AI is making brands sound the same.
Your team, your agency and your competitors all ask the same AI. We build AI on what your customers and your competitors’ customers say, so the ideas your team gets are yours.
What we wrote
Patagonia
“A fine jacket, survived by its zipper.”
Friends hold a straight-faced funeral for a torn jacket. Then someone brings out the repaired jacket, and the coffin turns out to be empty.
The brief: Get people to repair damaged gear, or buy it used, before buying new.
Same brief, AI on its own
- “It’s not worn out. It’s worn in.”
- “Repair it once. Brag about it forever.”
(01) — Why
AI is built to give the most likely answer. For a brand, the most likely answer is the one everyone else gets.
Every brand has ChatGPT. What changes the answer is what you give it to work from.
(02) — Brands vs. their fans
Brands sound alike. Their fans don’t.
An Aston Martin dealer’s posts sound like this:
- “Sun rising. Engine thundering. Asphalt awaits.”
- “Spines will tingle. Jaws will drop. Hair will stand.”
People posting about the same car sound like this, and got almost four times the views.
6.8Mviews
Renting the Aston Martin: £500. New suit: £750. Videographer: £750. Hotel: £250. Re-creating the famous James Bond Skyfall image: Priceless.
Posted by a fan
14.8Mviews
Didn’t see that coming 🤣
Posted by a fan
3.4Mviews
batman
Posted by a fan
This is what we test your work against before it ships.
See the full study
(03) — What we do
One system, built around your brand.
It starts from what people say about you and your competitors, adds your own sales, and gives your team four things.
- Audience and competitor research
- Social and content analysis
- Creative testing before launch
- Campaign and product ideas
- AI-powered analytics
- Custom AI tools for your team
- Brand-trained assistants
- ChatGPT and Claude integration
Know what a competitor’s unhappy customers want before the competitor does.
A short list each week of what changed in your market and what to do about it, with the quotes behind each point.
Walk into the board meeting with the numbers and quotes behind your plan.
Ask a plain question about your customers, your competitors or your sales, in Slack, Teams or ChatGPT, and get an answer you can check.
Stop paying for work your audience has already ignored.
Concepts, scripts and posts scored against what your audience has responded to and what competitors already say, before the money goes behind them.
Give your agency a starting point they couldn’t find themselves.
Campaign and product ideas that start from what your customers say, ranked so your team begins with the strongest few.
(04) — How it works
How it works.
We connect the places people talk about you and your competitors, add your own sales data, and build the system around your brand.
What goes in
- Your reviews and comments
- Your competitors’ reviews and comments
- Forums and communities
- Competitors’ ads and posts
- Your sales data
What the system does
- 01Sorts every comment by who said it and which brand it’s about
- 02Compares you with each competitor
- 03Flags what changed since last week
- 04Checks every claim against the quote it came from
- 05Goes to a person on our team for review
(05) — Proof
Tested against the AI you already have.
See the research64%6%
How often AI repeated an idea it had already written for the same brief, on its own and then in our system.
3.5%38%
Ideas rated interesting by two independent AI judges who didn’t know which ideas were ours.
(06) — Working together
How we work together.
We build the system around your brand first. After that it runs as a monthly service, for less than the strategist it saves you hiring.
Step 01
First two weeks
We connect your brand, your competitors and the places your customers talk, and deliver the first findings.
Step 02
Then, every week
Findings, answers whenever your team asks, and scores on work before it goes out.
Step 03
Over time
We add competitors, audiences and new tools as the business needs them.
(07) — Questions
What brand leaders ask us first.
- How is this different from social listening?
- Social listening counts mentions of your brand. We go through what people say about you and your competitors, and tell your team what to change because of it.
- Why can’t we get this from ChatGPT?
- ChatGPT starts from the same place for every brand, so it gives every brand the same likely answers. Ours starts from your customers, your competitors and your sales.
- Will this replace our agency?
- No. It gives your agency better material and a way to test work before it ships. Your people still decide what gets made.
- Who will we work with?
- A small team with backgrounds in brand strategy, creative and AI engineering. The people you meet stay on your account from the first call on.
(08) — Contact
Let’s get breakfast.
Or a call.
Name the competitor you watch most closely. We’ll show you what their customers are saying about them.
steph@ill.studioYour data stays yours. It never trains anyone’s model.
