Brandfather

Global branding guru, Peter Wilken, dishes out bite-sized wisdom

When it comes to building iconic brands, Peter Wilken has been at the helm of some of the most recognized names in the world. Over the past three decades, he’s lent his strategic and creative expertise to powerhouses like Coca-Cola, BMW, Disney, FedEx, IBM, McDonald’s, Shell, Sony, and Visa. His leadership across top-tier agencies—BBDO, Leo Burnett, and Ogilvy—helped shape campaigns that resonate across cultures and continents.

In 2002, Peter co-founded The Brand Company in Hong Kong, delivering impactful brand strategies to clients like AIG, SmarTone-Vodafone, and Shangri-La Hotels. He’s also the author of Dim Sum Strategy: Bite-Sized Tools to Build Stronger Brands, a go-to guide packed with more than 40 practical tools that simplify the complex world of branding. His free ebook, The 10 Commandments to Build a Strong Brand (and Steer Your Ship), further proves his commitment to sharing powerful, actionable insights. 

In this Q&A, Peter shares his perspective on what it really takes to build a strong brand in today’s fast-moving world—and why simplicity, creativity, and consistency are more essential than ever. 

How do you see AI redefining the way marketing teams operate today?

There are positives and negatives. On the positive side, AI is tremendous for accessing information, parsing data the way it’s instructed to and generating thought-starters that can help humans interpret and add insight. It can do this instantly and consequently, with everyone doing ‘rise the tide’ on which all boats are floating (note, without distancing them!) For those who can navigate through this to develop their own human interpretation, creative ideas and connectivity—it can be what AI assistant people talk about.

On the negative side, AI can clog all the channels in a white-washed world of facsimile. With so much content out there it’s difficult to break through an already cluttered market. AI puts this on acid. It’s easy to fall into an AI-leveraged environment where “good enough is good enough” is the norm. I should note that, depending on your thinking preferences, about half the CEOs out there already find this a perfectly practical solution that “ticks that marketing box” — and saves money, too.

It’s ridiculously easy now to access any strategic tool, framework or model and have AI fill in the boxes.

What are the key benefits brand owners can expect when leveraging AI for data-driven decision-making?

As mentioned above; speed, breadth of content, the ability to shape input and narrow-focus response, the ability to trigger thought and generate multiple alternatives—instantly. It’s an amazing research capability when used wisely. On the graphic design side, it can provide multiple options simultaneously to varying degrees of quality.

Remember, everything that comes from AI is from something that exists already. For those for whom this is less important, this can be perfectly satisfactory. For me, the human elements of understanding, nuance, originality, unpredictability, empathy, humour, pathos, fear, shock and countless other emotions that can be reflected in creative work, may be mimicked by AI but will be “seen through” for some time to come.

In what ways has AI enhanced productivity within your marketing team, and what challenges have you faced during implementation?

Accelerating discovery and research. Sparking thought. Checking for thoroughness of coverage of a category or topic. All this AI is great at.

On the downside, it’s become all too easy to complicate with plausible solutions rather than focus on a singular clear recommendation. For example, one of my clients proudly presented me with the 91-page strategic plan their graphic design agency had done for them—91 pages. They had put this together in record time and populated it with AI-generated copy. Some of it wasn’t bad—but I told them good brand strategy simplified complexity and focused thought to direct action. There was nothing that hadn’t been covered in the 91 pages—neither was the one shining diamond visible amongst the litter.

How can AI foster creativity and innovation in marketing, particularly when it comes to crafting personalized and meaningful customer experiences?

It can list what’s been used before (and labelled successful by others). In this way it can mirror or mimick what has been described in the metaverse as personalized and meaningful. AI can mimic emotion and ‘appropriate’ answers quite effectively. But there are many aspects of humanity that it cannot.

I read stories that cut both ways—the robots in Japanese banks that are apparently more efficient at reading facial expressions of customers than their human tellers (and more patient with appeasement)—or the Ai-driven dating apps that fail to see real human emotion behind apparently expressionless faces, but over-react to fake smiles when making matches.

Nuanced, culturally-sensitive and “impossibly human” contradiction is going to be a challenge for AI for years to come. You don’t do too well with sarcasm, do you AI?

What advice would you give to brand owners looking to balance AI’s capabilities with the human touch in their marketing efforts?

Put the human touch first and foremost. Use AI by all means—but don’t get hypnotised or distracted by it, and understand what the humans are taking out of the experience.

Looking ahead, what emerging AI trends or technologies do you believe will have the greatest impact on the future of marketing?
Finding the right balance between real human emotion and building long-term brand affinity, preference and loyalty, and performance-based, short-term, AI-generated data driven efficiencies.

How are you preparing your team or organization to adapt to these changes?

Open minds and open hearts. Plus chocolate.

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