Brands should lead with meaning instead of product details

Walk through New York City this fall and count the advertisements not selling artificial intelligence. Subway cars, bus shelters, billboards: Every surface pitches a model, an agent, a muse. And the images themselves are increasingly generated by AI rather than photographed. Every panel I have sat on this year has asked the same questions: How much AI should go into the work, and where?

My brand consultancy firm, the bread and butter, spent months this year on a project where those questions never came up. That absence is the most interesting thing about the work.

NOT ALL CUSTOMERS CARE ABOUT AI

The client is a premium eyeglass lens manufacturer with an exceptional product, measurably the best in its category. For its entire history, the company communicated that fact through specifications: refractive index figures, precision measurements, and comparative charts.

The people who buy premium lenses are not waiting to hear whether a brand uses AI. They want to understand what makes the product better and worth paying for, in language that respects their intelligence without demanding their research time. Call it sober authority: the confidence to state little and be believed anyway.

A DIFFICULT TRANSITION

Our proposal mapped personas of high-end consumers, then designed the brand they aspired to: the Hermès of lenses. Hermès sells handbags, but its imagery sells a fairy tale luxury that touches longing instead of listing features. Our concept, “profound vision,” treated the lens as a way of seeing rather than a product to describe. The photography showed what lies beyond it—details visible only to those with the sensibility to notice them.

So, we did not photograph the product. We photographed stone, close enough that the grain records how long each plane took to form, and a leaf’s ridge, close enough to see how the line was made. No claim, no specification. The message was simple: This company pays the kind of attention you do not have time to pay, and that attention is what you are buying. Work this subtle is difficult to make, and harder to approve.

The greatest challenge is the middle phase. When a company stops leading with specifications and starts leading with meaning, the old language switches off before the new one takes hold. Sales soften. Someone in a quarterly review asks why the numbers dipped. The honest answer: The dip is the price of the transition, and few organizations hold their nerve through it. Most reach for the specification sheet, because specifications are safe, defensible, and legible to a sales team.

WHY MOST BRANDS DON’T MAKE THE JUMP

Our client has not made the jump yet. The work was received well, parts were produced, and then the specification sheet came back. The people who would have carried the decision are measured quarterly on a change that pays back over years. That is unfair to ask of anyone, and our proposal did not make the intervening period survivable enough. We showed them where to land. We did not build the bridge.

Ask a chairman which brand they want to become, and the most common answer is Apple. Apple became Apple by challenging convention, a bet that could only be placed at the board level. So I now set one condition before creative work begins: The chief executive must be in the room where decisions are argued, not in a review at the end.

A rebrand changes what a company says while it is selling. That makes it a revenue decision, not a marketing decision. No marketing director can authorize a decision whose downside lands on this quarter and whose upside arrives after they have been reassigned. Ask them to, and they will produce safe marketing—the old version with better photography. With the chief executive in the room, the dip becomes a shared decision rather than one person’s risk, and everyone below stops hedging.

THREE CONDITIONS PRIOR TO LEAPING

Prior to beginning this process, consider these conditions. The first is heritage, translated for the present. No matter the company’s age, the history should still speak. The task is to find the choice from the company’s past that still explains what it stands for—a standard the company set, a shortcut it refused, a process it kept when cheaper options appeared—and to say it plainly.

The second is that the brand has to stand in the direction where it is pointing. If the people running a premium brand know their customer only from research decks, the work will not land. Taste is not a set of data points, and you cannot direct a photographer toward a world you have never entered. The brands that manage it put someone who lives in that world in charge, or give them time and budget to learn it first. The person leading the work has to know luxury from the inside.

The third is elasticity. A brand has to appear in a dozen places that behave nothing alike. The instinct is to protect the core by repeating it identically everywhere. The better structure holds the core fixed and lets the storylines stretch. What must never move is the reason the brand exists. Movement occurs in its storyline form. Most brand systems have this backwards.

A final irony. The product language these brands are trying to leave behind is what machines now generate at no cost, in volume. In April 2025 Ahrefs analyzed 900,000 newly created web pages and found that 74% contained AI-generated content. The advertisements covering New York City sell the ability to produce more of it. When every company can publish unlimited product descriptions, those descriptions stop being the differentiator. Meaning is the remaining move a machine cannot make on your behalf.

Sooyoung Cho is the founder and CEO of the bread and butter.