Daymond John Says the Brands That Stand Out Make 1 Choice a Machine Can’t Make
When everyone has the same AI tools, the edge goes to taste.
EXPERT OPINION BY NICOLE RAMIREZ, FOUNDER, NR DIGITAL CONSULTING
Anyone can generate a logo in seconds now. A launch campaign, a brand palette, a month of captions, all of it is a prompt away. Which raises a question every small business owner is now wrestling with: if the tools that once separated a polished brand from an amateur one are now free and universal, what is actually left to compete on?
New research from Adobe Express, released this month, points to an answer that is harder to download than any template. Adobe found that small business owners are not rejecting AI. They are using it and editing it into something that sounds like them, and the ones pulling ahead lean on it to bring the specific character of their brand to life rather than to sound like everyone else. The differentiator is no longer access to the tools but taste in how you use them.
To understand what that looks like from the top and the trenches, two people worth listening to sit at opposite ends of the same idea: Daymond John, who built a globally recognized brand decades before any of these tools existed, and Taylor Loren, a creator who teaches more than 350,000 followers how to actually make the stuff.
The thing AI still can’t hand you
Daymond John built FUBU into a cultural force, starting with handmade hats on a street corner in Queens, with none of the modern toolkit within reach. Ask him what separates one business from another now that anyone can generate a brand identity on demand, and he goes straight past the visuals.
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“AI can help you create a logo, a campaign, or a piece of content in seconds, but it can’t give you a genuine reason for why your brand should exist,” he says. “That still has to come from the founder.” What made FUBU different, in his telling, was never the logo. It was the culture and the community behind it, the part that is far harder to replicate than a visual identity. The Adobe research backs the instinct: 79 percent of small business owners agree that a clear point of view is not simply good branding but the thing that makes people follow you. As John puts it, people want to know not only what they are buying, but who they are buying it from.
Taylor Loren sees the same change from the creator side, in the questions her audience asks her. For years, they wanted to know how: how to edit a Reel, how to design something, which tools to use. AI has made the how dramatically easier, and 66 percent of small business owners are already using AI for marketing and content, so access is no longer the barrier. “Now, I think people need more help figuring out what is actually worth making,” she says, “and then having the confidence to put it out into the world.” The bottleneck moved from production to judgment.
What “blending in” actually looks like
The risk of universal tools is a universal sameness, and both of them can describe it precisely because they see so much of it.
Source: www.inc.com
