AI Won’t Fix Disorganized Marketing

If your marketing doesn’t have a system behind it, AI just makes the mess faster.

A recent Harvard Business Review article argued that the biggest obstacle to using AI in marketing isn’t the technology. It’s that most organizations haven’t changed how they operate their marketing to include AI.

Most firms still approach marketing the way they always have. Someone has an idea, it gets handed to whoever has time, that person creates it however they see fit, and it goes out. There’s no shared playbook. No centralized strategy that everyone works from. No documented rules for what the brand sounds like or what’s off-limits.

When you add AI to that process, you don’t get better marketing. You get more of the same inconsistency, just faster.

The HBR article introduces a concept called a “brand code,” which is essentially a centralized place where your strategy, messaging, audience definition, tone, and rules all live in a format that both people and AI tools can work from. When it exists, everything produced for your firm draws from the same foundation. When it doesn’t, every person and every tool is making it up as they go.

For advisory firms, this doesn’t need to be complicated. It means documenting who you serve, what you say, how you say it, and what the rules are, and putting it somewhere your team can actually find it. If you’ve already done this work through a documented strategy and brand and messaging guidelines, you’re ahead of most firms. If you haven’t, AI will only magnify the gap.

The firms that take the time to document it and organize it will be the ones that get the most out of AI, their team, and any outside partners they bring in.

The takeaway: AI is only as good as the system it’s working from. Before you invest in tools, invest in the foundation: your strategy, messaging, rules, and voice. Organize it once, and everything that follows, whether it’s produced by a person or a machine, will be more consistent, more efficient, and more on-brand.

This is what we help firms build at OnNiche® by Kaleido. We document your strategy, messaging, audience, and guidelines so your team, your tools, and your partners are all working from the same foundation. Schedule a call if you’d like to talk through what that looks like for your firm.

Kristen Luke

Founder of Kaleido Creative Studio and OnNiche®