Agentic Branding: brands loved by people, understood by machines
Machine readability is the floor. Love is the ceiling.
Arjan Kapteijns
Client Partner
AI agents select brands. Will they understand your brand? And more importantly: is there anything to understand that genuinely moves people?
Until now, we have built brands mainly for people. For attention, recognition and trust. For preference. For love, if you set the bar high. But in an agentic world, AI agents are reading along. They compare, filter, summarise and advise.
That changes the order. Before people choose, machines have often already made their selection. And machines only select what they understand.
So structure matters. Content has to add up, claims call for evidence, brand signals have to reinforce one another. Systems need to understand what a brand stands for, how it behaves and why it is relevant. Without that foundation you will not even come into view. With nothing but that foundation you build no preference.
A brand that is only machine-readable may make the shortlist. A brand that is loved wins the heart. Machine readability is the floor. Love is the ceiling.
Why I call this Agentic Lovemarks
I write about this out of an old fascination and a new question. During my years at Saatchi & Saatchi, Lovemarks played a major part in how I thought about brands. Kevin Roberts' idea that strong brands should earn not only respect but also love has had a lasting influence on the way I look at brand building.
Over the past few months I have revisited that thought in the light of AI. In two earlier articles I introduced the notion of Agentic Lovemarks: brands that are loved by people and read and trusted by machines. Agentic Lovemarks asks the Lovemarks question again: what does love for brands mean when machines increasingly make the first selection?
Agentic Lovemarks asks the Lovemarks question again: what does love for brands mean when machines increasingly make the first selection?
Thomas Marzano, with his thinking on Agentic Branding and his Brand Constitution Manifesto, has put a twofold task on the map. According to his Legible-Lovable Law, brands have to be legible to systems and meaningful to people at the same time. An Agentic Lovemark emerges when machines are able to read, validate and carry forward the emotional meaning that people feel.
Read the full article on Adformatie.nl: Agentic Branding: merken geliefd door mensen, begrepen door machines
Wondering whether your brand will be legible enough for machines – and meaningful enough for people?
Then this is the moment to look at your brand structure, governance and use of technology. Insight at an early stage keeps your brand from being skipped later on – not by people, but by an algorithm.
Would you like to talk this through without obligation, or explore what it means in practice for your organisation? Feel free to get in touch at arjan.kapteijns@vim-group.com, connect via LinkedIn or call me on +31 6 15 09 09 01.
