In 2008, I decided to buy one of the most striking cars ever built: the Volvo P1800, nicknamed Schneewittchensarg, or Snow White’s coffin. It looks as strange as it sounds. It has the silhouette of a sports car, low and lean. But it is not quite a sports car. It is something else entirely.
The story behind the car’s shape is stranger than the name itself.
In 1970, Volvo’s U.S. sales were under threat from a new American tax on sports cars. The company never said that was the reason for the different shape. The official line given to the press was that a golf bag needed to fit in the back. It later became clear that the real reason was the tax law.
To qualify as a sedan, the car got a frameless glass hatch, designed by Jan Wilsgaard. That hatch became the icon. A German journalist gave it its name. The big glass rear window and the wraparound glazing made the car look as if the king’s daughter lay inside it, on show for everyone under glass. Snow White’s coffin. Nobody at Volvo ever planned this design as a statement. It was a forced workaround of a tax bill.
That is the point. No committee or optimised process would ever have arrived at that shape. It happened because one designer took a strange constraint and made something out of it. An idea with an edge.
Most large companies today produce the opposite. Generic content.
They have one approved AI tool, rolled out by IT, locked down for security and safety. It is safe. It is compliant. And it is almost identical to the one the competitor down the road is using.
An AI for everyone sounds like progress. For a brand, it is the opposite. A brand is supposed to be the one thing that is not like everyone else.
I have spent more than 30 years coming up with ideas for brands. I have watched the work get faster and cleaner. I have also watched it get more generic. Most CMOs feel this, even when they do not say it out loud.
Generic in, generic out
Here is how it happens.
Today’s CMO sits in an IT-driven environment. The rules are about security and data, not always about brand. So the AI that lands on every desk is a general one. It has no real knowledge of what makes this company different.
Then the work moves. The internal team writes a brief. The brief is already a little generic, because the tool behind it was generic. The brief goes to the agency. The agency answers it, often with its own general AI. What comes back is fluent, correct, and could belong to anyone.
Generic in, generic out. At every step a little more of the brand is averaged away.
And the part that should hold all this together, the relationship with the people who know the brand from the outside, is the part nobody pays for anymore. The agency used to be a partner on a retainer. Now it is delivering a project and a deadline. The knowledge stops transferring. The outside view falls away.
The real cost is the brand’s edge
The danger is not bad content. The content looks fine. The danger is that the brand loses its edge.
Everyone now optimises on the same data, with the same tools, under the same fear of taking a risk in a hard economy. So everyone arrives at the same safe answer. The unusual idea, the brave decision, the part that does not quite fit. This is what gets streamlined out. That part was the brand.
The corporate world rarely asks whether the output is real, or whether there is any thinking behind it. It asks whether the deliverable has been shipped.
AI gets you 20% better. It will not make you brave.
So what actually helps?
Getting the right knowledge into the AI is the start. Real expertise, built into the tool, so it understands this brand, this market, this customer. A general assistant cannot do that. And that is where it is decided: whether an output sounds like you, or like everyone.
But a tool does not get you all the way.
In my experience, AI makes you about 20% better. It will not give you the confidence to do the bold thing. And it will not tell you, from experience, which risk is worth taking. That part is human.
The most valuable thing an agency ever gave a client was the outside view. I work with many brands and many problems, and I carry what we learn from each one into the next room. No single company has that view. No company’s private AI has it either.
The real answer to making the technology work is to have both AI and deep human expertise: the skill, and the experienced person behind it. A tandem. The AI moves you faster. The human makes sure you are moving somewhere worth going.
An AI for everyone will keep you in the race. It will not win it for you.
For that, you need people who know where the edge of your brand is, and who are not afraid to go there.
That glass hatch was a pure tax trick. It became an icon anyway. Because a human made something of its own out of a strange constraint.
No AI does that for you.