What’s Brand Gravity?

And how do you make it AI-ready?

Strategic Brand Definition

Brand Gravity is a brand strategy tool that uncovers and defines an organization’s core purpose, behaviors, values, emotions, and expression in order to create a powerful gravitational pull toward the brand.

Co-created over five years by Matt Delcomyn and John Zilly, the concept is built on the premise that people today are searching for meaning more than ever before. According to social science research, people find meaning in four key ways: purpose, belonging, transcendence, and storytelling. When brands can connect with consumers in these fundamental human ways, they attract the customers, employees, and partners they want. Brand Gravity will help you do that. Here are some examples.

Why Does Brand Gravity Need to Be AI-ready?

Brand Gravity needs to be AI-ready because it forms the fundamental architecture of your brand's meaning, purpose, and voice—all elements that increasingly need to be deployed in various AI channels. As marketing automation and AI content generation become standard practice, these foundational brand elements must be structured with a clear, consistent taxonomy that AI systems can interpret and implement faithfully. Without AI-readiness, brands like yours risk inconsistent expression, reducing their gravitational pull on your customers and stakeholders. When it comes to your brand, you need machine-readable precision while maintaining the right tone, message, and human resonance. AI-ready Brand Gravity documents ensure that whether content is created by humans or artificial intelligence, the brand's core purpose and distinctive voice remain not just intact but vibrant and alive. This allows you to scale storytelling while preserving the authentic meaning that drives consumer connection.

See a few real-world Brand Gravity+AI examples, below.

Some Key Components in a Brand Gravity Guide

Since every organization has its unique challenges and strengths, every Brand Gravity guide takes different forms and include different elements. Most, however, contain these elements:

  • Purpose statement

  • Values

  • Vision

  • Mission statement

  • Archetype

  • Attributes

  • Rational and emotional benefits

  • Positioning statement

  • Customer profiles

  • Story frameworks

  • Segmented elevator pitches

The Brand Gravity+AI Process

The Brand Gravity process typically involves 4 quick phases: discovery, questionnaire, worksession, development. For our AI-enabled Brand Gravity, we consider AI inputs and outputs during each phase. 

The end result is a Brand Gravity Guide that serves as a strategic brand foundation for the organization, helping align everyone around a shared understanding of the brand's purpose and meaning. The guide includes ready-to-use communications, such as story frameworks, segmented pitches, AI prompts, and other outward focused language. On completion, we translate the guide into an AI-ready format that can be used in any AI tool.

Why Your Brand Gravity Matters

As Daniel Pink has written, "Meaning is the new money." In today's marketplace, brands that can articulate a compelling purpose and meaning have a significant advantage. Brand Gravity will help you:

  • Make more intentional decisions aligned with a consistent core purpose

  • Create and tailor products and services that make sense with your brand

  • Develop powerful messaging that resonates with consumers

  • Connect more deeply with internal and external stakeholders

  • Stand out in a competitive environment with clarity about what makes your brand vibrant and unique

In the past, Brand Gravity was perfect for either new brands or brands in need of a refresh. As AI has emerged, it’s clear that every brand needs to be carefully defined in a way that preserves its core personality because the bots won’t have any mercy.

If you’re interested in learning more about our Brand Gravity process, get in touch.

Real-world Brand Gravity examples

These two text blocks were generated by the same prompt using Claude. This one was generated without using AI-Ready Brand Gravity. It has the flat tone and straightforward presentation of a news story. It’s fine but not evocative or unique, and critically it doesn’t tell the story the way Burn Design Lab wants it told.

We used the same prompt for this text block plus added Burn Design Lab’s AI-ready Brand Gravity document to the knowledge base in Claude. This version tells the story in the way Burn Design Lab intended, emphasizing the danger to women, size of the problem, and how their innovative design is changing lives.

We generated this text using ChatGPT without AI-ready Brand Gravity. Again, it’s fine but flat and uninspired. It doesn’t strike the notes that make BBA unique, in fact it sounds like any other community organization.

Here we used the same ChatGPT prompt plus added AI-ready Brand Gravity to the knowledge base. This version tells a much more emotional story about loving a diverse neighborhood in an authentic way.