Brand strategy
Research amongst luxury brands shows when AI actually harms your brand: as soon as emotion comes into play. Where that boundary runs, and what it costs.
Your customer notices nothing when AI writes your opening hours. They do notice when AI writes your thank-you email. That difference has a name: brand authenticity.
For years that sounded like a gut feeling from designers who saw their profession changing. Now there's a measurement, and the effect is larger than I'd expected.
AI-written communication only costs you credibility when emotion is involved. Factual texts and editorial work remain unpunished. The boundary doesn't lie with the technology, but with who determines the meaning. Below, where that boundary runs and what brand authenticity costs you if you ignore it.
Luxury is the laboratory of the brand world. There, the difference between price and meaning is greatest, and therefore it's most sharply examined. Someone selling a three-thousand-euro bag isn't selling leather.
The mechanism isn't reserved for the top end of the market. As soon as your customer doesn't choose on price but on feeling, the same rules apply. A physiotherapy practice that sells trust, a caterer that sells an evening, a gym that sells the feeling that someone belongs somewhere: all brands that must have meaning.
For you, the question therefore isn't whether you're luxury. The question is whether your customer buys from you for what it is or for what it means. In the second case, brand authenticity is your subject.
Colleen Kirk and Julian Givi published in 2025 in the Journal of Business Research a series of seven pre-registered experiments, together with over two thousand participants. They had people read the same marketing communication, with one difference. One group was told a human had written it, the other that AI had done it.
For an emotional email, willingness to recommend the brand dropped from 5.45 to 4.11 on a seven-point scale. That's not noise. That's a brand losing part of its word-of-mouth, because there's a line beneath an email.
The researchers also found why. It's not about quality, because the texts were identical. It's about brand authenticity, and for some readers about something the researchers call moral disgust. The reader feels manipulated. Emotion was feigned that wasn't there.
This is where it becomes interesting, and this is where most articles about this subject go wrong by only reporting the shock reaction.
The effect disappears with factual content. A price list, a manual, directions: there the reader doesn't care who or what built the sentences.
The effect also disappears when AI only edits and the human remains the sender. And with repurposed content, a text that was already copied, it even reverses. Then people value the AI version higher.
That's not a detail. That's the working instruction.
The boundary doesn't run between AI and no AI. The boundary runs between tasks where meaning is produced and tasks where it isn't. As soon as you as a brand claim to feel something, that feeling must come from somewhere. As soon as you only inform, the machine may do its work. That's where brand authenticity begins and ends.
That's the strongest objection, and it cuts wood. In the experiments it was stated in so many words. In practice, nobody puts beneath a thank-you email that a model drafted it. The researchers say so themselves: they worked with imagined situations and with participants from online panels in the United States and the United Kingdom. The measurement is therefore stricter than daily reality.
But the AI label isn't the cause. It's the revelation.
The text was already empty before anyone read it. The label beneath only made visible what wasn't in it. Remove it and the emptiness remains, only then the reader can't name it. He only feels that the email leaves him cold, and he doesn't forward it.
Moreover, that label is becoming increasingly superfluous. I catch myself seeing it from a distance now: four sentences with the same cadence, a list of three where two would suffice, an enumeration that goes nowhere. What sounded fluent last year now sounds like a model doing its best. Those who work daily with these systems recognise them within two paragraphs. That audience is growing, and your customers are in it. I wrote earlier about why humanity is your greatest asset in the AI era.
For Bonaire Eco Rentals, a family business that lets sustainable holiday homes on the island, three values had to come together in a brand identity: ecological responsibility, luxury comfort and nature conservation. On paper that's a tension, because luxury and austerity clash as soon as you don't take them seriously.
The three of us flew to the island. Not for the atmosphere, but because the research was there. We photographed at sunrise, we saw the coral from which the business derives its raison d'être, and we returned with what later became the Palette of Bonaire: ruby-red coral and turquoise water, taken from the island itself and not from a colour chart.
Today I can have an image made of turquoise water with a coral-red accent colour in half a minute. It would look good. It would also be worthless, because it's not that water, not that light and not that house. The founder said at the time that we'd captured the complete essence of the business. That was only possible because there'd been a team that had seen that essence.
That's brand authenticity in an image. An AI model can imagine a sunrise. It can't attend one.
Valentina Chiaudano and Hafsa Shakil from the University of Turin analysed 79 scholarly articles about AI in luxury brand management, published up to and including October 2025. Their overview came out this month and delivers precisely the concept that's missing in our field.
Brand authenticity, they write, is no longer the absence of technology in the AI era. It's the degree to which technology ethically and aesthetically aligns with where the brand comes from. They call that "curated authenticity": authenticity as the outcome of a conscious directorial choice rather than as a natural state.
Additionally, they describe what they call "hybrid intelligence". Value arises where prediction and intuition meet, where automation and craft work together rather than replacing each other.
A caveat about that second source. This is a literature study, not a measurement. The authors summarise what others found, the journal has only existed since 2024 and there's no limitations section in the article. Where this research and that of Kirk and Givi would contradict each other, the experiment wins. But they don't contradict each other. Kirk and Givi measure the boundary, Chiaudano and Shakil give it a name.
I work with AI in virtually every project, and I have a division of roles for it that runs exactly along that boundary.
I determine the brand, the strategy, the story and the judgement. That remains with me, because that's where meaning arises. AI produces: variants, structures, first versions, analyses. For code and technology I use different tools again. And I decide and deliver, because my name is beneath it. As long as I don't want or can't make that connection, the project isn't finished.
In practice that means four things. I write a customer story myself and at most have it edited. A manual, a specification or a list I readily have drafted and check afterwards. Images that must show a place that actually exists, I photograph, and images that must show an idea may be created. And when in doubt I ask a question: does this text claim to feel something? If yes, then there must be a human behind it who also felt it.
What strikes me since I've read this research: those weren't principles from caution. That simply proves to be the place where the effect stops.
It's worth measuring your own communication against this yardstick once. Not to remove AI, but to see where you're accidentally having it do the wrong work. That's precisely the work I do with entrepreneurs in a brand course trajectory.
Look at your welcome email, your thank-you email, your story about how the business began and your response to a complaint. Those are the places where your brand claims to feel something. Then look at your product texts, your frequently asked questions, your directions and your newsletter technique. There the machine may readily participate.
The mistake I see in the market isn't that entrepreneurs use AI. It's that they deploy it on precisely the wrong half, because that half is the most difficult and the writing there takes the longest. That's how brand authenticity leaks away at the only place where it counts.
Your brand isn't what you say you are. It's what remains when someone realises how it's made. Brand authenticity therefore isn't an attitude, it's a division of labour.
If you want to know where that boundary runs in your communication, send me an email. No form, no funnel, no sales conversation. Just an email.
Kirk, C.P. and Givi, J. (2025). The AI-authorship effect: Understanding authenticity, moral disgust, and consumer responses to AI-generated marketing communications. Journal of Business Research, 186, 114984.
Chiaudano, V. and Shakil, H. (2025). Understanding the role of artificial intelligence in luxury brand management. Journal of Emerging Perspectives, 2, 33-44. Published online on 18 July 2026.
Written by
Peter van der SteegePeter van der Steege is a brand strategist, designer and AI director. He builds brands for entrepreneurs and writes about what makes brands strong, from strategy to the role of AI and humanity. He lives and works in Groningen.
