Defining Your Brand for AI

When someone asks an AI assistant about your business, what does it say? Is the answer accurate? If you want AI platforms to recommend your products or services, you have to ensure they actually understand what you do. Before you can close the gap between your current AI footprint and your ideal one, you need to define the parameters:

• Brand attributes: how you want your brand to be viewed
• AI associations: how your brand, services, products, etc., are being represented by AI

Figure Out Your Brand Attributes

You can’t measure the gap between your current AI footprint and your ideal one until you define your target brand attributes. The first step is to actively work through exactly what your brand is and how you want AI to perceive it.

To figure out those attributes, you need to answer these core questions:

• What is the purpose of your service or product?
• What needs does your audience have and how do you solve them?
• Why should your audience choose you?
• Why do you win?

Finally, you need to answer the most complex question: Who is your audience, and who are they not?

Defining your audience requires the most digging. It breaks down into five specific areas, and the answers look different depending on whether you are a B2B or consumer brand:

• Industry and vertical: Who do you serve? Each group has its own language and priorities. “Commercial office cleaning” and “residential maid services” are totally different buying intents, even if the underlying service is similar. For consumer products, this looks more like lifestyle segments: “corporate menswear” versus “cufflink gifts for groomsmen.”
• Pain points: What specific problems make people start looking for your business? If you sell to other businesses, these show up in sales calls and emails (“our current vendor is always late”). If you sell to consumers, they show up in online reviews and social media (“every other plumber I called didn’t show up,” or “this brand of boots gave me blisters”).
  • You’ll discover pain points about your brand, but some pain points can be purposeful. Luxury items are higher priced for a reason and are positioned in the market to reflect that. If your service or product pain point is that the price is high, your gap might not be to lower the price, it is more likely that you need to advertise your value and position yourself better to sell that price.
• Use cases: What do people actually do with your product or service? It often differs from what you advertise most. You might market your athletic wear for high-intensity gym workouts, but realize most of your customers are buying it as comfortable work-from-home attire. A heavy-duty plastic storage bin might be marketed to mechanics, but bought mostly by teachers organizing their classrooms.
• Compatibility and Requirements: What does your product or service need to work with? For everyday business tools, it’s things like “syncs with QuickBooks.” For physical products, it’s practical requirements like “safe for septic systems,” “fits in a standard truck bed,” or “machine washable.” These details carry real purchase intent and are frequently the deciding factor for buyers.
  • Example: If you’re a local sports bar, this could also include information like the number of TVs, gameday specials, whether you have a patio, and whether that patio is dog-friendly. With new tools like Ask Maps, people are asking AI questions like, “Where can I watch the Chiefs game on Sunday and eat lunch with my dog?” It’s most likely going to pull from Google Business Profiles, reviews, Yelp, 3rd-party websites, and maybe your own website to get answers.
• Audience persona: Who is actually making the buying decision, and how do they talk? The language that resonates with a busy restaurant owner looking for a reliable vendor is completely different from what resonates with a budget-conscious college student looking for cheap takeout. AI picks up on those specific phrases and tones.