From Brushes and Chisels to Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

The Second Renaissance and the Future of Branding

Brands in the 21st century need to rethink themselves and move away from the branding design trinity of “logo, typography, and color” and the classical “command and control” approach. The world – in particular, the business world – has become too complex and too fast-paced for a brand to rely simply on guidelines and manuals to thrive. It is time for brand owners to leverage the changes happening right now and transform their brands into new forms of visual expression, making them much closer to art movements than to an expression of company ethos. When it comes to the look-and-feelequation of a brand, it’s time to put much more emphasis on the feel and turn the look into a dependent variable. This is where technology will play a key role.

As Ian Goldin and Chris Kutarna have pointed out in their book Age of Discovery, the world is entering into a second Renaissance – a period, like the first Renaissance, when the conditions are optimal for creating something new and amazing.

But instead of the brushes of Botticelli and the chisels of Michelangelo, we now have technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning, among many others. Just as the new masters need to learn how to use these new tools to produce new masterpieces, brand owners must embrace these important tools in the quest to turn a brand into a new form of visual expression, a new kind of art movement.

In this new world, the key task of the brand owner is to define the core aesthetics – the feel that he or she wants to transmit. It is not anymore about (only) creating strong (de)signs and making simple consistent execution possible; rather, it is about subtleties, finesse, and variation. In the constant tradeoff between complex, sophisticated design and ease of execution, complexity and sophistication are the way forward.

This major, somewhat Copernican, shift is made possible by the new brushes and chisels of this second Renaissance. Artificial intelligence and machine learning provide brand owners with the scale and reach they never had, allowing them to focus on the feel and disseminate it within and outside the company, while the rest of the organization produces the look, leveraging creativity within the frame posed by the brand owners.

What is important to note here is that the new tools are an extension and not a replacement of the brand owner. They allow augmented branding as they open new possibilities for the creation of new visual elements. A good example of what augmented branding can look like is the process by which we are using AI and machine learning to define the new photo language for The Boston Consulting Group (BCG).

Photography has always been very important for companies and their brands, and not only in industries such as fashion. Think of how IBM used the work of Cartier-Bresson in the 1960s and of the exclusive Pirelli Calendar. With the ongoing digital transformation, the generation of and access to photography has increased exponentially, commoditizing photography as a medium for a brand owner. The fact that we speak today of "stock" photography is the proof. So the challenge is to turn this commodity back into an asset through which the brand can be developed and articulated in a differentiating way.

This is simple in theory but extremely difficult in the execution: it requires going beyond simple photography and adding layers of metaphorical or emotional meaning to the pictures. Adding those layers immediately eliminates almost the entirety of stock imagery out there and most of the rest, turning photography into an asset again.

But how can we get to these additional layers? One possible answer is to go back to the roots and engage top photographers: Give them a brief and create commissioned work. Ultimately, this is what IBM did with Cartier-Bresson, and it is still recommended for certain instances. But for many situations, this approach has two major problems. First, it’s not scalable, so if you need a broad array of photos (and today you do), this becomes too complex and most likely too expensive. Second, you are basically putting the keys of your brand in the hands of one or a few photographers, whose approach will strongly shape the perception of your brand.

Here is where technology, responsible for the commoditization of photography in the first place, comes to the rescue. Through it we are able to outsource the creative process of generating images to EyeEm, a community of millions of photographers, which addresses the issues of scalability and homogeneity. Most important, machine learning, a key tool of the second Renaissance, allows us to make sense of this wealth of images in a new and unprecedented way. The tool, created by EyeEm, is trained with the aesthetics of the brand and is capable of recognizing images that reflect the feel of the brand, regardless of style and other criteria.

This is at the core of the Copernican shift we are undergoing. As a brand owner, I don’t have to “code” my aesthetics and thus the feel of the brand; instead, I can use an algorithm that learns the feel of the brand and surfaces images that reflect it.

Through that, the role and the possibilities for me as a brand owner are augmented. The role is augmented because I can concentrate on defining the essence of the brand and not the rules for expressing it. The possibilities are augmented as a community of millions of photographers, with their creativity, can be tapped. The material surfaced allows the whole organization to learn to speak the new visual language, maybe with some variation but with the same feel.

The use of machine learning with photography is only one example of the possibilities ahead of us. One could extrapolate it to all designs developed for the brand, providing a new design approach altogether, which enables the periphery of the organization to operate in a very different way. Similarly, the use of natural language processing and AI can provide brand owners with new ways to define the interaction of the brand and its users.

The second Renaissance is upon us. We have the opportunity to embrace it as brand owners and make visual languages more meaningful and more beautiful. We just need to embrace the brushes and chisels of this new age of discovery.