With the rapid advancement of generative AI technologies, the marketing industry is undergoing a profound transformation. Tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, Sora, and Deepseek are continuously pushing the boundaries of content creation efficiency, making “everyone a content creator” a tangible reality.

However, a new challenge has emerged: when every brand is capable of producing “decent” AI-generated content, where does the real competitive edge lie?

I. The Involution of AI Marketing: Low Barriers, High Homogeneity

Text-to-image, text-to-video, automated scriptwriting… AI has significantly lowered the barrier to content production. Marketers only need to input a few keywords, and a full suite of promotional assets can be generated—ranging from KV posters to short video scripts, visuals, and even memes.

While this kind of “cost reduction and efficiency boost” brings short-term benefits, it also leads to a highly homogeneous content ecosystem:

1. Visuals become sleek and uniform, but lack distinctiveness.

2. Copywriting becomes logical, but soulless.

As a result, differentiated expression and brand uniqueness have become scarce resources. This isn’t just about aesthetic fatigue—it’s a challenge to how well a brand can build and retain its unique identity.

II. The Essence of Brand Breakthrough: Not Technology, But Strategy

AI is merely a tool. What truly determines whether a brand can stand out is still its foundational brand strategy and content planning. In an era fully empowered by AI, brands must ask themselves three key questions:

1. Is our brand identity clear enough?

Can your brand’s visual language, content tone, and persona stand out in a sea of AI-generated, standardized materials? It’s not just about logos and color schemes—it’s about building a complete system of brand expression.

2. Is AI-generated content reinforcing our brand assets?

AI can produce massive content in a short time. But if the content isn’t aligned with your long-term brand assets, it becomes mere “attention bait.” Truly valuable AI content should revolve around the brand’s core beliefs, IP, and value propositions—becoming part of the brand’s legacy, not a one-off piece of content.

3. Have we built a data-driven content iteration mechanism?

AI is not only a content generator, but also an insight engine. By analyzing user interaction data, social media feedback, and UGC content, brands can iteratively optimize future content. This data loop will become a critical skill in AI-era content operations.

In short, the key to brand breakout in the AI era isn’t about who uses AI better—it’s about who understands better “Who we are” and “Why we should be remembered.”

III. The Social Shift of Content: From “What Brands Say” to “How Users Use It”

In the age of social media, communication is no longer a one-way street from brands to users. Today, the spread of content relies heavily on user-initiated sharing, remixing, and imitation. With AI making it easier than ever for anyone to become a creator, the logic of brand communication has changed: what you say matters less than whether users want to use it.

This means brand content must be highly socially usable: easy to understand, easy to share, and able to help users express themselves or showcase their attitudes.

A classic example is the viral success of McDonald’s meme-based community phenomenon, “Mai Men” (麦门):

Rather than launching a grand campaign, McDonald’s leaned into memes, emoji packs, jokes, and expressive catchphrases to build a whole “Mai Men” language system. Users began mimicking the “joining Mai Men” phrasing, creating and spreading memes, jokes, and narratives. Eventually, “Mai Men” became a cultural meme, not just a marketing campaign.

With AI, this co-creation effect becomes easier to scale. Brands can proactively design “raw materials for creativity”—editable meme templates, video skeletons, modular scripts—to spark user participation and expression.

So, in the AI era, the question brands should ask themselves is not “What content did we publish?” but rather:

“Have we created an open, fun, and usable space for expression?”

AI is not the end of creativity—it is an amplifier of it.

The real breakthrough for brands lies not in how well they use the technology, but in redefining why people will remember them in the age of AI.