Don’t Be a Commodity: Branding in the World of AI

Don’t Be a Commodity: Branding in the World of AI For small business owners whose brand looks like everyone else’s, and anyone who just bought a business Open your website, then open your two biggest competitors’ sites. If you swapped the logos, would anybody notice? For most small businesses the honest answer is no, and AI is making it worse. Everyone has the same tools now, so every site ends up with the same stock photos and the same “trusted partner” copy. Your team is probably already using ChatGPT to write your emails and posts. With nothing telling it who you are, it writes like you’re everybody else. Once you look like everyone else, customers shop you on price. When it’s time to sell, buyers price you that way too. I co-founded Utah’s largest vehicle wrap company at 23. For years my job was putting other companies’ brands on trucks, and most of those brands were forgettable at 65 miles an hour. I grew that business into five companies and sold to private equity in 2024. Now I buy and scale businesses, and the first thing I do after closing is raise prices 10%. That only works when customers are buying you and not the cheapest version of what you sell. This session is the short version of how I’d audit your brand and fix it. What you’ll leave with A self-audit you can run on your own brand tonight, covering your website, your reviews and the competitors you lose deals to A one-line positioning statement short enough to fit on the side of a truck The start of a voice guide, so whatever your team or ChatGPT writes for you sounds like you By the end, you’ll be able to Tell whether you need a refresh or a full rebrand (most owners need a lot less than they think) Pull the words your customers already use about you out of your reviews Spot the AI-sounding phrases in your marketing that make people scroll past Set up AI to write in your voice and not the internet’s average voice See your brand the way a buyer does when they’re putting a number on your business