Personality Is Your Competitive Edge

AI didn’t sneak into marketing. It stormed in promising scale, speed and savings, and we let it. We welcomed it with open PowerPoints, chat prompts and optimistic LinkedIn posts.

But now, as I review another bland campaign this week, I can feel what Lars Bastholm calls “Wonderpanic” – a sudden, electrifying blend of awe and dread. You see what’s possible but panic about what it means.

Marketers everywhere are feeling it. For a talk I am doing at Diggit 2025, I polled marketers across brands, agencies, and technology providers. Three-quarters of respondents reported using AI every day. Their top uses? Content creation, brainstorming, and research. But only 22% felt confident that what AI generates reflects their brand.

The biggest fear? Losing emotional authenticity. We’re facing a collective identity crisis. Drowning in smooth, scalable, synthetic content, we’ve forgotten something crucial – audiences don’t fall in love with efficient brands, they fall in love with emotionally resonant ones.

The ability to generate content quickly and at scale is what makes AI so powerful, but it’s also what makes it easy to overuse. Just because something is easy to produce doesn’t mean it’s without value. But when everything becomes easy, it’s tempting to stop questioning whether it’s right, distinctive or emotionally resonant. That’s why it’s crucial to use AI thoughtfully to amplify creativity, not replace it.

Brands aren’t remembered for being seamless, they’re remembered for being specific. Think about the brand moments that made you laugh or feel something. A sharp bit of copy, a human misstep, an unexpected, off-kilter ad or social post that refused to play by the rules. These aren’t the products of optimisation. They are the human results of personality.

I’ve stopped talking about a brand or product’s unique selling proposition or key selling proposition. These are dead because your product can be cloned, your price can be undercut, and your claims can be commoditised.

But what no algorithm can replicate is your Unique Selling Personality, your real, human KSP. This is your tone, your behaviour, your contradictions and cultural context. It’s your quirks, flaws, and flavour. It’s what makes you feel human and makes your brand matter to other humans.

That doesn’t mean every brand needs to be loud, quirky or weird. Some personalities are gentle, dry, principled or unapologetically blunt. That’s the point. It’s about being emotionally legible, recognisably human, not synthetically perfect.

Personality isn’t a garnish. It’s the whole dish. It’s the only thing separating a meaningful brand from a mediocre one. Emotion isn’t a dashboard or app. Too many marketers believe that AI can handle emotion, it can’t. The winning combination is AI with a human touch – the human touch is key.

AI can score sentiment and replicate tone. But emotion isn’t a metric, it’s a reaction, contextual and rooted in memory, culture, timing, and contradiction. You can’t prompt that. You have to live it.

You can’t generate my memory or how I interpret a reflection in a mirror – that is  human context, which makes people laugh or cry. It’s emotion that builds brands people care about, so when your brand stops evoking that, you’re not building connections, you’re just pushing content. 

The most unsettling part? AI isn’t just changing marketing, it’s changing us. Kids speak in TikTok or YouTube “voice” – that loud, performative, and emotionally heightened video voiceover. Every other video is narrated by “Adam Voice” – the calm, robotic, and devoid of natural rhythm voiceover. Creators default to the algorithm’s preference, and we absorb that aesthetic into our lives.

We are at risk of becoming the algorithm, not just in what we say but also in how we say it. That’s why personality matters more than ever. It’s not just your brand’s differentiator; it’s a fight for your own voice.

This is your moment if you’re a CMO, brand director, strategist or creative lead. You don’t need to ditch AI, but you do need to stop treating it as your creative director. Use it to sharpen, explore, and enhance. But don’t let it define you.

Insist on a “human in the loop”, critically audit your AI output and ask yourself, “Where is it flattening my brand?” Define your Unique Selling Personality to ensure it’s bold, human, and emotionally consistent. Align your purpose with how you show up. In a world of infinite content, congruence is your currency. Make room for surprise, risk, and delight. Be the brand that dares to behave like a person.

AI is only going to get better, faster, cheaper, and more convincing, so don’t waste your energy trying to out-AI the machines. Instead, out-emote them, out-feel them, and most of all out-human them. Because personality isn’t a luxury anymore, it’s your last real advantage and we must celebrate human-AI collaboration, not just automation.

My Recommendation: stop chasing “AI strategy,” start building AI fluency and develop policies that focus on people-first, AI-second. AI isn’t a tool you deploy, it’s a mindset you design, and it starts slowly.