State of the Brand #3
The Roundtable #40
Don’t Panic! No. 17
In a short period of time, we’ve seen a remarkable surge of interest in agentic branding. What started as a relatively abstract line of thinking is rapidly evolving into a field where strategy, technology, and marketing are increasingly converging. That shift brings with it a natural change in focus. How do you ensure your brand remains visible in a world where AI increasingly determines what is seen at all? In practice, that question quickly translates into optimization: GEO, AEO, and everything that helps secure inclusion in system-generated answers and recommendations.
I previously introduced the concept of Agentic Lovemarks as a way of understanding how brands in this reality are both selected by systems and chosen by people. This article builds on that foundation by sharpening the perspective on what this shift demands from brands and where, within that dynamic, value is truly created. Where the first article outlined the broader framework, this piece takes a step further by focusing on implications, sequence, and the role of Lovemarks as a lens on the lovability dimension of agentic branding.
This isn’t a theoretical question. As it becomes easier to produce and optimize everything, uniformity inevitably increases. Meanwhile, consumers are increasingly delegating their decision-making to AI—to agents that reduce, filter, and select on their behalf. Agentic branding is the development that brings both sides of that challenge together: being legible enough to be selected and meaningful enough to be chosen.
All of this creates a dual challenge for brands and a critical question of sequence: where do you begin?
Thomas Marzano’s manifesto marks an important turning point in this. His central proposition is that, in an AI-mediated world, brands can no longer rely on fragmented campaigns, content, or guidelines written for human readers. They need to define their brand essence in a Brand Constitution—a governing document that encodes what the brand will always stand for, what it will never do, and the boundaries within which any agent acting in its name must operate.
A brand thus becomes more than just a story. It becomes a protocol—something that needs to not only be understood by people, but also read and interpreted by systems. Agentic Lovemarks is my way of translating that perspective into the role of emotional brand preference in this new reality.
Agentic branding revolves around the combination of two forces that are becoming more important at the same time. On the one hand, the extent to which a brand is consistent, recognizable, and structurally reliable enough to be selected by systems. On the other, the extent to which it’s meaningful and attractive enough to be chosen by people.
Where within that dynamic is the most value created? At the intersection of machine trust and genuine human preference.
This builds on Kevin Roberts’s original Lovemarks thinking, in which brands are challenged not only to perform on functional dimensions but to also create emotional preference: loyalty beyond reason. I traced how that model evolves under agentic conditions in my previous article. Respect shifts toward machine trust, and the classic Love–Respect matrix becomes a tension between love and machine trust, with the Agentic Lovemark emerging where both meet.
But as systems increasingly determine which brands come into view, and people then choose from within that selection, the role of the brand fundamentally changes. Not because technology replaces the brand, but because it restructures the moment of choice. Erich Joachimsthaler captures this shift, moving the focus from reach to the moment and context in which a brand is even considered. Where marketing long revolved around being visible within an open field, we now see a situation in which that field is prefiltered. Systems reduce complexity and bring the market back to a manageable set of options, within which the choice is then made. And in the PRISM model, Stephan Reschke shows how brands must adapt to a reality in which AI actively influences how they’re perceived and selected.
That shift has direct implications. Legibility and meaning reinforce each other, but they can also undermine each other. Pure legibility without meaning produces an efficient but interchangeable choice; strong meaning that never translates into consistent behavior loses recognizability and, with it, visibility.
The most tangible response is to chase visibility in AI systems directly. But while that focus may be understandable, it poses a risk. Optimization without direction leads to structuring and amplifying something that isn’t yet distinctive. When a brand starts optimizing before it’s clear what it stands for, it may be mentioned more often, but it won’t be chosen more often.
Meaning comes first, then behavior, and only after that, visibility.
We’ve entered the next phase of the conversation, well beyond asking what’s changing and into what this concretely means for brands. How do you approach this, and where do you begin?
To make agentic branding more concrete, it’s important to see this all as one coherent system rather than as separate disciplines. A brand that develops toward Agentic Lovemark status moves through three interconnected steps: the Road to Love, where direction and meaning are defined; the Brand Constitution, where that meaning is translated into behavior; and the layer of legible and behavioral systems, where that behavior becomes visible and interpretable for systems.
The first step determines how strong that pattern is; the second, how consistent; the third, whether it’s visible to systems at all.
When we talk about the first step, the Road to Love, we’re talking about defining meaning in a concrete sense—as a guiding principle that determines why a brand matters and what role it plays in people’s lives. As a perspective on the aspirational level that can be achieved within agentic branding, Lovemarks thinking offers a useful instrument: the Lovemark organizing idea.
The organizing idea functions as a principle that creates movement. It guides decisions, clarifies what fits and what doesn’t, and ensures that a brand can develop consistently over time. In today’s agentic context, this is less a luxury and more a requirement. Systems don’t read what a brand intends—they read what it does. And meaning only becomes visible once it’s been translated into behavior.
A strong example of how this can work in practice is the Rotterdam School of Management (RSM). RSM aims to position itself as an international business school that educates the leaders of the future. The real tension here doesn’t lie in communication, but in behavior: as long as leadership remains abstract, little changes. Based on that insight, RSM opted as early as 2009 for a structural approach in which ambition is made personal. The organizing idea “I WILL” functions as a lasting manifesto: not a campaign with an end date, but an explicit commitment by individuals themselves. Students, faculty, alumni, and staff each formulate their own I WILL statement—a concrete expression of how they intend to make a difference in study, work, and the world.
What distinguishes this organizing idea is that it doesn’t stop at articulation. Around “I WILL,” a complete ecosystem has been built that anchors the principle in behavior. The I WILL Embassy, led by students themselves, has the explicit role of safeguarding that the principle is actually lived within the organization. Through the annual I WILL Awards, concrete examples of leadership are made visible and celebrated. In addition, scientific research has been conducted into the effects of formulating an inspiring goal in advance, providing an intellectual foundation for the principle.
“I WILL” is therefore a system that generates, reinforces, and repeats both content and behavior, and precisely because of that, something emerges that is essential in an agentic context: a consistent pattern of action that builds over time and becomes recognizable by both people and systems.
RSM may not be your typical “iconic” brand, but it has already largely completed the first step toward Agentic Lovemark status. The direction is clear, the meaning is concrete, and the behavior has been consistently activated for years. The pattern already exists, which makes the brand particularly well positioned to take the next step.
Over the past decades, the role of the brand has evolved step by step. Where brand 1.0 began as visual identity and a mark of quality, brand 2.0 evolved into a guiding principle for marketing and communication. Brand 3.0 introduced a more fundamental shift: the brand as the guiding principle for the organization’s entire behavior.
That’s exactly the step that the Brand Constitution aims to anchor. Where brand 3.0 already made clear that brand principles must be lived throughout the organization, the agentic context adds a new dimension. Brands are no longer only executed by people, but increasingly interpreted and applied by systems. Interactions that were once predesigned are now being generated in real time, rendering every inconsistency visible and every repetition into a pattern.
Marzano describes what this requires. The traditional brand book—the guidelines deck, the carefully produced document of rules for tone, conduct, and visual identity—was written for a human reader who can take a principle like “confident, but never arrogant” and apply judgment to a situation the rule never anticipated. An agent can’t do that. It has exactly as much nuance as was encoded, and nothing more. So, while a guideline may give good advice, that advice doesn’t permit, refuse, constrain, or escalate.
What you need instead is a governing document or, as Marzano calls it, a Brand Constitution. In practice, this is a markdown document or a custom-trained model layer that takes what brand guidelines have always tried to do and evolves it into something agents can be governed by. Where a guideline describes how the brand should look and sound, a constitution states what must hold true in every rendering—the brand’s identity, values, claims, and the territories it will never enter—even when the interaction is generated live by a system the brand team never sees. It’s something that’s enforced rather than “read.”
A Brand Constitution isn’t a document you write and shelve. It’s a governing layer that, by nature (if you can call it that) remains active. It’s consulted, enforced, and updated only by deliberate human decision. And building one requires exactly what RSM has spent years developing—a clear organizing idea, a behavioral ecosystem that proves the principle is lived rather than claimed, and a pattern consistent enough to be recognizable across contexts.
Systems don’t trust what your brand says, but rather what it consistently shows. Any off-brand pattern becomes visible, while any on-brand signal that isn’t repeated disappears.
The Road to Love defines what a brand stands for and what meaning it seeks to create. The Brand Constitution takes that meaning and encodes it not just as a manifesto for people, but as a constitutional layer that agents executing on the brand can turn to. Together, they form the foundation for what comes next: not only a brand whose clear meaning can be read, but a brand that can be surfaced and selected.
When that foundation is in place, the third step comes into view. Behavior becomes visible to systems and patterns are translated into signals that can be interpreted and included during selection.
What fundamentally changes here isn’t just how marketing is executed, but how brands come into view at all. In his book From SEO to GEO, Martin van Kranenburg describes the shift from traditional search engine optimization to optimization for generative and agentic systems. We’ve moved from search engines to answer engines, from a list of options to a single composed answer, from clicks to selection. It’s now more about whether you’re shortlisted and included than it is about whether you’re visible and found.
Milan Vaassen emphasizes that machine presence is as much an operational discipline as it is a strategic outcome. In practice, that’s exactly how many organizations now approach this new reality: they focus on GEO, AEO, and prompt optimization, rewrite content, and build FAQ structures. A layer of tooling and advisory work has grown up around it. Platforms such as Promptwatch.com and IrbisLabs.com analyze how brands appear in AI-generated answers and how strong their presence is in this new form of distribution. New propositions and advisory models (e.g., Prompt Marketing) are emerging to help organizations improve their visibility and performance within these systems. This is logical, and in many cases necessary, but it’s not where it starts.
Systems don’t optimize for intention, but for consistency and proof. They look for patterns that demonstrate that a brand is reliable, that it holds up, and that it doesn’t just say something, but actually delivers on it. The shift that Van Kranenburg describes—from ranking to reputation—is crucial here. It’s not the best-optimized page that wins, but the most credible whole. That whole is built from the combination of what the brand says about itself, what others say about the brand, and what the brand actually does. Systems continuously bring those three together. They compare claims with behavior, test promises against reviews, and combine internal consistency with external validation.
As conversations with Arjan ter Huurne of Prompt Marketing also illustrate, authority is shifting from links to conversation. Your own content still matters, but what others say about you matters just as much. Visibility no longer means having a presence; it means being part of the conversation happening around your category.
This also reshapes marketing’s role, moving it away from pure persuasion and toward interpretability. The question is less how to convince and more how to be understood. Prompt Marketing describes this as a shift toward a world in which brands are evaluated as entities: not as campaigns or isolated outputs, but as coherent entities within a knowledge structure. This means that a brand must not only have a story, but also a clear structure, a definition, a place within a broader whole, and a consistent set of signals that together create meaning.
In practice, this takes shape in how a brand organizes its knowledge. The website shifts from showcase to interface, from broadcasting to answering, from monologue to dialogue. Websites become answer engines, built around questions rather than pages, around needs rather than structure. The traditional homepage loses its central role. Instead, a question-driven architecture emerges, in which a structured knowledge base functions as the source of truth—less content dump and more a systematically organized foundation for answers.
This is because systems don’t work linearly, but rather through fragmentation and synthesis. They break down questions into subquestions, combine answers, and construct a coherent response. The query fan-out principle makes it clear that a brand that hasn’t structured its knowledge in this way simply doesn’t get included in that process. But perhaps even more important than structure is the quality of what underpins it. Van Kranenburg summarizes this in the AUB principle: up-to-date, unique, and reliable. Up-to-date means a brand remains visible over time, continues to publish, respond, and evolve. Unique means it contributes something and has its own perspective. Reliable means that everything that’s visible holds up, and that claims, behavior, and external signals structurally reinforce each other.
This brings us to the core of this third step. Legibility isn’t a trick, but a result. A result of meaning that has been defined, behavior that has been anchored, and consistency that has been built over time. When that’s in place, a brand becomes legible. When it’s not, no optimization will help.
The rise of AI makes marketing more efficient in many ways. Content is produced faster, campaigns are continuously optimized, and distribution is increasingly managed intelligently. This leads to scale and speed, but also to a certain degree of uniformity.
In an environment where more and more brands rely on the same technologies and the same optimization logic, the playing field shifts almost automatically—away from the question of who provides the best answer and toward the question of which brand actually means something. That’s precisely why the Lovemarks perspective is relevant here: when functional parity becomes the norm, it explains which brands ultimately win through emotional meaning rather than technical advantage.
And that’s exactly where the risk lies. Organizations that isolate this step and approach it as a technical discipline become legible but not meaningful. They provide answers but don’t build preference. They appear in outputs but disappear in choice. The result is a new form of commoditization, driven by the absence of meaning as opposed to the identicality of products. When everything is optimized for the same questions, everything becomes comparable. When everything follows the same structure, distinction disappears. And when distinction disappears, it increasingly no longer matters what you choose.
This isn’t a theoretical risk, but a pattern that’s already beginning to emerge. It strongly resembles the period in which many organizations fully committed to performance marketing; there too, the focus was on optimization, measurability, and short-term results, often at the expense of brand building and long-term preference. The risk is that the same dynamic now repeats itself, and that organizations collectively focus on legibility and visibility within AI systems, without having their underlying meaning and behavioral consistency in order.
Agentic Lovemarks aren’t reserved for brands with decades of equity. As Marzano always says, if you’re not on the shortlist, you don’t exist—and if you are on the shortlist but fail to create preference, you don’t win.
The implication is fundamental. A brand can’t start with visibility. It must start with meaning, if that meaning isn’t already in place. That meaning must be translated into behavior. That behavior must be consistently delivered. Only then can it become visible and interpretable to systems. Because systems determine whether a brand exists. But people determine whether it wins. And only when those two come together does a brand emerge that’s not only selected, but also chosen.
That’s an Agentic Lovemark.
Cover image: Елена Бутусова
Arjan Kapteijns MM RM is a brand and strategy leader with over 20 years of experience working at the intersection of brand, marketing, strategy, and organization. A former CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi and Publicis Groupe Netherlands, Arjan is currently Client Partner at VIM Group, supporting international companies in navigating complex challenges where brand change, growth, and innovation converge. He also leads Project X, a brand-driven strategy collective focused on direction-setting questions: how brands create meaning, how that meaning is embedded in organizations and systems, and how it translates into growth.
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