As part of the 2026 IPA Excellence Diploma in Brands, Andy Fraser explores why a brand's identity can no longer be held together by subjective human judgement alone – and therefore we must stop treating governance as a craft and start managing it with the precision of a machine tool, the Brandroid.
On the ground floor of the Science Museum in London, just past Tim Peake's Soyuz spacecraft and the first motor car, sits a rather ugly brass model – something like a cross between a sewing machine and a ship's wheel. It's certainly not the sexiest artefact in the building, yet it's arguably the most important machine tool in human history: Henry Maudslay's slide-rest lathe, invented in 1800.
Before it, every nut and bolt was handmade by eye. A bolt crafted in one workshop would never fit a nut from another – so if a machine broke down, you had to hire a blacksmith to make a custom replacement. Maudslay believed this was hindering industrialisation. His solution was a machine to create consistent screw threads. Without it, steamships, locomotives and the internal combustion engine would never have been feasible.
Today, brand management is trapped in its own pre-Maudslay era. We've built an industry where brands are still maintained manually, by artisans – and in an accelerated, hyper-fragmented landscape, that's no longer sufficient.
I believe that a brand's identity can no longer be held together by subjective human judgement alone – and therefore we must stop treating governance as a craft and start managing it with the precision of a machine tool.
This paper introduces that tool: the Brandroid. It traces the rise of signal-led branding, diagnoses its costs and sets out a blueprint for restoring coherence in a world where signals no longer point the way.
But first, let’s go back to when it all began…
The age of signals
Modern marketing was born directly from the spillover of the Industrial Revolution. Throughout the 1800s, as production scaled and competition intensified, the challenge facing businesses shifted from how to make things to what to make, how to differentiate it and how to sell it. Modern branding and advertising emerged in response to this complexity.
As marketing evolved into a formal discipline, decisions were increasingly expected to be grounded in external rationale rather than personal intuition. Brands began looking outward for guidance. Category norms, consumer data, performance metrics and, increasingly, culture itself became signals marketers relied on to guide their decisions.
Over time, the use of such signals became standard practice, intellectually grounded in behavioural science and new theories around how brands actually grow.0
These theories didn’t just explain how people choose brands – they quietly reshaped how they were managed. The first brands may have been simply the names of the people who made the product (e.g. Smith, Weaver, Baker) but we now approach brands almost if they are human themselves: scanning the environment for cues, copying what appears to work and defaulting to familiarity or consensus under pressure (Levine, R. et al., 2000).
And it’s worked. Humans have become spectacularly, undeniably successful at building brands. Strong ones command a 13% price premium, generate up to three times the sales volume of their competitors and outpace the stock market by nearly 400% (Roach, 2020).
However, the uncomfortable truth is that the signal-led approach was so well-suited to the world in which it emerged that it no longer fits the one now taking shape. The conditions have changed – and so must the way we build and manage brands.
Signal overload – the post-signal condition
Maudslay and his contemporaries could scarcely have imagined society today. Until relatively recently, culture was bound by a stable, singular monoculture (Klosterman, 2022). Reference points were inherited rather than chosen – what you cared about was largely identical to your neighbours, peers and grandparents.
That cohesion has dissolved. Competing narratives, proliferating subcultures and personalised algorithmic feeds mean that signals still arrive – in greater volume than ever – but they no longer point in one clear direction. They pull against each other, or simply overwhelm. Brands are forced into constant accommodation: bending to meet the market rather than standing firm within it, each at risk of becoming – as Roach (2024) warns – ‘a disconnected mess, with meaning and messages lacking coherence and consistency’.
But here’s the paradox. The same explosion of data, frameworks and effectiveness research that fragments strategic direction also produces its opposite: convergence. With everyone drawing from the same well of signals, different brands adopt similar strategic principles, emotional territories and media behaviours. What Yakob (2015) calls ‘convergent evolution’ isn't unique to branding – in finance, alpha-generating strategies lose their edge once widely adopted (Nauman, 2020); in SEO, best practice becomes a race to the middle.
The result is a post-signal age: not an absence of signals, but an excess of them – so abundant, and so widely shared, that they no longer reliably produce direction that’s differentiated or strategically consistent for the brand. Instead of guiding brands toward coherent, distinctive identities, signals have become a mechanism for drift. The evidence is already visible: brands' creative range is narrowing (Binet and Field, 2018), distinctive assets are weakening (Romaniuk, 2018) and communications are clustering around similar tones and structures (Morgan and Field, 2023).
What this produces
Peter Field identified a crisis of effectiveness driven by short-termism (Field, 2019). The reliance on signals is now layering on a second crisis – one of coherence. Instead of standing for something clear, brands are pulled in too many directions at once, slowly losing their shape.
The problem isn't a shortage of intelligence or ideas. It's that we are trying to manage an industrial volume of brand decisions with pre-industrial tools.
I call the cumulative cost of that failure the Identity Tax – offered here as a conceptual approach to thinking about the financial implications of drift, rather than a precise forecasting methodology.
The Identity Tax – the cost of drift
Signal-led brands won't fail overnight. But they will work harder for diminishing returns – and the cost of that extra effort accumulates in three areas.
The Media Inflation Penalty
We have at least two benchmarks to guide expected returns from media investment.
We know that a 10% ESOV should deliver 0.6% market share growth, and that stable brands grow share more than twice as efficiently as inconsistent ones (Binet and Field, 2017; Tindall, 2025). But both assumptions rely on baseline brand recognition – and when identity is incoherent, distinctive assets weaken, recognition fails to compound and the ESOV–SOM relationship degrades. The result is ESOV inflation. Brands then have to outspend the benchmark to achieve the same return.
Figure 4 shows the impact on a brand targeting 2% share growth (via 33% ESOV) in category with a total £20m media spend. Its incoherent identity delivers only 40% prompted recognition vs. 70% category norm, resulting in a relative asset strength of 57%. Additionally, its rather dull, norm-chasing communications achieve only a 1-star System 1 rating: a form of creative drag that restricts them to a 1x ESOV multiplier (Connors, 2017). Compared to an average brand and campaign, which would need 27.5% adjusted ESOV (33% / 1.2), the drifting brand would have to achieve 58% (33% / 57% / 1). That’s an additional £6.1m.
The Price of Algorithmic Invisibility
As search shifts toward AI-generated answers, coherence increasingly determines visibility – introducing a second cost.
AI systems don't ‘judge’ brands per se – they just recognise patterns in data. If a brand sends mixed or inconsistent messages, that looks like noise to the AI, which treats it as less reliable. The result is that brands without a clear, consistent identity get down-weighted.
Early evidence suggests the impact of this could be significant. According to McKinsey, brands with weak identities may increasingly experience 30–60% lower organic AI visibility relative to their market presence (see figure 6; Silliman et al., 2025). As AI search continues to evolve, the precise relationship between brand coherence and visibility will emerge.
Systemic Inefficiency
The hidden internal costs to a drifting brand are arguably worse than any external damage. When organisations constantly react to signals, everything becomes harder. Teams end up constantly firefighting with ‘busy work’: churning out tactical reactive content, rewriting strategies over and over and endless research to validate ideas with new audiences.
The ultimate price of drift is commoditisation. When competing brands chase the same data and copy the same trends, there's nothing to distinguish them – so people just buy on price. Margins shrink. What started as wasted ad spend becomes lost profit.
So neither the costs nor the causes of drift are in short supply. What's missing is a solution.
Why neither fix works
The obvious response might be to look inwards. If external signals can't be trusted, perhaps the answer lies in a brand's own DNA – its purpose, its founding principles, the decisions its founders would have made.
As appealing as that is, it doesn't hold.
Brands don't have stable internal 'selves'. They're constructed entities - sustained through shared belief, real only because people agree they are (Harari, 2016). Purpose statements articulate intent; they can't enforce it. Neither can brand guidelines. And a brand's DNA can always be stretched to justify contradictory decisions.
Burberry has always stood for British heritage, authenticity and craftsmanship. Under Rose Marie Bravo that justified aggressive licensing – the check on everything from caps to bags to strollers (all bought by Danniella Westbrook). Under Christopher Bailey, the same DNA justified the opposite: a ruthless culling of licenses to protect authentic craftsmanship.
With neither external signals nor internal essence able to reliably hold a brand together, maintaining clarity and consistency is getting harder – and marketers know it (see Figure 7). 86% of them also believe it has an impact on business performance (see Figure 8).
The irony is that branding has drifted from its own founding principle. A brand was originally a literal mark of consistency – a standardised guarantee (Kapferer, 2012). In becoming signal-led, we've quietly undermined the very thing that makes a brand work.
As counter-intuitive as it sounds, bringing a kind of automated precision to distinctiveness and differentiation will help to break this impasse. We need a new Maudslay.
A new Maudslay – meet the Brandroid
As individuals, we’ve already found a way to adapt to the modern world’s baffling array of options and decisions – by employing systems and tools to inform better judgement. Google Maps chooses routes for us. Netflix helps filter what we watch.
Brands haven't yet made a comparable shift.
What they need is a standardising mechanism – something that holds individual brand decisions to a consistent set of constraints, the way Maudslay’s lathe enabled every screw to be made to a common standard. Unlike people, such a system doesn't tire, forget or bend the same fact to a different conclusion on a different day.
Recent advances in tech make this credible. And that’s the idea behind the Brandroid: an AI-powered decision-support system that encodes a brand's commitments – what it stands for, its boundaries, trade-offs and non-negotiables – and evaluates proposed actions against them.
A shift in operating logic
Other fields have long trusted systems to handle decisions when complexity exceeds human capacity – without removing expertise or accountability. In aviation, fly-by-wire keeps pilots steady under extreme conditions – planes with systems installed are 89% less prone to ‘Loss of Control Incidents’ (Airbus, 2022). In medicine, clinical decision-support tools reduce diagnostic errors by up to 30% (Klein, 2025). In both cases, people retain responsibility. The system just keeps them steady.
Branding faces a similar challenge, without yet implementing an equivalent mechanism.
The commercial case for building one is clear. Gromark and Melin (2011) studied 500 companies and found that those treating brand identity as a governing principle achieved close to double the profitability of the rest. As the authors note: “Brand orientation... is about a mindset where brand identity is the starting point for all decisions” (Urde M., 1999, cited in Gromark and Melin, 2011, p.395). What's been missing is a way to make that approach systemic.
Daniel Kahneman has shown us that even experienced professionals following identical guidelines make highly inconsistent decisions – what he calls ‘noise’ (Kahneman et al., 2021). The Brandroid is, at its core, a mechanism for reducing that noise in brand judgement. It does not exist to enforce rigidity. Brands can genuinely benefit from strategic elasticity, cultural responsiveness, even deliberate inconsistency - from Nike’s reactive cultural positioning to Supreme’s constantly shifting output. The aim is not to eliminate adaptability, but to coordinate it coherently.
Liquid Death illustrates the principle in practice. Canned water with a death metal identity, it’s ignored every signal that should have killed it – health-washing trends, category norms, algorithmic pressure toward relatability – and evaluated every decision against a single encoded commitment instead. The result is extraordinary coherence and commercial results. It doesn't have a Brandroid. But it behaves as if it does.
Brands have always evolved by mirroring human behaviour. This is simply the next step: just as people now use AI to support their own judgement, brands can use it to hold theirs – shifting the operating logic of brand governance (see Figure 9).
The Brandroid Operating Manual
Maudslay didn't just conceive the lathe – he built a workshop to turn it into reality. What follows is the equivalent: a practical guide to commissioning and running the Brandroid, written for the strategist rather than the engineer.
The single most important Guidance Note is this: the Brandroid exists to reduce strategic drift – it is not designed to be, nor should it be used as, a creative gatekeeper. It has no opinion on whether a campaign is brave or boring: human judgement and taste remain fundamental. Think of it less as a judge and more as a navigation system: it doesn't choose the destination, and it doesn't drive the car. It simply keeps the brand on course when complexity, competing pressures and the sheer volume of decisions would otherwise cause it to drift.
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Getting started: where different brands begin
Not every brand will start from the same place.
Some know exactly who they are, but are easily drawn off course by signals. Others have governance in place, but built around an identity that is not effective or clear enough to be worth governing. Each requires a different entry point. The matrix (Figure 11) below maps both conditions into a roadmap toward full Brandroid implementation.
One warning. The most dangerous starting position isn't having too little structure - it's having just enough to feel confident. A Brandroid encoded with a weak identity won’t solve drift: it will systematise it.
Final calibration
Not all brands need the same level of consistency. Some – in fashion, entertainment or youth culture – might succeed precisely because they are reactive, fluid and hard to predict. The Brandroid is designed to accommodate this. A brand that’s chosen reactivity as its operating mode can encode that choice: the system will protect its freedom to respond, while still preventing the accidental drift that comes from having no position at all. The spectrum runs from tight guardrails to deliberate flexibility – but in every case, the brand stays where it has chosen to be, by design rather than by default (Figure 12).
What the Brandroid delivers
In practice, the Brandroid would deliver a small number of outputs – each designed to reduce decision noise rather than replace decision-making.
A ‘brief evaluation’ assesses any incoming brief and flags where a task risks coherence before work begins. A ‘signal filter’ reviews cultural and market trends, identifying which offer opportunities to enrich the brand's identity and which simply add noise.
Where a proposed action crosses a line, the system issues a ‘drift alert’ warning of the long-term consequence of a decision. Over time, a periodic ‘coherence audit’ would track the consistency of output across teams, channels and markets – making drift visible before it becomes irreversible.
Some of the most valuable applications are less obvious. In workshops and live strategy sessions, the Brandroid could be activated in the room, replacing the politics of who argues loudest with an objective reference point. A coherence evaluation ahead of creative presentations would shift the conversation from subjective preference to strategic fit.
Machine logic + human magic = creative power
All of this raises a question the industry will inevitably ask: what does this mean for agencies?
Far from diminishing their role, a fully operational Brandroid frees them to move upstream – from maintaining coherence to deploying it.
Too much effort today is spent in stabilising the present rather than projecting the future: re-explaining intentions, re-interpreting strategy under pressure, arbitrating the same disagreements brief by brief. This is work that simply shouldn't exist. The Brandroid anchors decisions to a consistent set of constraints, extending strategic intent into every moment of choice – so that bold moves become easier to take, and fear of drift stops being an excuse to reject great work.
Agencies that build and maintain Brandroids don’t just create new value for clients – they create a new model of value for themselves, selling infrastructure instead of projects. Strategy becomes something that runs through everything, and the agency becomes indispensable.
But the most valuable thing this capability protects isn't consistency, efficiency or even equity. It's the one thing no system can supply: imagination.
That remains irreducibly human.
In Maudslay’s workshop, the taming of the screw wasn’t about restriction; it was an act of liberation. By standardising the baseline mechanics, it made the locomotives and steamships that reshaped the world not just possible – but inevitable.
The Brandroid offers the same opportunity: standardise the governance, and you free the imagination. And in a post-signal world shaped by systems, data and optimisation, that will truly remain the last unfair advantage.
Andy Fraser is Managing Director & Head of Strategy at BETC. This essay was submitted as part of the IPA Excellence Diploma in Brands.
The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and were submitted in accordance with the IPA terms and conditions regarding the uploading and contribution of content to the IPA newsletters, IPA website, or other IPA media, and should not be interpreted as representing the opinion of the IPA.
Last updated 22 September 2026