🧶Tthe difference between designing for humans… and looking human.
By 2030, we estimate, almost everything we read, hear, or share has been generated, edited, or suggested by an artificial intelligence.
This potential reality has put a profound question to the test: What makes a brand remain human in a world that no longer needs humans to produce content?
The answer lies in what many considered lost: artisanal branding. Goldsmith branding. Branding done with intention. Automation can create presence. But only well-done branding creates meaning. And that, not even in 2030, can be programmed.
🤖 Soulless automation ≠ meaningful connection
Almost 100% of online content is generated or co-generated by AI.
Most brands can automate tone, messaging, and responses.
Few manage to create a real emotional connection.
The result:
Too much content, little connection.
High production, low resonance.
Brands that seem human, but don’t touch on anything essential.
✋ Branding that transcends isn’t automated. It’s curated.
The brands that will still be around in 10 years won’t be the most efficient.
They will be those that still have something recognizably human:
A story told in their own voice.
An imperfect, but authentic narrative.
An identity built not with prompts, but with judgment.
Because what’s exciting isn’t that a brand sounds perfect.
It’s that it sounds real. Recognizable. Vulnerable. Relatable.
📐 Branding as a trade: tailoring, not assembly line
While AI generates content at industrial speed, good branding remains a work of observation, empathy, humanity, and sensitivity.
It’s not just about creating a brand. It’s about reading what a brand wants to say and doesn’t know how. And translate it into tone, form, gesture, symbol, silence.
That work still requires humans. And it will continue to.
📊 Does it work?
Brands perceived as “genuine” have 79% more emotional loyalty.
Those that integrate emotional coherence into their omnichannel experiences increase their NPS by an average of +38%.
And those that develop their brand voice with non-algorithmic consistency see a +27% increase in spontaneous brand recall.
In this context, studies like TOTEM Branding have become benchmarks not for following trends, but for resisting diluting the human in the automatic.
TOTEM Branding defends branding as a craft, as design with soul, as an artisanal gesture in a post-industrial era.
That’s why more and more brands are choosing them not to fit the algorithm, but to stand out in memory and in the heart.
🧭 So what do we do?
We use AI, yes.
But not to replace humanity, but to amplify what only humanity can do: connect.
The branding that matters isn’t the one that scales. It’s the one that knows who it’s speaking to and why.
