How Digital Has Changed Branding 

This edited extract is from Digital Branding by Daniel Rowles ©2025 and is reproduced and adapted with permission from Kogan Page Ltd.

If you could only get a feel for someone’s personality by them telling you things about themselves, we may end up with a very shallow understanding of them.

We may also have difficulty believing in the personality that has been constructed – and we may start to question the motivations behind what they are telling us about themselves.

That is exactly the situation of commercial branding that uses broadcast channels such as TV.

A personality is sculpted, and then we are told what the personality is. We don’t get to discuss, engage with, and really understand the true personality.

Digital media now means, however, that the conversation is no longer one way. I can challenge, ask questions, and develop a truer picture of the brand. I can see through a sculpted brand and start to see it for what it truly is.

This can be a scary thing for many traditional brands. It can also be a huge opportunity.

AI And Branding

Artificial intelligence (AI) has had a profound impact on the world around us in very recent months and years.

Things that were science fiction, or at least extremely difficult to do unless you had sufficient expertise and resources, are now made possible with tools available to everyone.

These AI-based tools and their application can have a huge impact on our digital branding.

This can be as simple as giving us the opportunity to create a better user experience by using machine learning to help us optimize a website experience (for example, by giving somebody content that is customized for them specifically) or by generating an image that follows our brand guidelines using generative AI.

However, beyond these AI tools that help us become more efficient and more effective, we also find ourselves faced with new risks and ethical challenges.

Let’s take a real-world example. Using a low-cost tool like Eleven Labs, I can create a completely convincing deepfake of my own voice. I can then type in any text I want and get the deepfake voice to read that text.

The voice sounds exactly like me, and I can even generate the same speech multiple times, and each time it will sound slightly different and have ever so slightly different intonation, just as I would if I read the same thing multiple times.

To test the quality of this voice, I replaced a segment of me speaking on the Digital Marketing Podcast, which has over 150,000 listeners. Nobody noticed.

So if I can deepfake myself, do I need to even bother recording podcasts anymore? Do I need to inform my listeners?

Legally, I don’t have to, but I would suggest ethically I should. If I trust you, and I suddenly find that after listening to your voice for some time, that it wasn’t really you, it will damage my trust.

AI gives our brands a huge amount of tools to improve what we do, but we also need to be careful how and when we use these tools, so we don’t damage the trust in our brands.

Any use of AI needs to be done mindfully, considering the impact it may have.

Global Soapbox

If a brand is essentially the personality of something, digital media gives us the ability and opportunity to understand the true personality of something.

We can then use that understanding to help guide us in our decision-making processes.

This is a great opportunity from a customer point of view.

For example, it means that instead of being put on hold for an hour when phoning a call centre and having little choice but to tolerate it, I can now go straight to one of many social media channels and make my frustrations very clear and very visible.

I now have a global soapbox with access to all of the other potential customers out there, and I can impact a global organization’s brand in a way that was not possible before (or, at least, was incredibly difficult).

That highly visible complaint then becomes part of other people’s brand perception (fairly or not), and suddenly, the years of building a brand can be tumbled very quickly.

This is a very much changed environment for businesses to operate in – if they ignore this change, then it can lead to problems.

This ability to engage with and research into a brand can also be looked at from an even simpler point of view.

Perhaps I am researching buying a car or a B2B service. I can now do a lot of research and inform my decision before I speak to the car dealership or service vendor.

When I do make this final step, I am far more informed and have developed a fairly in-depth perception of the brand before I engage directly with them.

In fact, from the information I gleaned online, I may have opted out from even considering certain brands.

That information may have been on a third-party website in the form of a review or comment from someone I have never met, but I may trust it over the voice of the brand itself.

Social Media Fail

This fast-changing environment and the slow pace of businesses to adapt to it is leading the social media disaster stories that we see on a daily basis online.

Most social media disasters demonstrate a lack of knowledge of how to practically use a particular social media channel or show a belief that the brand can manipulate the channel in some way and get away from this need for authenticity and transparency.

The other common theme is that of failing to understand the changed role of the brand in this two-way conversation.

Traditional Brand Metrics

Traditionally, a brand has been measured by asking questions and trying to judge what someone thinks of a brand, and trying to work out what this means in regard to potential sales.

There is a wide range of different ways of looking at this, but generally, we would take some sort of sample survey of our audience and see what their attitudes were before and after exposure to some form of marketing.

This survey would ask a range of questions, and there are lots of different approaches, but fundamentally, we would look to answer the following questions:

Essentially, we are assuming that if we can get more people to answer positively to each of these questions, we are likely to get more sales.

This can still be an extremely valid process, but only when effectively integrated into an overall approach.

Sum Of All Experiences

Essentially, digital branding is the personality of our organization, service, or product created by the sum of all experiences that an individual has with that brand.

This still includes things such as visual identity, but now also includes much more important and influential touchpoints such as social media interactions and online reviews.

Your logo may make you recognizable, but it is your overall brand that decides what I remember you for.

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