Love this Zoe and its exactly aligned to a lot of what I've been thinking about. I was inspired by Arie De Geuss The Living Company and Wally Olin's The Corporate Personality- old books now but with AI it's now absolutely possible for companies to learn and brands to think.
I pitched a "procedurally-generated" view of brand to a major brand about two years ago, inclusive of a series of systems (now agents) that could help scan the horizon. They were excited, but the inertia proved too much. I feel so validated/less insane by your thinking!
Zoe,thank you for articulating what I’ve been sensing in a much more nebulous way for months.
This piece captures something I’ve struggled to put into words: the shift from treating AI as a production tool to treating it as a thinking partner. Not for efficiency. Not for speed. But for encoding judgment, holding tension, and building something that compounds over time.
I’d love to open another layer of this conversation, particularly around neurodivergence.
For many of us who think in systems, patterns, and associative webs rather than linear processes, traditional brand structures have often felt constraining. But this moment, where AI becomes something to think with rather than something to automate with, feels different.
Is the rise of AI finally creating space for neurodivergent modes of cognition to be recognised as strategic assets rather than friction points?
Are others experiencing this shift, where their natural way of thinking suddenly aligns with the cultural and technological moment?
PS: Yes, I drafted this comment with AI, as a French strategist, it helps me articulate my thinking more clearly in English.
Love this Zoe - fantastic insights. After 2 years of 'trying out' an idea (linked to democracy - and if anything needs a rebrand, that does) my colleague and I find ourselves coordinating an amazing and exciting initiative that's now in 9 countries ... and we're now thinking about our brand, and how we can create this to continue attracting and building great partnerships that will enable us to expand our reach. We don't have years of (or any, actually) branding guidelines or long strategy docs to draw from, but your post and provocations are inspiring and I'll be returning to your advice in the coming weeks & months ... so thank you!
Thank you for sharing your wisdom on this new age of branding. I’m in the middle of rebranding now and this is exactly the next level inspiration I needed. My next thought is the “how”- how to build the system with which artifacts, where do we build it (Claude seems right today?) and how to we make it accessible and scalable across the organization? If anyone here is interested in forming a small group to share learnings on our journey of how we build the system, I’d be interested. Or maybe that’s the secret sauce we keep to ourselves. Thanks again, Zoe. Your writing is my favorite Substack.
This concept of a living, breathing, brand isn’t necessarily new but I do love your callout about also holding the historical data and judgment of past CDs, CMOs, etc. You see newer AI tools in the coding space take this approach because they have a similar problem, where one super senior engineer is holding the historical knowledge of the company but can only be spread so thin. This alone I think could solve the extremely short tenure of CMOs we see now, especially.
This is a brilliant piece of writing. I have been following your work for a little while now. It so happens that it’s coincided with me doing a Masters program and pivoting into something that looks like brand strategy.
There was an intuitive sense however, that as I read some of the recommended literature, something was missing and slightly behind where I observed things are going.
When I finally started to take time to read your Substack, I realised that you were mirroring some aspects of my line of thinking.
Your naming something that I have experienced in my career before this MA. For one, the part about brands and companies treating things as if they are still static buildings. That they ever were is another discussion. But, driving the point home further is the part where you mention the invisible architecture and the glut in data from experience that comes when and embedded member of the brand leaves with that knowledge in tow.
I am really intrigued by the idea of a Brand constitution: using the Claude Constitution and game design as potential mirrors of what could be when it comes to the future of brand building.
I look forward to reading more of the Terra Incognita series. Before reading 'The Imagination Curriculum' I felt the kindred spirit of a Sci-fi/ Speculative Fiction reader in you approach to writing.
I'm glad to found you when I did. I shall be gradually making my way through your past writings. They will prove useful in further fleshing out my MA thesis.
My husband and I work on brand/strategy with Welsh SMEs (after 20 years running an agency, which we closed last year). They are often founder-led, marketing team of one. Brand is treated as a project squeezed in between everything else. They are big enough to feel brand drift, but small enough that they don’t have the infrastructure to manage it.
Reading this, the idea of encoding how a brand thinks really resonated, because that’s exactly what we try to do! Understand where a business genuinely wins, what it’s prepared to decline, and how that position shapes pricing, hiring and growth.
We often find, in SMEs, that the instinct is there. And in many ways, they are freer to actually apply it. Fewer politics and faster feedback loops. They are really close to their customers. The behaviour-reputation gap is inches, not miles.
What isn’t there is time, translation and usable structure. So we approach brand as behaviour. We try to extract the thinking that’s instinctive and embodied and turn it into simple decision filters the team can use on the daily.
I’d love to ask. If you were working without layers of brand infrastructure, what’s the minimum viable way to encode how a brand thinks?
Thank you, and I love this question because you're actually in a better position to do this than the big brands are.
The piece talks about encoding how a brand thinks into a generative system. For enterprise, that's a massive undertaking - decades of strategy decks, killed work, crisis responses, institutional memory scattered across hundreds of people. For a founder-led SME - the source material is sitting right there. It's often the founder.
Igor Schwarzmann wrote something brilliant recently called Strategy as Protocol that speaks directly to this. His argument: strategy fails not because organisations lack insight, but because strategy is the wrong shape. It can't be delegated, debugged, or evolved. It lives as narrative - a slide deck, a memo, a ritual - when it needs to live as explicit decision logic that people can actually operate from.
He uses Fela Kuti as the metaphor, which I love. Fela's band would rehearse the same groove for hours until the structure was so internalised that improvisation could happen within it, not despite it. That's what your Welsh SMEs need. Not more brand documentation. A groove tight enough that the team can improvise confidently when the founder isn't in the room. Freedom within a frame.
And the minimum viable tech stack for this is simpler than people think. You do the deep extraction work you're already describing - those winding conversations about what the business believes, what it would never do, how the founder reads a situation and makes a call. The logic underneath. Then you encode that into something like a custom GPT or a Claude project. Feed it the decisions, the reasoning, the tensions the brand holds to create a system that understands how this brand thinks.
Then the team can interrogate it. "A competitor just undercut us by 40% - what are our options?" "A journalist wants a comment on X - how do we show up?" And it comes back with answers that sound like the founder, because it's learned the grammar, not just the rules.
Igor's point about transparency is key here too - you can't delegate what you can't articulate. The act of building this forces founders to make explicit what's been instinctive. The extraction process is as valuable as the tool it produces.
And for SMEs where the behaviour-reputation gap is already inches - as you said - you're encoding what's genuinely there, not manufacturing something aspirational. That's a huge advantage over enterprise brands drowning in 500-page guidelines nobody reads.
Turn the founder's groove into something the whole band can play.
This is such a generous reply, thank you, Zoe. The groove metaphor is perfect. I’m off to read Igor Schwarzmann immediately!
The extraction process often seems very therapeutic for our clients. Founders realise how much of their decision-making has been instinctive. Pattern recognition they’ve never quite put into words. They’re usually more than happy to talk through the groove in great detail. Framing it as “giving the team the confidence to improvise when you’re not in the room” would be powerful (and, I suspect, mildly terrifying in equal measure for hands-on founders!) But that’s probably the point.
The idea of encoding grammar rather than rules is particularly interesting at this smaller scale. If the system/tech stack can respond in a way that sounds like the founder (not by copying tone, but by understanding judgment) that’s actually transformational. For founders who simply don’t have enough hours in the day, the ability to externalise their thinking without flattening it could be extraordinary.
We’ll definitely be exploring this in more depth - thank you so much.
Really loved this (a long time ago I had an assignment at P&G in ADD and always wish I'd stayed in Brand) anyway have shared publicly and privately with CMO friends - and getting the feedback "wow". I've been working on the organisational capability side of this - what does the human system need to be capable of for any of this to be possible? Very much agree with Catriona Henry's comments re Arie De Gues (and I'd add in Peter Senge)- it is absolutely possible for companies to become learning organisations and to develop the capacity to think and for brands to think. It's just much slower, less sexy work than Transformation! AI-rollout! Strategy!
This is the best articulation I've read of why brand guidelines are fundamentally unfit for purpose in the age of intelligence. The shift from "rules the brand checks itself against" to "intelligence the brand thinks with" is exactly right. And long overdue.
Where I might push your thinking one step further: the brands I find most interesting aren't just encoding how they think; they're also making that intelligence available to customers as a skill they can use. A brand that has a consistent identity in all situations is different from a brand that uses its intelligence to help customers reach their goals.
Your framing is compelling as an internal architecture problem: how does the brand maintain its own logic? But I think there is a bigger change going on beneath it: from brand as identity to brand as service infrastructure. The brand that thinks is great. The brand that makes its customers smarter, more capable, or better able to do something they really care about is the one that builds the moat. Coherence is the starting point, not the end point.
Home Depot's Magic Apron isn't interesting because it sounds like Home Depot. It's interesting because it turns a trip to the store for grout into customer confidence about how to remodel. The intelligence is there to help the customer, not to make the brand more consistent.
I wonder if Terra Incognita will go there. I think it might.
I'm actually working on a book that goes exactly where you're pointing: how brand identity guides AI behaviors before they meet customers, rather than just encoding what they've been doing.
I'd love to compare notes at some point if you're interested. I suspect we might be building different parts of the same argument.
I've been through a very similar line of thinking these past couple of months. I have tried to explain this to fellow co-workers but was met with eye rolls and sighs. Thank you for validating what I've been toiling with in my head for the last little while.
And that's why brand management is an art my friend! Building brand systems is the craft of integrating creativity, science and technology at the speed of culture.
The "a brand is a person" trope is the conventional way of talking about these issues. Most descriptions of what that means reduces the idea of "person" to a caricature. You've demonstrated what it means to take that trope much deeper to explore how we, as real persons, actually go through the lived-process of living our lives, making all those "that's me" and "that's not me" determinations that shape our realities.
Love this Zoe and its exactly aligned to a lot of what I've been thinking about. I was inspired by Arie De Geuss The Living Company and Wally Olin's The Corporate Personality- old books now but with AI it's now absolutely possible for companies to learn and brands to think.
I pitched a "procedurally-generated" view of brand to a major brand about two years ago, inclusive of a series of systems (now agents) that could help scan the horizon. They were excited, but the inertia proved too much. I feel so validated/less insane by your thinking!
Zoe,thank you for articulating what I’ve been sensing in a much more nebulous way for months.
This piece captures something I’ve struggled to put into words: the shift from treating AI as a production tool to treating it as a thinking partner. Not for efficiency. Not for speed. But for encoding judgment, holding tension, and building something that compounds over time.
I’d love to open another layer of this conversation, particularly around neurodivergence.
For many of us who think in systems, patterns, and associative webs rather than linear processes, traditional brand structures have often felt constraining. But this moment, where AI becomes something to think with rather than something to automate with, feels different.
Is the rise of AI finally creating space for neurodivergent modes of cognition to be recognised as strategic assets rather than friction points?
Are others experiencing this shift, where their natural way of thinking suddenly aligns with the cultural and technological moment?
PS: Yes, I drafted this comment with AI, as a French strategist, it helps me articulate my thinking more clearly in English.
Love this Zoe - fantastic insights. After 2 years of 'trying out' an idea (linked to democracy - and if anything needs a rebrand, that does) my colleague and I find ourselves coordinating an amazing and exciting initiative that's now in 9 countries ... and we're now thinking about our brand, and how we can create this to continue attracting and building great partnerships that will enable us to expand our reach. We don't have years of (or any, actually) branding guidelines or long strategy docs to draw from, but your post and provocations are inspiring and I'll be returning to your advice in the coming weeks & months ... so thank you!
Thank you for sharing your wisdom on this new age of branding. I’m in the middle of rebranding now and this is exactly the next level inspiration I needed. My next thought is the “how”- how to build the system with which artifacts, where do we build it (Claude seems right today?) and how to we make it accessible and scalable across the organization? If anyone here is interested in forming a small group to share learnings on our journey of how we build the system, I’d be interested. Or maybe that’s the secret sauce we keep to ourselves. Thanks again, Zoe. Your writing is my favorite Substack.
This concept of a living, breathing, brand isn’t necessarily new but I do love your callout about also holding the historical data and judgment of past CDs, CMOs, etc. You see newer AI tools in the coding space take this approach because they have a similar problem, where one super senior engineer is holding the historical knowledge of the company but can only be spread so thin. This alone I think could solve the extremely short tenure of CMOs we see now, especially.
Hi Zoe,
This is a brilliant piece of writing. I have been following your work for a little while now. It so happens that it’s coincided with me doing a Masters program and pivoting into something that looks like brand strategy.
There was an intuitive sense however, that as I read some of the recommended literature, something was missing and slightly behind where I observed things are going.
When I finally started to take time to read your Substack, I realised that you were mirroring some aspects of my line of thinking.
Your naming something that I have experienced in my career before this MA. For one, the part about brands and companies treating things as if they are still static buildings. That they ever were is another discussion. But, driving the point home further is the part where you mention the invisible architecture and the glut in data from experience that comes when and embedded member of the brand leaves with that knowledge in tow.
I am really intrigued by the idea of a Brand constitution: using the Claude Constitution and game design as potential mirrors of what could be when it comes to the future of brand building.
I look forward to reading more of the Terra Incognita series. Before reading 'The Imagination Curriculum' I felt the kindred spirit of a Sci-fi/ Speculative Fiction reader in you approach to writing.
I'm glad to found you when I did. I shall be gradually making my way through your past writings. They will prove useful in further fleshing out my MA thesis.
What a bloody brilliant piece - thank you, Zoe.
My husband and I work on brand/strategy with Welsh SMEs (after 20 years running an agency, which we closed last year). They are often founder-led, marketing team of one. Brand is treated as a project squeezed in between everything else. They are big enough to feel brand drift, but small enough that they don’t have the infrastructure to manage it.
Reading this, the idea of encoding how a brand thinks really resonated, because that’s exactly what we try to do! Understand where a business genuinely wins, what it’s prepared to decline, and how that position shapes pricing, hiring and growth.
We often find, in SMEs, that the instinct is there. And in many ways, they are freer to actually apply it. Fewer politics and faster feedback loops. They are really close to their customers. The behaviour-reputation gap is inches, not miles.
What isn’t there is time, translation and usable structure. So we approach brand as behaviour. We try to extract the thinking that’s instinctive and embodied and turn it into simple decision filters the team can use on the daily.
I’d love to ask. If you were working without layers of brand infrastructure, what’s the minimum viable way to encode how a brand thinks?
Thank you, and I love this question because you're actually in a better position to do this than the big brands are.
The piece talks about encoding how a brand thinks into a generative system. For enterprise, that's a massive undertaking - decades of strategy decks, killed work, crisis responses, institutional memory scattered across hundreds of people. For a founder-led SME - the source material is sitting right there. It's often the founder.
Igor Schwarzmann wrote something brilliant recently called Strategy as Protocol that speaks directly to this. His argument: strategy fails not because organisations lack insight, but because strategy is the wrong shape. It can't be delegated, debugged, or evolved. It lives as narrative - a slide deck, a memo, a ritual - when it needs to live as explicit decision logic that people can actually operate from.
He uses Fela Kuti as the metaphor, which I love. Fela's band would rehearse the same groove for hours until the structure was so internalised that improvisation could happen within it, not despite it. That's what your Welsh SMEs need. Not more brand documentation. A groove tight enough that the team can improvise confidently when the founder isn't in the room. Freedom within a frame.
And the minimum viable tech stack for this is simpler than people think. You do the deep extraction work you're already describing - those winding conversations about what the business believes, what it would never do, how the founder reads a situation and makes a call. The logic underneath. Then you encode that into something like a custom GPT or a Claude project. Feed it the decisions, the reasoning, the tensions the brand holds to create a system that understands how this brand thinks.
Then the team can interrogate it. "A competitor just undercut us by 40% - what are our options?" "A journalist wants a comment on X - how do we show up?" And it comes back with answers that sound like the founder, because it's learned the grammar, not just the rules.
Igor's point about transparency is key here too - you can't delegate what you can't articulate. The act of building this forces founders to make explicit what's been instinctive. The extraction process is as valuable as the tool it produces.
And for SMEs where the behaviour-reputation gap is already inches - as you said - you're encoding what's genuinely there, not manufacturing something aspirational. That's a huge advantage over enterprise brands drowning in 500-page guidelines nobody reads.
Turn the founder's groove into something the whole band can play.
This is such a generous reply, thank you, Zoe. The groove metaphor is perfect. I’m off to read Igor Schwarzmann immediately!
The extraction process often seems very therapeutic for our clients. Founders realise how much of their decision-making has been instinctive. Pattern recognition they’ve never quite put into words. They’re usually more than happy to talk through the groove in great detail. Framing it as “giving the team the confidence to improvise when you’re not in the room” would be powerful (and, I suspect, mildly terrifying in equal measure for hands-on founders!) But that’s probably the point.
The idea of encoding grammar rather than rules is particularly interesting at this smaller scale. If the system/tech stack can respond in a way that sounds like the founder (not by copying tone, but by understanding judgment) that’s actually transformational. For founders who simply don’t have enough hours in the day, the ability to externalise their thinking without flattening it could be extraordinary.
We’ll definitely be exploring this in more depth - thank you so much.
Really loved this (a long time ago I had an assignment at P&G in ADD and always wish I'd stayed in Brand) anyway have shared publicly and privately with CMO friends - and getting the feedback "wow". I've been working on the organisational capability side of this - what does the human system need to be capable of for any of this to be possible? Very much agree with Catriona Henry's comments re Arie De Gues (and I'd add in Peter Senge)- it is absolutely possible for companies to become learning organisations and to develop the capacity to think and for brands to think. It's just much slower, less sexy work than Transformation! AI-rollout! Strategy!
You're getting very good at this Zoe
This is the best articulation I've read of why brand guidelines are fundamentally unfit for purpose in the age of intelligence. The shift from "rules the brand checks itself against" to "intelligence the brand thinks with" is exactly right. And long overdue.
Where I might push your thinking one step further: the brands I find most interesting aren't just encoding how they think; they're also making that intelligence available to customers as a skill they can use. A brand that has a consistent identity in all situations is different from a brand that uses its intelligence to help customers reach their goals.
Your framing is compelling as an internal architecture problem: how does the brand maintain its own logic? But I think there is a bigger change going on beneath it: from brand as identity to brand as service infrastructure. The brand that thinks is great. The brand that makes its customers smarter, more capable, or better able to do something they really care about is the one that builds the moat. Coherence is the starting point, not the end point.
Home Depot's Magic Apron isn't interesting because it sounds like Home Depot. It's interesting because it turns a trip to the store for grout into customer confidence about how to remodel. The intelligence is there to help the customer, not to make the brand more consistent.
I wonder if Terra Incognita will go there. I think it might.
Yes! That’s absolutely where it needs to go next. And I love the build of brand intelligence to make the customer smarter/more confident.
Zoe, I'm pleased that that landed.
I'm actually working on a book that goes exactly where you're pointing: how brand identity guides AI behaviors before they meet customers, rather than just encoding what they've been doing.
I'd love to compare notes at some point if you're interested. I suspect we might be building different parts of the same argument.
Yes please. Drop me a line - zoe@bodacious.be
This is genuinely an exciting future to foresee
I've been through a very similar line of thinking these past couple of months. I have tried to explain this to fellow co-workers but was met with eye rolls and sighs. Thank you for validating what I've been toiling with in my head for the last little while.
And that's why brand management is an art my friend! Building brand systems is the craft of integrating creativity, science and technology at the speed of culture.
The "a brand is a person" trope is the conventional way of talking about these issues. Most descriptions of what that means reduces the idea of "person" to a caricature. You've demonstrated what it means to take that trope much deeper to explore how we, as real persons, actually go through the lived-process of living our lives, making all those "that's me" and "that's not me" determinations that shape our realities.