Brand vs. Demand in the Age of AI: The Balancing Act for CMOs

Why the pendulum is swinging back to brand in an AI-first world

First, a quick ask: I’m running a survey of marketing leaders, in collaboration with Ray Rike of BenchmarkIt, on how marketers are allocating budgets between brand and demand generation in 2025. If you’re a CMO, marketing leader, or CEO with a point of view, we’d love for you to take two minutes to share how you’re balancing the two by completing the survey here. We’ll publish the results so we can all see how the market is shifting.

The Timeless Tension: Brand vs. Demand

Every CMO knows the push and pull: how much budget to dedicate to brand—building long-term awareness, affinity, and trust—versus how much to invest in demand generation—driving the immediate pipeline CEOs and CFOs care about.

For the past several years, with interest rates climbing and investors demanding efficiency, the pendulum swung heavily toward demand generation. CMOs were under pressure to prove ROI and cut costs. Pipeline became the north star metric, while brand investments were often cut or deprioritized as “nice to have.”

But something has shifted.

AI Brings Brand Back to the Forefront

Many of the top AI-Native companies are investing in brand, some even more than demand generation. Companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and Lovable have had relatively small marketing departments in their earlier stages of growth, focusing more on brand, communications, and community experience than traditional demand-generation and paid activities. Why?

• Differentiation: AI has made software faster, cheaper, and easier to build. In crowded categories, the product isn’t enough of a moat. A distinct, memorable brand—mission, vision, personality, voice, visual identity—is a strong differentiator. Anthopic’s core brand value of acting for the global good underpins their value and message through everything they do. Lovable’s brand stands out against Replit’s for its warmth and approachability for the everyday people it sells to.

• Experience: In a crowded market, customers are not just buying the technology, but buying the experience of interacting with the company. Brand shapes that experience.

• B2B and B2C Crossover: Many AI products are bringing B2C experiences into B2B settings, or asking individuals to bring their favorite AI to work. B2C has long had an easier time matching brand investments to revenue because of shorter sales cycles and has long sold on emotion in addition to logic.

• Revenue impact: The irony is that brand, often seen as fluffy, is more directly impacting revenue. Companies with a strong identity stand out, attract more organic attention, and convert faster.

A Case in Point: Lovable

Take Lovable, the AI-native platform that lets anyone build apps through vibe-coding, where I’ve been advising lately. Its brand—both the word and the feeling—is working overtime for growth.

• The look and feel of the product is designed to be beautiful and fun, not sterile enterprise software.

• The voice is human, approachable, and yes, lovable. That makes people want to use it, share it, and evangelize it. It speaks to the 99% of people who don’t code and invites them into a world of technology that has previously seemed unapproachable to non-technical folks.

• The growth has been built on product, experience, and social media love, with paid advertising and demand generation taking an almost microscopic role.

• The momentum the brand creates in the market is palpable. Customers, influencers, and even journalists are drawn to the story not just because of the technology and growth, but because of the identity behind it. (Mad props to Nad Chishtie and Felix Haas for building such an energizing look and feel)

That’s the multiplier effect of brand: it doesn’t just complement demand; it accelerates it.

The CMO’s New Balancing Act

So where does that leave CMOs?

• Demand will always matter. The board still wants revenue efficiency and pipeline visibility.

• But brand is back. In the age of AI, companies that rely only on demand tactics risk blending into the noise.

The challenge for today’s leaders is not choosing one or the other—it’s orchestrating both. The right balance is dynamic, shifting with market cycles, company stage, and competitive pressure.

The 10 Pillars of Brand in an AI-First World

So what does "brand" actually mean in practice? It's more than just a logo or tagline. Here are the ten elements that separate memorable brands from forgettable ones in an AI-saturated market—in the order you'd actually build and roll them out:

1. Brand Identity & Recognition
Your foundational identity elements—company name, URL, logo, color palette, typography, and product UI. This starts with the basics: is your name memorable and brandable? Can people spell it, say it? (We almost renamed Atlassian because of these issues) Then it extends to how you present yourself visually. In a crowded AI world where products can feel similar, these core identity elements create instant recognition and help you stand out from the sea of sameness or laughable names.

2. Brand Values & Purpose
The principles that guide your company and how you communicate them. This foundation informs everything else you build. Customers and employees want to connect with brands that stand for something, especially as AI raises new ethical questions that require clear stances.

3. Brand Story & Narrative
The overarching story about who you are, why you exist, and what you're building toward. Built on your values, this story becomes the throughline for all communications. Storytelling fuels both press coverage and word-of-mouth. AI can help distribute stories, but the narrative itself must be authentic and compelling.

4. Voice & Tone
The personality is expressed through language, copy, and customer communications. Your story and values inform how you sound. AI-generated content risks sounding generic, so a strong, human, recognizable voice cuts through the noise and makes people actually want to read what you write.

5. Customer Experience
Every touchpoint, from website onboarding to support chats to product interactions. Experience is increasingly inseparable from brand. Frictionless, delightful experiences reinforce identity and drive the loyalty that keeps customers coming back. This can include even smooth off-boarding in cancellations, or empathetic error messages.

6. Emotional Content
Your brand's ability to trigger emotional connection through content, especially video and campaigns. Video is the currency of attention, and AI makes it cheaper to create—but harder to make memorable. Brands must infuse emotion and originality, and if it’s authentic to their brand, humor.

7. Community & Advocacy
How much your brand is loved, shared, and evangelized by customers, developers, or fans. Start building this early—community-led growth scales brand reach faster than paid channels, especially in ecosystems powered by AI where word-of-mouth moves at internet speed.

8. Advertising & Awareness
Paid campaigns, media buys, and amplification strategies. Once you have strong foundational elements, paid media can amplify them effectively. In an AI-first search world where organic reach is getting harder, this becomes one of the few controllable levers for visibility and mindshare.

9. Thought Leadership & Influence
Many AI-first companies are investing very deeply here - in informative podcasts, press, how-to videos, data reports, and insights - materials that help educate and inform on the new world order. This has always been critical in marketing, but the voraciousness everyone has to learn (and the crazy noise of everything AI) makes excellent thought leadership even more valuable at the moment. In AI-driven industries, being seen as a category shaper builds credibility that goes beyond product features and creates competitive moats - just take a look at Carta’s amazing data reports and resulting momentum.

10. Social Impact & Reputation
In the current AI gold rush, this isn’t factoring in quite as heavily here outside of a few companies that are more centrally dedicated to the cause (Anthropic), though Google did release data on how much energy an AI prompt uses earlier this week. I expect we’ll see more in this category as these AI-native companies grow—ESG commitments, philanthropy, and impact initiatives. Social trust is fragile, and social impact can reinforce the positive vision of a company. Plus, companies with authentic impact have more goodwill and resilience when crises hit.

Share Your Perspective

I’d love to know how you are thinking about brand versus demand right now. Are you shifting spend toward one or the other? What metrics do you use to prove a brand’s value?

Please take two minutes to fill out the survey here

I’ll share the results in an upcoming post so we can all benchmark where our peers are leaning in 2025.

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Carilu Dietrich is a former CMO, most notably the head of marketing who took Atlassian public. She currently advises CEOs and CMOs of high-growth tech companies. Carilu helps leaders operationalize the chaos of scale, see around corners, and improve marketing and company performance.

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