The Brand Czar’s Guide to Using AI for Message Discipline 

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Key Points

• While AI can worsen a "brand czar's" job by enabling employees to produce large volumes of off-brand content or "slop," the right AI platform can actually enforce message discipline by giving an entire organization access to the same approved, up-to-date brand messaging.  
• As we know from Herb Kelleher's famous "chicken salad test," inconsistent messaging across leadership and teams erodes brand value and fails to connect with customers.  
• To promote message discipline, companies should seek AI tools with a single cloud-based interface, secure file sharing, built-in fact-checking and data privacy that prevents proprietary information from being used as training data—all controllable by the brand czar to ensure everyone works from vetted, approved source material.

The Brand Czar’s Guide to Using AI for Message Discipline 

Many organizations have a “brand czar,” a marketing chief appointed to ensure the company speaks with one voice. AI is making that person’s job harder every day because AI “slop” allows employees to write exponentially more off-brand content every day. But a good AI platform can also make the chief marketer’s job astronomically easier by giving the entire organization the same set of up-to-date messaging to work from that match the company’s brand precisely. 
 
From email signatures to sales decks, the brand czar’s job has always been to slap the typing fingers of anyone in the company who fails to follow the official brand guidelines of the organization. Whether it be the CEO—and especially if it is the CEO—or an intern, everyone must have the same message if the organization has any hope of connecting with customers over the long term. Now, a marketer can upload the exact brand documents they want their teams to use as source material, so that every resulting document they produce will rely on the latest, approved messaging. Moreover, the brand czar can change the message on a moment’s notice and disseminate it across the organization in seconds if a crisis or opportunity arises. 

 
The Chicken Salad Test 

Southwest Airlines’ late chief Herb Kelleher, who had a nose for marketing, famously dictated to his company that they should focus on being “low-fare,” using the “chicken salad test.” As Chip and Dan Heath noted in their famous 2007 marketing book, Made to Stick, Kelleher reportedly said that if offering chicken salad wouldn’t make the company low-fare, then they shouldn’t do it. Taking a page from Kelleher’s wisdom, if a company’s marketing messages don’t reflect the brand, it will undo all the efforts to cultivate an audience. For instance, it would irrevocably harm Southwest’s brand value if the CEO were to brand the company as low-priced, but the sales team was selling a luxury product. The disjointed message wouldn’t ring true with the customer. 

How to Require “Message Discipline” with AI 

In the marketing profession, consistent repetition of brand value as Kelleher preached is known as “message discipline.” 

One of the biggest advantages a well-tailored AI platform can provide communications and marketing heads in this journey is the ability to force message discipline. A solid tool does this by giving all users access to the same platform, with cloud-based storage that is secure and private to the outside world.   

But there are some complications with this solution.  

Remove File-Sharing Friction  

The biggest problem is that many companies allow employees to choose any AI platform they please, or “phantom AI” tools. This means there is not a common enterprise version that everyone is using consistently, which makes file sharing complicated. Even if the company has a cloud system for sharing common docs on an intranet, or in a third-party app like Microsoft SharePoint or Google Drive, users may still have to migrate documents back and forth between their preferred AI platforms like ChatGPT or Perplexity. This friction causes employees not to use tools that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars per month. What a waste! 

Don’t Let Company Info Be Used as Training Data 

Another problem is data security. Some of the big AI providers like Claude are building incredible capability that integrates across Microsoft, Google, Adobe or other big, third-party providers. But there’s a concern here for organizations that prefer to keep their business or client information private. A lot of users simply cannot afford to allow their proprietary information to be used as AI training data by the big LLMs. In many cases, due to contractual obligation, it would be illegal for information to be shared with applications that inherently create such an information security vulnerability.  

Reduce the Threat of AI-Enhanced “Slop” 

A third issue that inhibits a brand czar’s ability to force message discipline is that some employees will inevitably choose to use AI to create tons and tons of garbage materials—or “slop.” This is one of AI’s biggest threats to reputation and brand, and it is among the hardest to control.  One recent Stanford University study showed that the more powerful an AI model is, the more it is likely to hallucinate, or make up false and, thereby, off-brand content. 

One way an AI platform can help combat this kind of slop is through built-in fact-checking tools. Many common platforms don’t have these features that allow a user to check and doublecheck their work. So, the resulting products—which end up being produced in great volume by non-thinking employees—not only comes out factually inaccurate and wrong, but that material is often used and reused by both man and machine after it is spat out into the world.  

There is a great need for corporate AI programs to cut these terrible practices off at the pass, before they are used to disseminate bad information. 

Key Features of AI to Promote “Messages Discipline” 

While it is practically impossible to make every employee use good judgement, or to turn every employee into a brilliant writer overnight, AI does have the capability to help. 

Among the most important features to look for in an AI tool is a single, cloud-based interface with a common file sharing system that can be deployed across a user base or across teams within a user base. Even better, secure and reliable AI tools should have fact-checking features built in that forbid the production of documents with ethical or other concerns, and do not share data with training models. In the best case, the AI tool should use “multi-modal” fact checking, spreading the risk of inaccurate information across multiple AI models before delivering a result. A Google DeepMind study shows the performance of various leading models. 

Most importantly, if an AI tool can be well controlled by the brand czar, the company can be better assured that the source material employees rely on to create new documents is always the latest, up-to-date, approved messages the company leadership has reviewed, vetted and approved.