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BRAND DRIFT

Field notes on brand identity in the age of AI.

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AI & BrandingAug 2026

The Founder Who Waited for the Perfect Brand — And Never Launched

I meet a version of this founder more often than you'd think: smart, capable, sitting on a genuinely good idea, still "just polishing a few things" before launch — for the second year running. Nothing's technically wrong. The logo isn't quite right yet. The website copy needs one more pass. The positioning will be finalized "once we've done a bit more research." Every individual delay sounds reasonable. Stacked together, they add up to a business that's been circling the runway for so long it's starting to forget why it wanted to fly in the first place.

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AI & BrandingAug 2026

What Happens to Trust When Your Team Doesn't Agree on Who You Are

Most of what I write about Brand Drift focuses on AI — a chatbot, an automated email, a tool nobody's supervising closely enough. But drift doesn't need artificial intelligence to happen. It happens just as easily, and sometimes far more damagingly, when the humans inside a company simply don't agree on who the company is supposed to be. That version of drift has a name too, in my research — I think of it as internal-external misalignment — and it's exactly what took down one of the most recognizable brands of the last decade.

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AI & BrandingAug 2026

The Brand Voice Test: Could a Stranger Guess It's You?

Here's a test I run on my own clients constantly, and now I'm handing it to you: take your last ten social captions, customer emails, or website blurbs, strip off your logo and your name, and hand them to a stranger. Ask them to guess who wrote it. If they can't get anywhere close, you don't have a brand voice. You have words that happen to be near your logo.

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AI & BrandingAug 2026

Why Your Best Client Isn't Who You Think They Are

One of the most useful questions I ask in a first strategy call has nothing to do with branding on the surface. I ask: "Tell me about the client who's actually easiest to work with, refers you the most, and pays without a fight." Not your ideal client on paper. The real one, currently, in your inbox. The answers surprise founders more often than you'd think — and every time it happens, I get a little thrill, because it usually means we just found the actual business hiding underneath the one they thought they were running.

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AI & BrandingAug 2026

The Brand That Said No to a Client — And Grew Because of It

I've turned away work. Not often, and never lightly, but enough times that I've stopped feeling guilty about it. Every time, it's for the same reason: the client wanted me to be a slightly different business than the one I actually am, and saying yes would have meant quietly becoming that different business, one compromise at a time, until Brand Bloom Lab stopped being Brand Bloom Lab.

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AI & BrandingAug 2026

The AI-Proof Brand: How to Stay Human When Everything Is Automated

I want to tell you about a phrase I coined, because I'm a little proud of it and also because you need to know it exists before it happens to you: Brand Drift.

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AI & BrandingJul 2026

What 10x-ing a Confectionery Brand Taught Me About Brand Before Product-Market Fit

I'm going to tell you about the project where the founder herself said, more or less, "I still can't believe the numbers" — and then I'm going to tell you why I actually believe them, because I watched it happen slowly, in a very unglamorous way, before it happened fast.

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AI & BrandingJul 2026

The Governance Gap: What Happens to Your Brand When Everyone on Your Team Uses AI

Nobody at Sports Illustrated sat in a meeting and decided to destroy 70 years of editorial trust. That's the part I keep coming back to when I tell this story.

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AI & BrandingJul 2026

Nine Brands, One Roof: What Cheppih Taught Me About Systems That Scale

Somewhere around brand number six, I remember thinking: this is either going to be the most interesting project of my year, or the moment I finally lose my mind. It turned out to be the first one, mostly.

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