As AI edges us ever closer to Sam Altman’s vision of the one-person unicorn, launching a company has never been easier. With more startups, ideas, products and services emerging than ever before, creating a solid, authentic brand identity is essential to stand out from the crowd.
Sköna is a creative agency that builds bold brand strategies for cutting-edge B2B tech companies. Headquartered in San Francisco, its clients include tech industry giants such as the data management giant Snowflake and the fintech innovator Kleer.
Martyna Studniarska, Creative Strategist at Sköna, joined the agency in San Francisco in 2013. She’s since moved back to Stockholm’s satellite office, where she assists companies in creating their brand blueprint and in building efficient creative campaigns to reach their target audience.
“I help clients define the foundation of their brand – who they are, why they exist and who they serve – and then shape their brand expression in words, including their tone of voice, personality and core essence to ensure a consistent brand image,” she explains.
I sat down with Martyna to dive into how AI is shaking up the rules of B2B marketing and explore where the real opportunities lie today.
Using AI in the Ideation Phase
As a Creative Strategist, Martyna uses AI primarily as a catalyst for creativity, employing it in unexpected ways to generate fresh ideas. Creativity lies at the heart of brand building, enabling brands to present themselves in a unique and engaging way that sparks customer interest. When used judiciously, AI can enhance this creative process.
One method she relies on is the so-called ‘paradox process’, a brainstorming approach which involves identifying paradoxes in the target industry – situations where two contradictory truths coexist – and using the resulting tensions as a source of creative inspiration. In her experience, AI is particularly useful in highlighting these internal contradictions and setting off creative sparks for the team to build upon.
AI for ideation is not a one-stop-shop however. “It’s rarely the case that you just put in one prompt and have a campaign. It usually takes a lot of thinking.” The initial ideation phase, which involves identifying the core idea around which everything else revolves, is typically carried out through team brainstorming. Only once this core idea has been determined can AI be used as a tool to generate more concrete ideas from that initial spark.
Furthermore, Martyna warns against relying too heavily on AI for generating content, as the public becomes increasingly wary of the AI voice so frequently encountered on social media. In 2024, the AI content detection startup Originality AI revealed that over 54% of LinkedIn messages exceeding 100 words were AI-generated. In response to this tidal wave of monotonous, automated output, the general public is starting to seek out more authentic content.
AI in the Hands of Consumers
Nowadays, understanding your customers’ evolving expectations and behaviors in relation to AI is essential to effective B2B branding.
Effective branding involves knowing how to position oneself in the market and enhance one’s strategic visibility. Understanding customers’ online behaviour, particularly with regard to AI, is crucial for effective brand positioning.
“These days, around 60% of potential clients have researched the product or service offered by the company before contacting the vendor,” explains Martyna.
However, the way customers search for information online has changed. As LLMs gradually replace search engines, traditional SEO methods of building a public image are evolving.
An increasing number of consumers are using AI chatbots rather than traditional web search engines to conduct their research. For brands trying to optimize their outreach, the fundamental difference lies in the fact that LLMs, unlike web browsers, don’t just provide a series of links, but rather analyze information to provide one single, synthetized answer. According to Bain & Company, around 80% of search users rely on AI summaries in at least 40% of their searches. This means fewer opportunities for brands to appear before customers through clicks or website traffic, hard-won through years of search engine optimisation.
Marketers must therefore exploit the new outreach opportunities offered by AI: now that AI provides a synthesis of a brand’s public communications, it’s no longer a brand’s visibility that matters, but its credibility. Once the brand has a clear, strong strategy in place, AI will naturally follow suit and convey the desired narrative to customers. In the midst of all the AI-generated noise, it is the strategists’ responsibility to ensure that the brand is correctly positioned online.
To ensure her customers use the right tone and messaging across platforms, Martyna teaches them how to use AI effectively. She now provides her clients with customized AI prompts to help them achieve the right tone of voice for future campaigns. As she explains, “They’re going to use AI whether we like it or not – we just help them use it in the best possible way.”
A valuable tool to gain insight into your customers and competitors
With an ever-increasing number of companies emerging, it’s essential to identify one’s niche and understand the market segment one serves. AI can process large amounts of valuable customer and competitor data for this purpose: the more accurate information companies have about each other, the better they can position themselves to serve different market segments.
As Martyna reminds the entrepreneurs she works with, it’s important to remember that “competitors don’t want to compete head-on either. Everyone benefits from having a lot of information out there, so you can be sure to find your own market segment.”
B2B in particular requires a sophisticated analysis of complex data. Part of Martyna’s work involves determining a brand’s ‘persona’: in marketing terms, this is a fictional projection created to represent a certain demographic in a company’s target audience.
“I help businesses understand their target audience, giving them an idea of who they’re selling to and who their leads are,” she explains.
After conducting a handful of in-depth interviews, Martyna inputs the gathered data into an AI, which then creates a model persona using additional customer data extracted from the internet. Martyna and her team can then interact with the persona, asking it questions and bouncing ideas off it. The clearer their understanding of their target audience, the more effectively they can develop a captivating brand strategy.
Beyond the AI hype: Building brands that last
As technologies continue to develop, Sköna’s core belief remains the same: the essence of marketing lies in building a clear, unique brand voice. Although data can inform the brand-building process, it cannot replace the human creativity and insight required to define a brand’s mission, values and personality.
While AI can reveal opportunities and generate ideas, for now, the creative spark at Sköna still comes from people. That’s why, in the future, the brands that will stand out most are those that not only master AI for themselves, but also understand how their customers and competitors are using it, leveraging that knowledge to craft more distinctive creative strategies.
