Build brand associations

Christian says: “2026 is all about brand associations: in people's minds, in search engines, and in LLMs.

Optimizing for brand associations means building deep and meaningful connections between your brand and the topics, products, features, outcomes – all of the things that matter to people and machines.”

How do you create a brand association by leveraging different topics, products, and features?

“I can start by giving you some examples of really good brand association. These are things like the association between Kleenex and tissue paper, Dove and natural beauty, Patagonia and sustainability, and Apple and innovation. These are the kinds of associations that people have between brands and values, products, or features.

We know that these exist in both a neurological sense and in a machine sense. The way that algorithms like LLMs and search engines (through the knowledge graph, for example) approach the idea of finding information is through associations, and the human mind works in a similar way. It's more than just how a brand is seen and read; it's the whole experience, and that feeling that you get with the brand.

The task is all about how you create these associations in the wild. There are a few ways to do this, but it all starts with what you want those associations to be. That might mean just sitting down with a pen and a piece of paper and thinking about your brand and your product, and all of the best associations that you want with it.

Think about your product space and the kinds of things that your customers/potential customers care about and talk about. Think about the benefits that your product offers – and the benefit of the benefit, as we say. These are emotional associations, like having more free time or being able to do something more easily.

Also, think about the values that are important to your brand and that you want people to see in you, and see reflected in your company. Start brainstorming and writing down what all of those are, then go out and see which of those already exist in the wild.

See what kind of associations come up when you search for your own brand on search engines, on LLMs, on LinkedIn, on Reddit – on all of the different spaces where your customers might exist. Identify any that already exist, any that exist but need to be deepened, and any negative associations that you might want to deal with.”

How do brands successfully ensure that their association is different, substantial, and enduring?

“I won't pretend to be an expert in all the different levels of marketing. I work in content marketing, so that's where most of my expertise tends to stay.

I would say that they look for opportunities to present themselves in unique and unusual ways that are really going to stick in people’s minds – and they do so with incredible consistency.

One of the problems that a lot of companies have, especially before they really find their niche, is that they try to go after a really broad range of values, outcomes, etc. Some of the best advice I've ever received is to identify just three or four things that are really core and important to you, and to have everything that you do come back to those things.

With Patagonia, they do lots of interesting marketing things that aren’t necessarily just marketing their product. If you go on their website, they have an entire blog section that’s dedicated to adventure, which is full of stories of people climbing mountains and travelling down rivers. That really resonates with the people who are interested in Patagonia as a brand.

Then, through those stories, they're able to talk about sustainability. They're able to bring the association between Patagonia and sustainability into virtually everything that they do, but in really unexpected and unique ways.

That's something that helps strengthen those neurological connections. Anything that gets the human brain to stop, wake up, and think, ‘That's not what I was expecting,’ is going to create much stronger associations than when everything just follows the status quo and your brain is on autopilot.”

Who do SEOs need to have conversations with to establish those core elements of your business and ensure that everyone embraces those things?

“If the company has already done its due diligence, then these values are hopefully going to be things that are felt by everyone who works there, and they’re going to come through really strongly.

When you do your onboarding at that company, you should already be learning what the values are and what outcomes and benefits are associated with the product. A lot of the companies that we’ve worked with have done this in a really great way, so it’s easy for us to come in with our writers and content marketers, take what they have, and run with it.

If that hasn’t been done in your company, then it really falls to the direction: CEO, CMO, COO – all of the people at the top. It is their responsibility to define what these values are and to propagate them throughout the company.

I firmly believe that a company can't demonstrate something that it doesn't do itself, internally. People have to really feel it and believe it for it to come through in the content that they create – and even the products that they create. Apple is a really good example of this. The people who work there live and breathe Apple.

If you’re wondering who to ask about this, it’s the leadership team. If leadership hasn't done it yet, then now's the time to do it.”

What do you do with any negative associations that already exist with your brand?

“I don't claim to be a PR expert, and I'm sure there are others who could answer this question with much more finesse than I can, but I think it comes down to two things.

First of all, it's not worth burying them. I worked in tourism and hospitality for a number of years before getting into marketing, and sometimes bad reviews happen. The best thing that you can do from a brand perspective, which worked well for us, is to demonstrate how seriously you take complaints or bad reviews on those platforms.

Respond to what people say, thank them for bringing the problem to your attention, and demonstrate the steps that you have taken to resolve the issue and make sure it won't happen again. Be visible. Make it clear that you have recognised a problem (if there was one), and spell out the steps that you've taken to correct it.

It does take some soul-searching. If you have a company that is facing some negative publicity, it's very easy to have a knee-jerk reaction. However, I've always seen it as a good opportunity to try and understand where the public is coming from, what the issue is, and whether something actually needs to be done.

BrewDog had this punk imagery that they have since adapted and moved away from – not because that imagery was bad for them, but because they became involved in some scandal in terms of the way they were treating their employees. Once they realised that was going to come out, they had to ask themselves what they did wrong, what they could do to fix that, and how they could demonstrate (with authenticity and honesty) that something had changed within the company.

The second thing is just making sure that the good outweighs the bad. Produce enough valuable, good, new content that will change those associations, for both people and machines.”

How does this help with LLMs and optimizing for AI search?

“LLMs are still very much a black box. We built the algorithms and we train them, but we can't look inside an LLM and see exactly what the internal architecture looks like, because it's staggeringly complicated. It’s not as complicated as the human mind, but it’s still very complicated.

I recently read an interesting study that tried to apply some of the methods we've used to study associations in the human brain and see if that resonates with the internal architecture of LLMs. As it turns out, these machines also build associations between words. I'm not going to say that they build associations between concepts or ideas, because they don't understand concepts and ideas, but they are making associations between words.

When you put a query into an LLM, it is going to ingest that query and look for the next most appropriate word. The way it does that is by running it through this machine of associations. If you say the word ‘red’, the word ‘rose’ is more closely associated with the word ‘red’ than the word ‘cloud’.

By doing this over millions and millions of iterations very quickly, it identifies the next most appropriate word, and then it does it again. You could almost say that LLMs are associative machines. They take something, they find the next most appropriate association, and they spit it out.

Therefore, building these associations is not just valuable for human minds. It's also valuable for the way that LLMs and search algorithms work – particularly LLMs, because they have essentially been built as association machines.”

Christian, what's the key takeaway from the tip you shared today?

“If you don't define your brand associations, algorithms and audiences will define them for you, or you'll be left out of conversations.

It's important to build and reinforce the links that you want in people's minds and in machines’ maps, or you risk being invisible in 2026.”

Christian Rigg is Director of Operations at Eleven Writing. Find out more over at ElevenWriting.com.