If you’re looking to create a new logo for your municipality, DMO or EDC, some may believe AI could do the trick.

If you’re looking to create an enduring brand and narrative inspired by and endorsed by your residents and key stakeholders, that’s a different kind of work.

Why?

First and foremost, a logo is something you design. A brand is something your community builds. A logo is not a brand and AI cannot engage your community on a human level. Thus, pursuing a community logo with AI misses on two levels right out of the gate: it reduces the brand’s definition to a graphic identity and, more importantly, it eliminates the invaluable opportunity for community building that a collaborative, resident- and stakeholder-driven process allows. Time and time again, our clients have told us that the value of the process was not the resulting logo, but the experience of everyone in the community sharing their voices and feeling part of shaping the story.

Consider what jumping straight to an AI-built logo removes from your branding opportunity:

• The ability to educate your residents and stakeholders on “the why” of branding and invite them into a collaborative, inclusive process that builds community
• The insights gained from in-person depth interviews, focus groups, community surveys and outside research
• Hearing the key objectives, visions and concerns of your elected officials and keeping them close to the process throughout
• Aligning on a positioning and DNA strategy that your community, alone, can own
• The rich, essential exchanges that take place within an appointed creative committee consisting of staff and key stakeholders as your brand develops
• The integration of visuals and voice to shape your inimitable identity and story
• Customized activation strategies and action ideas rooted in your DNA that extend well beyond conventional “branding” venues
• The magical moment of telling your residents and stakeholders that this brand and marketing strategy was born of their knowledge, insights and passion
• Watching your residents and leaders live into the brand because of the the idea it represents, not because of a piece of graphic art

In short, only human connection and engagement creates genuine community ownership.

Skipping the human process in favor of an AI prompt alone ultimately leads to a result that lacks substance, strategy, and passion.

Even if you still think “all we need is a logo” there are many compelling reasons to use human instead of AI-generated designs. Perhaps the most important caution is this: everything that an AI model creates is based on information that already exists in the real world. This means that the odds of an AI-generated logo infringing on an existing brand in that marketplace are extremely high. This introduces significant financial and reputational risk.

At North Star, we’re putting AI to work every day.

It’s a vital tool for research, insights, and creative work refinement. For instance, AI is very efficient at producing base photos for illustrating brand use, saving hours of searching for stock photos and retouching. Using our original brand creations, it can help bring our brand activation ideas for placemaking or promotion to life and help our clients envision how their brands can be put to work. It sharpens and accents some of our original thinking, but we don’t treat it as a branding professional. By the way, our prompts are never used to train public models. Our AI includes enterprise-grade protections so that our data and our inputs stay within our organization.

AI is a remarkable asset, and all of us in place marketing must be careful to never let it replace the most valuable hand in the brand development process: your community. At North Star, we won’t let you. Let’s talk about the creation of your enduring brand, one built with efficiency and human-inspired depth.