The Great Commoditisation:  Brand in a World Where Brand Doesn’t Matter

When that shift becomes embedded in everyday life, it will quietly challenge one of the core assumptions that has guided brand strategy for decades: that humans are the primary decision-makers. 

The end of the human moment in choice 

For most of modern marketing history, brand building has centred on shaping perception at the moment of choice. We obsess over awareness, salience and emotional resonance because we believe — correctly — that when a person is confronted with options, the brand that feels familiar, distinctive or meaningful stands the best chance of being selected. Entire industries have been built on influencing that fleeting human moment. 

But what happens when that moment no longer belongs to a human being? 

Automated decision making and its implications 

Take something mundane, like ordering a takeaway. Consumers don’t feel a deep emotional connection to whether dinner arrives via Just Eat, Deliveroo or Uber Eats. They may have habits, they may have interface preferences, but they do not meaningfully care about the logo on the rider’s jacket or the tone of voice in their advertising. Yet these businesses spend tens of millions of dollars each year attempting to cultivate precisely that sense of distinction. 

Imagine a scenario where the consumer never opens the app at all. Instead, they instruct an AI assistant to order a pizza. The system scans available providers, evaluates delivery times, checks service pricing, reviews reliability data, and executes the transaction. The entire process takes place in a black box. The user does not browse. They do not compare. They are not exposed to campaigns or nudged by distinctive assets. The decision is simply optimized. 

From a consumer perspective, this is seamless and efficient. From a brand perspective, it is deeply unsettling. 

The algorithmic consumer – a new challenge for brands 

In this environment, decisions are no longer influenced by nostalgia, positive sentiment, emotional cues or storytelling. Logic, parameters and data drive the outcome. The algorithm does not care if Snoop Dogg fronted the last campaign, how charming the copy was, or whether the brand won awards for creative excellence. It cares about price, speed, availability and performance. 

Viewed through this lens, certain sectors appear highly exposed. Consider telecommunications, insurance or utilities. Brands in these spaces have historically invested heavily in campaigns designed to create preference in crowded and often undifferentiated markets. Yet, in the UK at least, the right to switch providers with minimal friction is enshrined in regulation. Ofcom has made has switching easier than ever. Insurance comparison is almost entirely digital. Energy tariffs can be changed with a few clicks. 

There’s very little now that compels consumers to engage meaningfully with these brands. They do not need to visit a store, study tariff tables or sit through advertising. An AI agent could monitor the market continuously and move a user to a better deal without their active involvement. That is not brand competition in the traditional sense; it’s churn. 

Despite this reality, most brand strategies continue to behave as if human attention will remain the primary battleground. We need to prepare for a generational shift in thinking. 

From awareness to eligibility: the new role for brands 

For decades, we’ve treated awareness as the foundation of growth. Be famous. Be distinctive. Be top of mind. When the moment of choice arrives, ensure your brand is mentally available. That logic remains sound — if a human is making the decision. But an AI agent does not remember your jingle or subconsciously favour your colour palette. It does not feel reassured by your heritage or inspired by your purpose. It simply calculates. 

This does not mean brand and marketing disappear, but their function must. Marketeers need to switch their focus upstream from the moment of choice to defining the parameters of choice. 

Encoding values into AI 

Discussions about automation tend to miss a critical nuance: humans still define the criteria. A user might delegate the act of comparison to an AI, but they will still determine what it optimizes for. They might instruct it to prioritize companies with high customer service ratings, favour businesses with credible sustainability credentials, or exclude brands that have suffered data breaches. Human values, identity, and worldview will still shape the rules. 

Trust, identity signalling, and ethical alignment: these human drivers do not evaporate simply because a machine intermediates the transaction. In fact, they may become more explicit. Rather than being subconsciously influenced by advertising, consumers will consciously encode their preferences into the system. 

In that world, the role of brand becomes less about capturing attention in the moment. It becomes about establishing an identity so clear and widely understood that consumers choose to programme those specific parameters into their agents.  The brands that endure will stand for something concrete enough to shape the instructions people give their machines. 

Operational resilience and symbolic value 

This dynamic explains why operational-first companies, like Octopus Energy, may prove more resilient than legacy incumbents. Their reputation is built on operational behaviour, not just communication. In an ecosystem where machines evaluate performance and reliability, that kind of structural advantage matters. 

At the other end of the spectrum, luxury and hype-driven brands operate in a realm that is less susceptible to optimisation logic. A Rolex is not chosen because it is the most efficient timekeeping device, and Hermès does not compete on price-performance metrics. Scarcity, symbolism and social signalling are deeply human dynamics, and as functional categories commoditise, those symbolic categories will likely become even more pronounced. 

The vast middle ground faces the biggest risk — the brands whose differentiation relies primarily on communication rather than capability. Agentic AI will expose decorative branding with uncomfortable clarity. If your distinctiveness lives in marketing but not in service, performance or trust, then optimisation will reduce your value to price alone.  

The path forward 

For branding professionals, this is not a minor adjustment; it is a fundamental reframing. The future will rely less on megaphones and more on architecture. We must move away from simply generating awareness toward establishing qualities so credible and so consistent that they influence how customers configure their digital proxies. The question will no longer simply be how to be noticed, but how to remain eligible. 

The great commoditisation will not arrive with a single, dramatic announcement. It will unfold gradually, as convenience wins and delegation becomes the norm. Yet, its implications are profound. In a world where brand appears not to matter because machines do the choosing, the brands that survive will be those that matter enough for people to instruct their machines accordingly. 

That is a far higher bar than awareness. It demands a serious evaluation of what a brand is built to achieve.