From brand identity to brand intelligence

Returning to Maribyrnong City Council's Business Elevate Program with a different approach to branding.

Last year, Citizen By Design joined Maribyrnong City Council's Business Elevate Program as a preferred supplier, offering local businesses a brand identity package designed to help them create a more distinctive and consistent visual identity.

This year, I wanted to try something different.

Over the past year I've been exploring how AI can become part of the branding process – not as a replacement for thinking or creativity, but as a way of making the thinking behind a brand more useful.

The more I've used AI, the more I've become interested in one of its biggest weaknesses: sameness.

Give the same tool a generic prompt and it's very easy to get a generic answer. But give it a clear understanding of a business – what makes it different, what it believes, how it speaks and what it's trying to achieve – and it becomes considerably more useful.

The process doesn't start by opening ChatGPT. It starts with the same questions I'd ask when developing a brand:

Who are you? What makes you different? Who are you trying to connect with? What do you believe? How should you sound?

Working directly with the business, we explore its positioning, purpose, vision, values, audiences and tone of voice before organising that thinking into a structured brand knowledge framework.

Only then does AI enter the process.

That framework becomes the foundation for a private Custom GPT – an AI assistant designed around the business rather than a generic prompt.

It can then help the owner think through marketing ideas, write communications, develop website and SEO content, check whether something sounds consistent with the brand, or simply answer the everyday question: “How would we say this?”

In that sense, it starts to feel less like another AI tool and more like brand guidelines that talk back.

What interests me most isn't AI's ability to create more content.

It's whether it can help a business communicate with greater clarity and consistency without losing the things that make it distinctive in the first place.

That's the experiment behind Citizen By AI – taking the thinking that traditionally sits behind a brand and turning it into something a business can actively use every day.