What if the Wonder of You Shows in Storytelling Skills? Not Branding.

Do you know this problem? You want to be seen and understood. You want customers –the good ones, worthy of your time and talents. More income would lower your stress, but you’ll be happy with some steady cash flow every month. Marketing feels like selling and you don’t like it. Someone told you to learn branding to show your authority and uniqueness and that didn’t work.

Here’s the bigger problem. Humans lost their storytelling skills and then lost touch with people critical to them when they confused marketing and branding with storytelling.

Stick with me as we unpack the mess that landed you here because it just got even worse with the introduction of AI.

This is the story of you and it follows your trail down several rabbit holes. Here’s your reward: By understanding how you lost touch with other humans and lost touch with yourself, you will see the solutions to getting out of the isolated, disconnected, silent corner you painted yourself into.

Warning label: This might sting as we rip the Band-Aids off. You might experience a bright light of discovery as we remove the blindfold you put on decades ago. You won’t find the words or images you need for your story on the Internet because that all remains inside of you until you learn–then practice daily, the storytelling skills to achieve relationships and satisfaction.

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Facts, Beliefs, and Myths About Storytelling, Branding, Rebranding, and AI

The first thing many think about when we say branding is the centuries-old practice of humans with a branding iron, hot-stamping their name or logo into the hide and flesh of a living creature. I wonder if today’s branding is any different or less painful as technology and algorithms work 24/7 to hot-stamp someone else’s identity, logo, or call to action onto the delicate neural networks of your brain?

Common sense tells you storytelling is as old as humans standing upright, speaking, listening, and waving their arms. It was after 1975 that someone created most of the books about storytelling, as well as coaches and workshops that emphasize storytelling for professional advancement or team leadership.

Marketing as the term we use today, became popular in the late 19^th century as humans created activities for buying and selling products and services. Philip Kotler, still with us at 94, gets credit as “Father of Modern Marketing”. His lifetime of work and more than 80 books on marketing went through a paradigm shift in 1993 when Don Peppers and Martha Rogers wrote The One to One Future. I was there when it happened, and one of the first consultants hired into the Peppers and Rogers Group to revolutionize business with a radical rethinking of marketing basics. That book became today’s bible for marketers. Nowhere in that book for the Interactive Age will you find the words internet or artificial intelligence. What blows your socks off are the 1993 principles for selling more goods to fewer people to produce greater profits—advanced in the 1:1 practices, are exactly what today is about when asking AI to find the perfect customer for your precious product or barely-known service.

The great news is that the confusing mess we are in today took only two or three generations. That’s less time than the age of America, nearly 250 years old, and the world still sees America as a relatively young nation.

The better news is you and everyone you know has the immediate and same opportunity to make a massive course correction in the next 12 months to storytelling more than branding and storytelling as the ultimate humanizing force over AI.

Information is not action. You can study storytelling and learn principles and methods within a matter of weeks. Like bodybuilding or achieving health goals, it may take a year of daily writing, presenting, practicing, and interaction with humans to put your newly discovered storytelling skills into tangible results.

Think about it. One year of becoming great at storytelling instead of another 10 or 20 years thinking marketing and branding will somehow be better or different from the not-enough results you’ve been getting?

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Stop Looking for Next Steps. You Need Now Steps.

Your time is now. You are alive in the most pivotal point in human communication.

Are you wondering, “Will AI replace me?” or “Is my job impossible for AI?” The best answer now is that the professional with storytelling skills and a healthy relationship with AI as an assistant or collaborator will eclipse you. Then, eventually, replace you.

Once you see how this comes together and reinvents everything you are doing and your connections with others, you can’t unsee it.

That’s how I transformed from marketing to community builder for Gifted Professionals and Communicators. That’s how I grew from a consultant for national professional associations to the storytelling detective for individuals with great wisdom and insights to share with the world. I work 1:1 with everyday geniuses to build their storytelling habits while showing them where to find the clues for all the stories they buried while they were overwhelmed and distracted by career struggles and finances.

Here’s the rest of the story, to help you find your way back home, to the storytelling wonder that only a human can be.

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When Did a Brand Mean Something and Where Did We Lose You?

Before there were modern tools or marketing, there was just you, the individual, and the name someone gave you at birth. In fact, that name is so important that it is the first gift you get in life, and it is the only thing you take with you into death.

The definition of brand that has never changed and increases in value with the introduction of AI is this:

A brand is your lived experience, your reputation, and the perception people have of you. Branding is an intentional effort to distinguish yourself, communicate your value proposition, and build trust and credibility. You may start a business or become part of some else’s company, and the core principles of building a strong, consistent, and memorable identity remain fundamentally the same for both personal and company brands.

Storytelling is always better, stronger, faster, and more impactful than what many call branding. Storytelling and human connection always beat rebranding.

Even if you go to work within a company and do not identify as self-employed, you risk everything if you stop seeing that your brand is you. It’s about authentic self-expression, building a unique worldview, and consistently sharing valuable insights that resonate with a specific audience. Your expertise, personality, and the problems you solve become your brand’s core. It’s about creating an undeniable presence through consistent, high-quality stories that reflect your true self, fostering deep connections and loyalty.

The specific audience that needs to see you and connect with your words (could be music or art) depends on what you need. Is that the audience the boss who will promote you or increase your pay? Is that audience a client who can hire you? Is that audience a publisher or investor who can advance you the money to live on while you continue to create your signature solution before release? We craft each story for each audience, based on story listening skills.

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Your Storytelling Strengths Start With Knowing Your Brand’s Core

We don’t know when storytelling became mixed up with branding and marketing. We know it’s been a costly mess to get back to basics and find our way back to authenticity, creativity, and connecting with other humans—often without devices or technology.

When we thought of a person’s name as their brand, that meant a lot when we knew them personally. That was back when horses and walking were our only options to go more than 35 miles a day from home. When the individual’s name became the sign for their business, you had a good idea what they did because you knew their story, based on your direct experience with them. It was that way for hundreds of years.

When automobiles, trains, planes, telephones, and marketing were invented, we had to make more effort and spend money to make a simple connection between a name and what the business offered. Here are four individuals who put their names on their businesses hundreds of years ago, and today, we still know what they are making and selling: Josiah Wedgwood, Arthur Guinness, Charles Lewis Tiffany, and John Cadbury.

We lost that in recent history because we lost sight of the stories. The further apart the story is from the human, the more expensive the marketing is to try to forge that bond again in our brains. For example, it’s called Apple, instead of Steve’s Computers. It’s called Amazon instead of Jeff’s Books and Variety Store. It’s called Verizon instead of Tom Edison’s Talking Machine.

Storytelling and Human Connection Over Rebranding

More often than not, the most impactful and enduring branding comes from authentic storytelling and a genuine resonance with human emotions, rather than expensive rebranding exercises. Consider companies or individuals who have captivated audiences not through slick campaigns, but by sharing compelling narratives that speak to shared values, aspirations, or struggles. When a brand genuinely connects with people on an emotional level, through transparent communication and a commitment to its stated purpose, it builds loyalty and trust that superficial changes can never achieve. True connection fosters advocacy and a sense of belonging, which is far more powerful than any purely aesthetic transformation.

Branding has taken a beating lately. Rebranding is even worse. The headlines in recent months brought wonder and head scratching with The Gulf of America, Cracker Barrel, and the Department of War.

Many people mistakenly believe branding is merely about superficial changes, like a new logo or a catchy slogan. This “lipstick on a pig” approach is a classic misnomer.

My experience is with national associations, many of which blew a fortune on a sleek new visual identity, hoping it would magically erase years of poor customer service and subpar meetings. Without addressing fundamental operational flaws or genuinely improving what it offers, such an exercise is ultimately futile. The core problems persist, hidden only momentarily beneath a glossy new exterior, and the discerning public quickly sees through the cosmetic alterations.

Storytelling runs much deeper than surface-level aesthetics.

It’s not about a curated façade for social media, but rather the genuine impression you leave on others, a reflection of your true self and the impact you have on the world around you. This essence is forged in the crucible of your lived experience, evolving as you do and resonating with those who genuinely connect with your journey.

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Storytelling Gets Better With Experience

The longer you live, the more you experience—see, hear, feel, taste, and smell. Your brain is amazing in its ability to remember everything, recall upon demand, or forget what doesn’t seem to connect to what matters. The more you study the functions and speed of the brain, plus pay attention to brain health through daily habits, the better you become at storytelling.

Because your brain loves pleasure and quick fixes, the mess we got into with branding starts to make sense.

Humans in business situations view branding or rebranding as a fast solution to a more profound problem. When your business, tiny or large, is struggling with declining sales, a poor reputation, or a negative culture, the allure of a quick brand makeover becomes incredibly strong. It offers the illusion of progress without the hard work of introspection, difficult decision-making, or doing the work to bring out the story. This inclination to opt for the easy, visible change over the complex, invisible groundwork of storytelling reflects a human bias for immediate gratification.

Neuroscience suggests our brains are wired to seek quick fixes, inadvertently enabling humans—alone or in a team, to prioritize superficial changes over the deep, often uncomfortable, work required to truly connect with people and build lasting value.

The Most Tempting AI Target is Cost and Waste in Branding/Rebranding

The financial outlay on branding and rebranding exercises can be astronomical, with studies and business reports often highlighting significant expenditures that, in many cases, lead to minimal or no tangible improvement in performance. Think of the millions of dollars global corporations spend on revamping their logos, color palettes, and marketing slogans. While precise overall waste figures are hard to pinpoint, the sheer volume of aborted campaigns, quickly forgotten rebrands, and initiatives that fail to move the needle on key metrics strongly suggests a substantial portion of this spending is inefficient, if not entirely squandered on efforts that don’t address fundamental business challenges or customer needs.

The major cost and the most fascinating part of branding exercises is customer listening. You heard me right. The biggest cost in hiring branding consultants is for research to gain a deep understanding of the business client’s current perception by all possible customers, market landscape, and future potential.

As the primary consultant, already inside the organization, for the precise purpose of finding and fixing communication gaps, gaffs, faulty assumptions, and poor writing, I could see the total budget and results metrics of the organization. I saw the total costs of branding engagements, and that the research pieces would consume more than half of the total expense.

Even the biggest associations had business operations similar to a small or mid-size company, and the total cost for a full rebrand with research and basic implementation was from $30,000 to $150,000.

But wait! Isn’t that the same thing you can do on your own to tell a more accurate story about the purpose and passion for your business, plus your conversations with customers about what you are doing right and where you suck?

Isn’t deep knowledge of customer needs and behaviors at the heart of storytelling, more than branding? Of course it is.

It did no good for me to bang my head on a wall while watching my client go off course from the storytelling project and suddenly decide to waste months and a lot of money on the shiny object, razzle-dazzle branding contract. It was decades later, when I left association consulting and worked with individuals who taught me brain science, plasticity, and critical thinking, that I understood humans would rather pay someone else $50,000 to go get the truth from their customers than face rejection and tough love criticism.

In order to find your story, you often have to face some truths that you’ve been hiding or omitting. It takes courage and creativity to become better at storytelling. Only you have that—not AI.

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Good Thing I Stuck With Storytelling. AI Just Took Over Branding.

Branding research is full of repetitive, labor-intensive, time-demanding chores. That made it expensive. That made it an easy target for the integration of artificial intelligence (AI). Particularly in the last year or so, the rise of sophisticated large language models (LLMs) and generative AI, revolutionized the brand research landscape. Many tasks that were once labor-intensive, time-consuming, and prone to human bias are now being automated or augmented in powerful ways.

It’s easy to name specific areas where AI is changing brand research, where AI can surpass human capabilities due to its ability to process vast data without bias and identify patterns humans might miss.

There are two kinds of research—qualitative and quantitative. Brand research demands both. Until now, that made it expensive and lengthy. Qualitative includes conversations, interviews, focus groups, and deep listening in many forms. Quantitative includes surveys, head counting, and many forms of “bean counting.”

Humans created these research elements and performed them millions of times. Now AI can do it with stunning speed and performance:

• Accelerated Data Collection and Analysis
• Enhanced Data Synthesis and Reporting
• More Efficient and Personalized Research Design

Especially in areas where human cognitive biases can lead to flawed conclusions, AI outpaces and outperforms the research consultants and client team by:

• Eliminating Confirmation Bias in Data Interpretation
• Overcoming Sampling Bias and Limited Scope
• Mitigating Observer and Interviewer Bias
• Reducing Misinterpretation of Non-Verbal Cues

Which Brings Us Back to Storytelling as The Bridge to Customers

The AI impact on brand research is huge.

The value of storytelling becomes stronger as you see what AI cannot do—human insight, critical thinking, and the ability to love and build rapport. This places the individual with stronger storytelling skills way ahead of brand exercises.

What are we seeing now? Is AI replacing the branding business? No. Instead, we see the staff member or tiny team inside the organization is rapidly learning how to make AI an indispensable partner in the research phase. This allows the organization to conduct more thorough, faster, and demonstrably less biased research, enabling them to build storytelling strategies grounded in a deeper, more accurate understanding of the market and target audience.

The “frank conversations” remain vital, but AI now supercharges the analysis of those conversations and countless others happening across the digital landscape. Interviews, listening, and recording daily experiences are storytelling gold.

Put It Together—Brand Leadership and Storytelling

Do you see the inseparable link between brand and storytelling?

Brand Work: It’s still smart to learn about brand work so you know the principles and can write detailed prompts for AI to do research. This is the strategic foundation – defining the brand’s purpose, values, target audience, and unique selling proposition. It’s the “what” and “why” of the brand.

Storytelling Work: This is the execution and emotional connection. It’s how you communicate identity. The story shows your experience and gifts in a compelling, relatable, and memorable way. Storytelling brings the brand (your life, your work) to life, making it resonate with the audience on a deeper level.

There is no start and stop because they overlap significantly. Storytelling is a crucial toolfor effective brand building and communication. You tell stories about your brand to express its identity and values.

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Connect the Dots

Brand. This is foundational. It is a strategic process of creating and shaping a unique identity, perception, and reputation for a product, service, individual, or company. It’s about who you are and what you stand for.

Marketing. This is transactional. It’s about how you communicate and deliver your brand’s value. Why are marketing and branding connected? Branding is a component of marketing in the sense that a clear brand identity is essential for coherent marketing campaigns. Marketing is a subset of brand in the sense that all marketing activities should be informed by and reinforce the brand.

Storytelling. This is transformational. It’s about lived experience, transformations, and the many changes and decisions humans make. Every story has a character or several, a plot, a beginning, middle, and end. Every story has human emotions and observations. It happened to you or you saw it happen to others. Maybe you felt it, heard it, or touched it.

Why does the story matter? If marketing efforts are not aligned with a clear identity, you get mixed messages and confuse the audience. Confusion kills trust. These days, no trust can send you to the spam folder. If you focus solely on transactions without investing in your story, that lacks depth, loyalty, and sustainable value. Nobody cares about you until you demonstrate you care more about them.

You are the brand. Marketing is how you deliver your promise. Storytelling is your connection with human emotions. Without exception, 100% of all “yes” or “I’ll buy it” decisions come from the emotional part of the human brain. You need to understand all three and come to love storytelling and yourself for long-term success.