduciary. And so, as a fractional marketer, I'm a fiduciary, a marketing fiduciary, if you will, to my clients and when they understand when, when you can do that for any service, right, you can be the CTO fiduciary or your technology fiduciary. You're not trying to sell more service, you're not trying to get the person to buy more gear, you're having them buy the gear that will best suit them for the budget they have and their objectives that they brought forth, right. And I think that if we all kind of melded what you were saying, like it's customer first, it's customer centric, right, we used to have in my creative agency kind of an egg shape, so it was like a shell, a thick shell, egg white and a yolk, right, and then the yolk was the client and the egg white was the employees and the company was the shell. Ah, okay, so we were an employee-centric company with client-centric employees, because without the employees there was there and it was all in that leg right there.

Speaker 2: 19:52

That birth whatever analogy.

Speaker 1: 19:55

you want to go from there, from it, but but that I think that if we can get back to the fundamentals which everything you're talking about is fundamentals, yeah, so it's fundamentals of branding. They haven't changed in centuries. People want to make it so complicated. It's like well, now that we have ai, what do we do with? With branding, you do the same thing, but like you were saying you just do it faster, Yep and more consistently Right, exactly, I totally get that.

Speaker 1: 20:24

So how does a small business get started with integrating AI in their branding strategy?

Speaker 2: 20:33

So I started, I actually had to make up an entire concept. I call it the AI branding blueprint and essentially what it does is allows you to set up what I call the brand pillars, and these are not new terms. You have your brand name, you have your brand slogan, you have your brand voice, you have your customer avatar, you have your core brand values and all of these things, essentially, are the drivers behind every other policy that you make, are the drivers behind every other policy that you make. Every visual, interactive, experiential, written and community guide is actually driven from this one set of pillars. That way, instead of having to make a decision every single time, like, okay, we're going to go run an event, what should the salespeople should be doing? Should they be doing a demo? Should it be a challenge? Should it be some kind of awesome thing happening in the background? Like, what do we do? It's like, stop thinking about it. You go back to your, your mission, you go back to your pillar, you go back to your customer avatar and you say, well, what would this person want and what are we supposed to represent? And it's like, okay, well, we're always pushing people to be better, so we're going to have a challenge. We should have a challenge because that represents the brand and the thing we're trying to achieve the best. And so, instead of doing this kind of like what most companies do, which is like time for a brainstorming session, let's get the whole marketing team in here and let's talk about it and do a little thing on the whiteboard.

Speaker 2: 21:53

And everybody has equal opinions. It's like no stop all that. We shouldn't be talking about stuff that we have already decided and, honestly, most people aren't even qualified for. Like, I don't give a crap, even that the CEO might really like the color purple. You know, if it's not on brand, then that doesn't matter. You have to go with the brand, otherwise you're essentially ruining the impressions that could have been reinforcing the thing you're trying to build. Instead, it's just like wow, bob likes that, so we're going to do it, bob's in accounting. Why are we having this discussion?

Speaker 2: 22:32

In marketing, the worst thing you can do is end up with the IT guy who has lots of opinions about how to build crap and you're like this guy doesn't even know how people work most of the time. Why is he even in this meeting? So, anyways, I have some angst against meetings because I've been to quite a few of them and I'm like this is stupid, we shouldn't be talking. You don't bring me into the accounting meeting to see where we should allocate expenses. Why are you here telling me how I should be marketing to the customer that you don't give a crap about, because it's my job to do that?

Speaker 2: 23:09

So it's a few things, but I think the biggest opportunity for AI is just like hey, we don't have to talk about this anymore. It's not just our opinions that we have. We essentially have this machine that averages the last 10 to 20 years of human opinions. It's going to be the most unbiased thing, even though it still could be biased. It's still going to be way less biased than the most biased thing in the planet, which is me and you and every other individual.

Speaker 1: 23:37

You heard, mark. It is time to lean in to AI for your branding and make it consistent, make it predictable, so that it can do what it's supposed to do for you, which is bring your clients closer to you. So I want you to check out his AI branding bootcamp at AIbrandingacademy. That's AIbrandingac dot Academy. Go do it and stay buzzworthy.