The Human Side of AI Branding

John Jantsch ( 00: 01.08 )

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast’s latest episode is here. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Mark Kingsley. He is a well-known brand strategist, consultant, and author with extensive experience guiding global businesses through digital transformation. His latest book we’re going to talk about today, Brands in the Age of AI. It’s an essential guide for leaders, marketers and entrepreneurs seeking to thrive in a landscape where AI is rapidly changing consumer expectations, brand trust and the

very much of that important brand differentiation factor. So Mark, welcome to the show.

Mark Kingsley ( 00: 37.992 )

Pleasure to be here. Thank you.

John Jantsch ( 00: 40.076 )

Let’s just let’s just hit it right off the bat. How, if you will, is AI altering the fundamental rules of branding?

Mark Kingsley ( 00: 47.55 )

Does it change the rules or does it put a more pressure on people’s behavior? It puts more pressure on what I would consider to be better behavior, which I am aware of. Because AI does multiply. It acts as a multiplier for the ability to get more attention and get more profit from brands and transactions to get more attention, etc.

But I see it also as an opportunity to, in the book I speak about like connecting with the I thou connection, me I and you thou and seeing each other with open eyes, seeing the other person as a person, not as a target, as a member of an audience or a potential transaction. And AI does.

provide these opportunities. It just comes down to like what is the choice that people are going to

John Jantsch ( 01: 50.602 )

We’ll say a little more about that because I mean, you’re talking about it as a force to actually humanize some marketing and there certainly are people that are saying just suggesting just the opposite. It’s turning marketing into a more robotic exercise.

Mark Kingsley ( 01: 56. 211 )

Yes.

Mark Kingsley ( 02: 00.766 )

Mm-hmm.

Mark Kingsley ( 02: 05. 756 )

Yeah, well, it’s very easy. In the beginning of the book, I talk about the way in which I’m approaching it. And I approach it differently than the majority of those who discuss AI. Like if you go to Linked In, there were volumes and volumes of gibberish every day about the best prompts and how this company is going to market cap, blah, blah, you know, all that stuff. That’s what I refer to as calculative thinking. And that’s basically figuring out how am I going to get from here to there. It’s logistics, right?

John Jantsch ( 02: 22.498 )

Right, right.

Mark Kingsley ( 02: 35.742 )

And I’m proposing that we also enter it’s also an opportunity for us to enter into what I call a more contemplative or meditative thinking which is I am I am going to consider the way that AI is going to impact my relationship and our relationship to each other to time to history to Society to knowledge all of that and so that this is it’s more of like an inflection point It’s very easy. We are rewarded

for effective calculative thinking. We are rewarded with year-end bonuses. You’ll get paid for your returns by naming any industry or domain. But that only goes so far. mean, aren’t we on this planet? Don’t we provide goods and services in a way that promotes human flourishing? One would hope.

John Jantsch ( 03: 31. 918 )

Sorry to chuckle there, but I had forgotten all about that.

Mark Kingsley ( 03: 36.486 )

That is the issue. It’s easy to forget, right? because we become engrossed in our work. We get caught up in our engagement. We get caught up in results. We can track those, too. How does one track an emotional… mean, brands in theory, everyone that works in branding talks about brands making an emotional connection to people. That makes that difficult to follow. That’s hard to rationalize on a spreadsheet at the end of the day. And that’s hard. So it’s…

I know that I am shouting in the wind. I am aware of that, am I? But, you know, at least someone is doing that. It’s I’m like the, you know, the classic myth of the little boy in the dyke and trying to keep his finger in the dyke trying to keep the sea at bay.

John Jantsch ( 04: 25. 304 )

Well, it’s interesting because, you know, I’ve been doing this for 30 some years. And I mean, I’ve seen a lot of new technologies develop, and you can tell you how huge, you can see a huge change in how promising this technology is. And then inevitably you see the swing back to like, here’s how it failed us. So one of the most important words, I think you talked about emotional connection, but certainly trust is a huge part of that. What part does AI therefore play?

Mark Kingsley ( 04: 51.133 )

You

John Jantsch ( 44 ): 54.19

enhancing trust as opposed to eroding it. You know, you hear people saying all the time now, one of the negatives about AI is I don’t know what to trust because am I seeing something that’s real or not? So I believe there will be a swing, both in favor of not trusting and the other way around. How do we return to humanizing the emotional connection?

Mark Kingsley ( 05: 15.729 )

Whether it’s AI or computers, humanity has a general relationship with technology in general. could be the… I was just gonna say that, exactly, right? So we all jump to brand-new technological advancements and improvements after seeing the advantages they’ll have for us, but technology is never either positive or negative. It’s kind of like a neutral thing. What technology does, and this is…

John Jantsch ( 05: 20.386 )

Yes. Or automobiles. Yeah.

Mark Kingsley ( 54 ) ( 44. 766 )

this is an idea that comes out of Heidegger, is that it reframes our relationship to things. For example, the technology of taking sawdust, mixing it with glue and coming up with medium density fiberboard, right? That creates Billy bookcases. And it’s amazing that we can kind of use this material that was once considered to be, know, detritus, we can now use it for an actual building material and make money with this, right? That accomplishes what is that

There are forests in Romania that have been decimated just to build Billy bookcases, just to make sawdust for the Billy bookcases. So that’s what I mean about the constant reframing that technology does in our society.

John Jantsch ( 06: 23.502 )

Yeah.

So one of the things that I hear a lot of people talking about is sometimes marketers are just responding to what the algorithms give them, right? If you want to appear in AI overviews, you must perform X, Y, and Z. And so you see a lot of people just chasing the algorithms that really truthfully are making decisions, in some cases, for our customers. So how do you kind of fight that no, let’s be human to no, let’s chase algorithms?

Mark Kingsley ( 06: 56. 889 )

If that’s all you’re going to do as a marketing person is chase algorithms, you are replaceable. You can’t be replaced by AI. And so it’s it’s it’s short sightedness to even to even think that way. I mean, in the book I describe and it’s a it’s a constant example that people use if you look at lawyers. Right. And the education and training of a lawyer is you become you go through law school and then you become a junior partner and you sit there all night long going through paper and going through cases, reading cases.

and looking for solutions to a problem or to gain some insight. That is you learning how to be a lawyer, right? But we can now offshore that work to AI and have AI go through and do this analysis. However, what we’re doing is basically robbing the future. We are robbing new generations of lawyers. So how should we now train lawyers? it’s even in marketing, there’s

There has to be some sort of constant readjustment, resetting about how does one learn how to be a marketer, how does one act as a marketer, how does one kind of identify good marketing techniques.

John Jantsch ( 07: 57.998 )

Thank

John Jantsch ( 08: 07.598 )

Yes. A phrase just popped into my head. know, know, the first kill all the lawyers, which was part of a much larger phrase, but, but I think it’s now first kill all the paralegals. that.

Mark Kingsley ( 08: 16.477 )

Yeah.

Mark Kingsley ( 08: 23.325 )

No, I would you know, I I you know, I’m much more cynical than you are I say first let’s kill all the mid-level marketing managers

John Jantsch ( 08: 30.606 )

Right. So if chasing algorithm, and I’ve totally agree with that. mean, the people who are essentially almost being replaced themselves are finding efficiencies and things like that with AI. Right. So in branding, I think we’ve said this way before AI way before, frankly, anything digital came along storytelling is the one of the key, you know, the key assets. So the situation

Mark Kingsley ( 08: 47.057 )

Right, right.

John Jantsch ( 09: 00.472 )

Do you have some examples? know you do in the book, plenty of examples, but give us an example of a brand that you think gets storytelling that’s AI driven.

Mark Kingsley ( 12: 665 )

Well, first off, have to identify what storytelling is. And so I would say that first, I believe I might have some reservations about how you’re defining storytelling. Because a lot of storytelling is basically, at least within the brand world, like the whole idea of the customer journey. A lot of that isn’t necessarily storytelling, but it’s events. It’s a repetition, and it’s a record of events that occur first in this, then in that, then in that, then in that, then in that, then in that, then in that.

John Jantsch ( 09: 24.494 )

Okay.

Mark Kingsley ( 09: 41. 487 )

I look at storytelling as some sort of, requires some sort of like, aha moment. So I’m like, a moment of transportation, transcendence, transformation. The potential is then apparent to me. And so my favorite example, and this all comes down to like, how do I?

create the impression that that I-thou relationship exists, is that possible? So an example that I give when I give talks is I talk about one of my favorite bars in Chelsea called Chiquito. And I used to walk in and the person behind the bar, she would look at me and she’d go, you know, she opened her hands about, you know, like a bottle length and I’d nod. And then, as soon as I sat down, the Barone Reserva was waiting, right? She knew my wine and that’s how I ordered it, right? She was aware of me.

I knew her, we had a little secret link. We didn’t sit down, I didn’t meet her after work and go, hey, when I walk in, you need to know. Simply put, we saw each other, and it just happens naturally. And so to take that kind of notion of like, you’re seeing, another example that I use in the book is talking about going to JFK in a long-term parking lot. So you can make reservations at JFK, but you kind of have to do long-term parking.

John Jantsch ( 10: 39.63 )

You

Mark Kingsley ( 10: 58.318 )

And there are a few parking lots where you can enter your license plate. That’s how you do your reservation like any other place. There was no one there when I arrived at this particular parking lot the first time. There was no booth. And I was like, I was ready to get really angry very quickly. I’m a New Yorker, am I right? I’m ready to get angry. However, as I get a little closer, the gate opens. It’s because there was a tiny little camera that saw me and my license plate and put it together and said, here’s Mark.

And that was that moment of transformation where I’m like, I instantly went from feeling ready to fight to welcome, to like, come on in. You are here, folks. We get it. You enter. And these kind of innovations are slowly happening in airports. We’re going to get to a point where I don’t need to do bag drop off because AI has been watching my gate.

Biometric information, or biometric information, is already available in the world. I mean, I go to other countries and it scans my face and it recognizes me. Even though I haven’t been there since the introduction of AI, my face is already there in that nation. So it’s already out. So I’m going to walk into an airport that will recognize me by my gate, by my face, and it’ll recognize my bag. And I’ll take care of everything. I just put the bag on the thing, off I go, and then it’ll track it for me. I am aware.

When I I check my bags, already get text messages from various airlines going, oh, the bags on the plane, the bags off the plane, the bags coming to you. So this is this is all part of that that push to like a sense of subjectivity, I guess, or a sense of like, I don’t need. And part of that is getting rid of all the bumps along the way so that I don’t have to worry about standing in this particular line. Oh, here’s the check in line. Oh my God, it’s 15 people long. I’m just going to walk from taxi to gate.

John Jantsch ( 12: 28.056 )

Yep.

John Jantsch ( 12: 40.416 )

Mm-hmm.

Mark Kingsley ( 12: 51.472 )

Very soon, right? And so that for me is That’s a transformation. That is some sort of transformation in the story

John Jantsch ( 13: 00. 878 )

Well, I think you used a really key word there because I think where people get tripped up with any kind of automations is when they’re used to make things life easier for the company as opposed to removing the friction for the customer.

Mark Kingsley ( 13: 14. 16 )

Yeah, exactly. this is part of the frustration, right? Because of the fact that many people often talk about innovations in boardrooms in the manner of calculus. How are we going to get more churn? More transactions are going to be made, more precisely. How do I do it with more efficiency, right? Yeah, that kind of thing. So I say that because of that. that’s why I say that. Sometimes I feel like I’m yelling in the wind.

John Jantsch ( 13: 31.544 )

I’ve less people.

John Jantsch ( 13: 42. 766 )

One of the key elements is a framework or a model you call the brand AI integration model. Do you want to unpack that one for us, then?

Mark Kingsley ( 13: 53.501 )

So it’s there’s there’s an idea and this comes from a friend of mine Ali madad who It has has like a strategy firm that he’s beginning these experiments with like ideas of like what he calls like a like a brand operating system and There is potentially a way to kind of automate the donkey work. Donkey work of strategy, isn’t it? Can I can I set up my criteria and my parameters?

John Jantsch ( 14: 10.242 )

Yeah.

Mark Kingsley ( 14: 21.636 )

and set off a system to do the automatic customer segmentation, to do the automatic logistics, the automatic ordering supply chain, all that stuff can potentially come together if we get to that point where we properly integrate databases. Integration of databases is currently a challenge. For example, Starbucks. Starbucks is currently battling closures all over the world. They’ve closed like 900, no, they’ve laid off 900 employees

and close like a couple hundred locations in the United States in the last couple of weeks. What’s happening is that more and more licensed Starbucks are popping up in hotels, Barnes and Noble books, and other places. So that’s not really Starbucks. They refer to themselves as Starbucks, but they don’t act like that. So what that means is that I have my app, and I can go order a

John Jantsch ( 15: 07.342 )

in the supermarkets.

John Jantsch ( 15: 13.966 )

Peace.

Mark Kingsley ( 15: 20. 744 )

coffee 10 minutes out and show up and then the coffee is waiting for me. I can’t do that anymore because the databases aren’t connected. Right. And so Starbucks has gone for the efficiency and the profit, but not necessarily the customer experience.

John Jantsch ( 15: 36.332 )

Yes. Yeah. You see, you see, I detest picking on airports, especially those that are in airports. mean, those are concessionaires and those that employee may have been working at Chick-fil-A, you know, two days ago and now they’re at Starbucks. I mean, so you won’t get the same. You also don’t get the same vibe as well as the database issue.

Mark Kingsley ( 15: 53.116 )

Absolutely. Yeah. and so on, and the notion of like a brand, sorry, a brand OS, an AI-based operating system. So those licensed Starbucks, if they need like stirrers or like coffee lids or something like that, they can’t call up another Starbucks a couple of miles down the road and go, hey, can you loan us some until like the shipment comes in? They have to go through the home company that owns the licensee that owns a license.

John Jantsch ( 16: 14. 252 ) )

Yeah.

John Jantsch ( 16: 21.218 )

Yes. Yeah.

Mark Kingsley ( 16: 22.201 )

Then it will take roughly a month for the content to arrive there. And it also comes down to training. I’m unable to train to another Starbucks, therefore. I have to train within my own little group. So it’s this kind of like segmentation and silo database issue, which I would, know, fingers crossed in the future, if I was king, know, like AI would help kind of integrate all that stuff. And that eliminates friction in essence.

John Jantsch ( 16: 47.17 )

Yes. And I think that’s going to be one of the, you know, the, the promise of this agentic AI. think that’s going to be a real stumbling block for that as well, because a lot of stuff has to talk to other stuff. and we are a long way from, of course. And frankly, some of the big players are actually going to resist that because they want to keep their proprietary approach or protocols to themselves.

Mark Kingsley ( 17: 11.429 )

Well, there’s also, and then on top of it, there’s like a purely a linguistic and epistemological issue there, right? Because if I am going to use agentic AI, anything that I type in is symbolized. Right, it’s called tokenization. So like words and sentences and like syllables will be put into a token, like given a numeric value, and then that numeric value is put into the AI. The AI then makes predictions.

John Jantsch ( 17: 27.554 )

Yeah.

Mark Kingsley ( 17: 39.152 )

What will happen if I receive this kind of input and produce some sort of predictive output? So it’s like a game of, it’s like a very fancy game of computer telephone. I might think of an elm when I think of trees. And when you hear me say the word tree, you’re thinking of a pine tree. And so this is, in semiotics, it’s called an open semiosis. It’s like the original idea never quite matches up.

John Jantsch ( 17: 49.4 )

Yeah.

Mark Kingsley ( 18: 06.692 )

And this is going to be part of that problem of agentic AI is how are we actually going to know with any degree of confidence that, right? And so this is part of the complexities that are before us.

John Jantsch ( 18: 23. 64 )

So one of the, I mean, there’s certainly plenty of people you talked about being out there, you know, trying to hold back the dam. Many people I run into say,” No, this is the opportunity to be more human.” I’ve certainly heard that. But how do you think leaders, you know, are we talking about different human skills, different human beings that need to be employed in that kind of capacity for us to make that change?

Mark Kingsley ( 18: 45. 711 )

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Different ways of teaching leadership, different ways of defining leadership, different ways of defining employment, different ways of defining goals, different ways of defining profit, and all of those things. This is part of the exciting thing, is like there’s great potential for a transformative change which can enhance human life. That’s my hope and dream.

John Jantsch ( 16: 878 )

So many of my listeners are small business owners. They are currently feeling overwhelmed, which is the best emotion they can express with all the AI that is theirs, in my opinion. What are some of the biggest risks and opportunities you think that AI presents for particularly small businesses?

Mark Kingsley ( 19: 35.899 )

Let’s start small business first, and then go over this together, shall we? One of the risks, small business, is that we should start small. So if I was a branding agency, like one of the larger branding agencies, and I sent an invoice for kind of strategic work, for work that had been done that had been delivered and approved by the client,

John Jantsch ( 1986 ): 48. 68

Okay.

Mark Kingsley ( 20: 05.114 )

The client has every right to go, wait a second, why are you charging me this much? Given that you used AI and that you didn’t have as many people, was that correct? So there’s going to be a certain kind of arbitrage that happens within organizations. Now, if I were a smaller, more mobile agency or client or whatever, that’s where the opportunity is, right? I think it may help you kind of level up to the behavioral capacity of a larger firm, right?

John Jantsch ( 20: 11.169 )

Yes, yes, yes.

John Jantsch ( 20: 31.758 )

No queries. Yeah.

Mark Kingsley ( 20: 34.939 )

I mean, and to be honest, the truth is that I have experience working for brands, design, brands, and other companies. So the truth of the matter is that most branding teams, regardless of the size of the company, are five people at the most, right? You have a client person, strategy, a couple of designers, a creative director, and a sort of executive director of the thing. That’s five people at the most. And that’s basically what I had when I was at Lander working on Citi. And we were the global brand ambassador team.

Working with the global brand team at Citi, we were the global brand team at Landor. We only had five people, so we occasionally added people. And so AI now gives smaller agencies and smaller players the capacity to level up to that. So that same amount of practice, as long as you also have an equal amount of insight and an equal amount of innovation.

John Jantsch ( 21: 29. 122 )

Yeah, and what I find in our agency, we are doing is instead of just saying here’s the same deliverable, we did it faster because we could, but we’re still going to charge you the same amount. To put it simply, we find that we can give them much more output and value for the same price for the same amount of people and the same amount of input.

And so I think that’s how people, or at least that’s how I believe people need to be looking at it is, is you can deliver more.

Mark Kingsley ( 21: 55.28 )

Yeah.

Mark Kingsley ( 21: 59. )

Yeah, I see, see, yeah, but John, I see the problem in that though, right? Because what you’re doing is reducing value. You’re eroding what you can potentially charge. And so there, there does need to be a certain kind of larger societal reckoning about value, right? You know, because of information technology, communication technology, you name it, because employee productivity has increased over the past 50 years, you know? Our productivity is through the roof.

but the waitress hasn’t changed, is that correct? And so there is going to be a problem.

John Jantsch ( 22: 36.238 )

I believe we have already solved all the issues we have today, Mark. So I appreciate you.

Mark Kingsley ( 22: 43. 634 )

Oh, well, John, you and me over a drink over like a weekend. We’ll just get to like maybe one percent of the problems being solved.

John Jantsch ( 22: 50. 582 )

That’s right. I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by, I suppose. Where would you have people invite people to learn more about your work, about the book, obviously connect with you.

Mark Kingsley ( 22: 59.515 )

My website, malcontent.com, M-A-L-C-O-N-T-E-N-T, is so basic that I have to create it. Yes, I do have that URL. One of my most proud possessions is this. And basically, I do business under the name malcontent because it really describes my approach and my feelings about established processes and established procedures, knowing that there’s always a better way out there. So therefore.

John Jantsch ( 23: 09.87 )

You

John Jantsch ( 23: 24.13 )

Yes, that’s correct. There are no best practices, right? There’s only better practices.

Mark Kingsley ( 23: 29. 371 )

And there’s it’s everything situational everything is totally situational

John Jantsch ( 23: 33. 559 )

Yeah, that’s Well, again, I appreciate you stopping by. Hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Mark Kingsley ( 23: 39. 014 )

Great, thank you.