I’ve sat in brand workshops where we’ve asked clients to imagine their brand experience as a person. Are they tall or short? What are they wearing? How do they sound? Why?
Post‑it notes get fired around at a great rate of knots, and before you know it, there is a long list of adjectives to describe our ‘person’. The idea behind this exercise is simple. It is much easier to describe human interactions than it is to describe how you feel when looking at the login screen for your banking app.
For years, we have been designing digital brands to convey human traits through very obviously non-human mediums – tone of voice, colour, scale and motion, to name a few. But now, with the widespread adoption of chat interfaces and AI automations, brands have never felt more human. Your brand voice is no longer trapped in ad copy or tone-of-voice guidelines. It can respond, adapt, and even hold a conversation. Whether that is through a chatbot, an AI-generated email, or a virtual assistant with your logo stitched to its digital sleeve, your brand can talk back.
Every automated reply, every chatbot greeting, every algorithmically generated line of copy becomes a living piece of brand experience. Your brand is no longer just a set of values on a strategy deck. It is something people can literally talk to.
This brings a new design challenge. We are not just shaping visual systems or message hierarchies anymore. We are shaping behaviours.
- Do you want your brand to interrupt politely or wait to be spoken to?
- Should it crack jokes or play it straight?
- Should it ask questions, apologise, or admit it does not know?
These decisions might seem small, but they build up into something recognisable: a personality. If you do not design that personality with intent, one will emerge anyway.
Just like people, brands develop reputations based on how they behave when no one is watching. That half-helpful chatbot that keeps misunderstanding you is still your brand. The AI-generated email that feels a bit too chirpy after a complaint is also your brand.
Most AI-powered chat systems and large language models come with a pre-canned personality. They are friendly, helpful, and sometimes witty. They are designed to appeal to the broadest audience possible.
This works if you just want a functional solution. But if your brand relies on nuance, subtlety, or a very specific tone of voice, an off-the-shelf AI can dilute your identity. Your carefully crafted personality – your quirks, your humour, your way of solving problems can be flattened into a generic, every-brand-is-everywhere voice.
Customising the experience is not just a nice-to-have. It is how you preserve differentiation. Tone, phrasing, and even how the AI handles uncertainty or apologises are all levers to make your brand recognisable in conversation. Skip it and you may end up with a competent chatbot that feels like a stranger wearing your logo.
Brands that design these behaviours intentionally will stand out. Brands that do not will blend into a sea of interchangeable “helpful assistants” that could belong to anyone.
The brands that succeed in this new landscape will not necessarily be the wittiest or most “human.” They will be the ones that feel authentic. A bank that is calm and competent might do better than one trying too hard to be your mate. A utility company might earn more trust by being transparent than by being clever.
It is not about teaching your brand to perform with humanity. It is about helping it behave with integrity.
The anthropomorphisation of digital experience is not just a quirk of human psychology. It is a new design frontier. The moment your brand speaks back, it starts to develop a personality in the minds of your customers. Whether you have designed that personality or not.
So maybe the next brand workshop should not ask, “If your brand were a person, who would they be?”
Maybe it should ask something more confronting:
“If your brand could talk, would you actually want to talk to them?”