AI is everywhere! But does it feel human, personal … and on BRAND?
Brand practice and brand science revolve around different orbits. The project “Building Brand” tries to connect these two worlds. Prof. Baumgarth is particularly pleased when these encounters result in concrete collaborations on exciting and relevant brand topics.
One such collaboration is the “AI Conversation Branding Study 2025” project with partners MetaDesign, eye square & Hochschule für Wirtschaft und Recht Berlin.
The aim was to analyze whether and how AI-generated chatbots can be designed as brand touchpoints in real time in a brand-oriented way. To this end, a mental model (OCEAN personality model) was used as a fine-tuning approach for ChatGPT, and experts and consumers were confronted with these chatbots in several studies.
The key findings are:
- Chatbots ≠ cost center – they demonstrably boost brand strength.
- OCEAN fine-tuning ensures a consistent brand voice – otherwise, there is a risk of brand violations and generic small talk.
- Strong power brands? Need fewer fine-tuning, because their brand values and brand tonality are already embedded in the training corpus of the LLMs.
More information about the study and the opportunity to try out the approach can be found here.
