Insights
Explore brand strategy insights on some of today’s big issues, from Evoleus, one of the first brand agencies in the world to reimagine a new model of AI-powered brand consulting.
Reimagining brand strategy for the AI-era
AI is transforming the world as we have known it, becoming an indispensable tool to boost productivity across almost every industry. In branding and marketing this is posing existential challenges for agencies large and small; and for global advertising networks it is wreaking havoc.
Here at Evoleus, we have taken an unequivocal view. Knowledge is no longer scarce, it is ambient. All you have to do is ask the right question, so what now is the value of consultants, and agencies?
Large agencies face a challenging future, as clients expect much more for much less, and much faster than before. With ubiquitous LLM tools at their fingertips, marketing departments are taking more and more projects in-house, inflicting severe pain on their agencies. Adapting to this new reality will come at a high cost and the process will be painful, with huge numbers of agency staff lost along the way.
Media buying, once the most valued advertising service, has been the first to suffer at the hands of Meta and Google’s automated campaign tools. Considering the inevitable, we concluded that a new kind of agency was required, an expert boutique agency combining highly experienced brand consultants to engineer the inputs and curate the outputs from a suite a suite of proprietary AI agents, adding human insights, creativity and emotion at every step of the way. This combination of AI plus human creativity and emotional intelligence looks to us to be the way to reimagine the future of creative agencies.
Coming to this conclusion required a dispassionate analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of both AI and human consulting. The future of branding, we believe, lies not in choosing between AI or human creativity, but in orchestrating the two.
What AI does best in brand consulting
AI shines in pattern recognition, data crunching, linguistics and scalability.
Our use of LLMs and our own Third Lens® platform transform the speed and scale of many foundational tasks in any brand consulting programme, providing us with unprecedented foresight and flexibility:
Surface consumer insights from vast amounts of social, search, and sales data with market segmentation and sentiment analysis
Reduce human error in fact-checking, copywriting, copy-checking, unifying styles
Generate initial creative content from names, taglines, scripts, mock-ups at speed and volume
Predict campaign outcomes based on historic data, synthetic personas and A/B testing models
Provide multi-lingual, multi-cultural perspectives including linguistics, etymology, sentiment and any cultural bias
Automate brand audits with competitor mapping and trend tracking
Where human creativity still rules
We’ve always believed that great branding is ultimately about storytelling, emotional resonance, aesthetics and cultural nuance. These are all deeply human domains.
So, while AI can optimise a message or a proposition and validate good ideas, only human creativity can invent a great one with soul and emotional depth:
Strategic intuition comes from lived experience, not algorithms, and can detect AI hallucinations and potential bias in training data
The Big Idea is usually the product of thinking out-of-the-box, conceiving something that’s never been done before
Brand tone and voice requires emotional intelligence: empathy, rhythm, sometimes irony, and an ear for cultural tension
Creative direction isn’t just an output - it’s also an input in terms of aesthetics, taste, relevance, morality, attention to detail and risk-taking
Cultural sensitivity needs lived context; AI still struggles with satire, irony, taboo and continuously emerging subcultures
AI can optimise a message or a proposition, but only human creativity can invent one with soul and emotional depth
Crafting the right balance
We are now learning to orchestrate the best collaborations between man and machine to build world-class brands for the future - and deliver best value to our clients around the world.
We’re doing this by building specific agents for a variety of tasks, all agnostic to the LLMs that power them, so we can swap one out for another if a particular AI makes a breakthrough. This agentic approach is based on the well-proven methodologies and workflows we have developed over many years for: brand naming, value propositions, brand valuations, identities and websites. It enables our small but highly experienced team to deliver outstanding, highly differentiated solutions, faster and to even higher standards than ever before.
Our approach can be summarised as:
Use AI as a co-pilot, not the pilot. Use agentic workflows to handle the mechanics (research, data modelling, validation) while we guide the creative narrative, aesthetics and emotion
Start with strategy, not the tools. Define the brand’s purpose and value propositions using AI where it accelerates insight or execution
Treat AI as a sketchpad. Use it for first drafts and divergent ideas, then refine and curate it with human judgment and creativity
Build multidisciplinary teams. Combine highly experienced experts in brand strategy, design, copywriting and digital with data scientists and prompt engineers
Achieve impactful branding rapidly and cost-effectively without ever compromising quality
Today’s creative director is now a conductor
Shaping brands in the AI era isn’t about creativity being replaced — it's about augmenting human creativity with AI agents, blending left-brain logic with right-brain magic.
At Evoleus we believe the role of brand consultants is evolving from being domain experts to becoming orchestrators – individuals and small teams who know when to lean on AI’s power and speed, and when to pause for human instinct.
The result? Our reimagined brand consulting model is already proving that this orchestrated approach brings smarter, sharper, more culturally aware brand narratives that move hearts, minds and metrics.
Watch this space for case studies and further insights…
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