Be honest... those brand docs your team has scattered across Google Drive (the personas, the customer journeys, maybe a tone of voice page) - is anyone actually using them?
Unilever asked a different version of that question: what if the AI couldn't skip them?
They call it Brand DNAi. (I'm jealous of the name.)
It's a governance layer. A structured data pool that holds their positioning, messaging, tone of voice, visual identity, etc. and every piece of AI-generated content has to pass through it before anything ships.
The results:
- Content production is 65% faster & 55% cheaper
- For brands like TRESemmé and Dove, click-through rates doubled
- AI-generated assets showed 23% higher effectiveness than traditional creative
But here's why this is working...The gains didn't come from a better AI model.
The gains came from how tightly the brand strategy was wired into the system. The AI literally couldn't produce anything generic because the strategy wouldn't let it.
Now, you and I are not Unilever...
We don't have an AI governance platform built by Brandtech Group. We don't have 3.7 billion daily users...
...but the insight scales down beautifully.
Most firms I work with already have some version of brand guidelines. A logo doc. A tone of voice page that last saw daylight in 2022. Maybe a brand strategy deck from that offsite 2 years ago that everyone agreed was great and then quietly never opened again.
Sound familiar?
The strategy somewhat exists. It's just not operational. Nobody references it when they write a proposal. Nobody feeds it into AI. And when a partner writes a LinkedIn post? Pure improv. (We've all seen the partner LinkedIn post. We know.)
What Unilever figured out - and what I think applies whether you're a $60 billion CPG brand or a 60-person manufacturing company - is that brand strategy works like infrastructure. Not like a deliverable.
The way you treat your CRM or your project management system. Always on. Always governing output. Not something someone reads once during onboarding, nods politely, and never opens again.
The Move
Take your brand strategy - or the closest thing you have to one (no judgment, we've all got that half-baked Google Doc) - and upload it as permanent context in whatever AI tool your team uses most.
Then prompt it to write something you'd normally draft yourself. A marketing campaign. A proposal outline. A sales deck.
Unilever calls their version a "Single Digital Truth" - one authoritative source that every AI tool draws from so nothing drifts off-brand.
Your firm needs the same thing. Not at their scale, but with their logic. 1 document your AI checks every time so it aligns to your brand.
If the output still sounds like it could come from any firm in your industry, the problem isn't the AI. it's that the doc doesn't contain enough of YOU - your positioning, your messaging, your POVs, your competitive angles, the actual language your clients use - to produce anything distinctive.
The stuff that makes your firm yours has to be written down before AI can use it.
Unilever just proved that making AI work in marketing has very little to do with AI. And everything to do with the strategy document nobody opens.
Brand strategy was never meant to live in a slide deck... It was meant to run things.
✌️,
Dani