Arjan Kapteijns’ recent piece on Agentic Lovemarks got under my skin in the best way. His argument that brands must now earn love from humans and trust from machines is right. The Agentic Lovemark Loop he proposes, where meaning becomes pattern, pattern becomes recognition, and recognition drives reinforcement describes something real that brand leaders need to reckon with. And his use of Thomas Marzano’s Brand Constitutions manifesto as the conceptual backbone is smart: it gives the argument structural weight.
But here’s what kept nagging me as I read it: every example is Nike, Apple, Patagonia, or IKEA. Brands with decades of cultural density, billion-dollar budgets, and organizing ideas so deeply embedded they’ve become part of popular consciousness. “If you have a body, you are an athlete” didn’t happen by accident. It happened over 40 years, backed by extraordinary investment and creative talent.
Most brands don’t have that luxury. And most brands are the ones that need this framework most urgently.
The mid-market reality of agentic branding
For several years, I was responsible for strategic communications across the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. During that time, I watched more than 60 companies get acquired into the portfolio. They weren’t Nike. They were mid-market business-to-business (B2B) software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies with solid products, growing teams, and meaningful revenue, but with brand systems held together by a shared Google Drive, a PDF brand guide nobody opened, and the institutional memory of whoever happened to have been there longest.
These are the brands that will be most exposed in an agentic economy. Not because they lack soul. Many of them have real emotional meaning to their customers. But that meaning lives in people’s heads rather than in any system an AI agent could read.
When Kapteijns writes that “agents don’t feel emotional territories,” he’s right. But the implication cuts deeper than his article explores.
For Apple, the behavioral signatures are so pervasive that they’re practically self-documenting. Apple’s legibility is an emergent property of cultural ubiquity. For a B2B SaaS company with 5 million Euros in yearly revenue and a 12-person marketing team? Legibility doesn’t just emerge. It has to be built with very limited resources.
This is the conversation the Agentic Lovemarks framework needs next: not what happens at the top of the brand pyramid, but what happens in the messy, resource-constrained middle where most brands actually live.
The missing layer: Who builds a brand’s pattern?
The Agentic Lovemark Loop looks great on a slide. Meaning becomes pattern, pattern becomes recognition, recognition drives reinforcement. But between “meaning” and “pattern” sits an operational gap that neither Kapteijns’s article nor the broader branding conversation has addressed.
Who translates the organizing idea into repeatable brand behaviors across 40 touchpoints, three markets, and five AI content tools? Who makes sure the “behavioral signatures” don’t fragment when a new product marketer joins and starts creating assets from their own interpretation of the brand? Who maintains the metadata, the structured templates, the approval logic that makes a brand legible to machines?
Machine trust isn’t just a strategic outcome. It’s an operational discipline.
The answer, in most cases, is creative operations. And in most scaling companies, this function either doesn’t exist as a named role or it’s buried inside marketing as an afterthought. Someone wrangling assets in a digital asset manager nobody trusts, chasing approvals over Slack, manually checking whether the latest campaign deck matches the brand guidelines.
Legibility doesn’t come from having a strong organizing idea. It comes from encoding that idea into the daily machinery of content creation, review, and distribution, so that every asset, every touchpoint, every AI-generated draft carries the same structural DNA.
Making the idea of Brand Constitutions tangible
This is where Marzano’s Brand Constitutions framework becomes most interesting to me. Not as a manifesto, but as an operational blueprint.
Marzano articulated what a Brand Constitution should contain: the myth and purpose that ground a brand, the signatures and tones that express it, the quests that direct it. He made the case for why brands need this kind of codified coherence in an agentic economy. I agree with that case. But having built and maintained brand systems across dozens of companies at different stages of growth, I know the distance between defining a Brand Constitution and implementing one is where most brands stall.
The manifesto answers the question of what. The question I’m more interested in is how. How do you make a Brand Constitution operational in a company where the marketing team has 12 people, three markets, and a growing stack of AI tools generating content faster than anyone can review it?
From my experience, that operationalization comes down to four layers.
The first is codified meaning. Not a mission statement buried in a strategy deck, but an organizing idea that’s embedded into content briefs, AI prompts, and approval criteria. This is Kapteijns’ “meaning” layer and Marzano’s foundational myth, translated into artefacts that shape daily decisions.
The second is structured patterns. Not a 96-page brand book, but tone of voice parameters, visual signatures, messaging hierarchies, and naming conventions that can be parsed by both humans and AI tools. This is where “pattern” actually gets built, through specificity rather than aspiration.
Third, governance logic. Who can create what, which claims require legal review, what happens when a local market adapts an asset, how AI-generated content gets validated before publication. Kapteijns’ framework skips this layer entirely. Marzano’s manifesto implies it but doesn’t detail it. Yet it’s the layer that determines whether your “pattern” holds or fractures at scale.
And fourth, verification infrastructure. Metadata, version control, audit trails. The evidence layer that gives agents, regulators, and partners a reason to trust that your brand behaviors aren’t just claimed but verified.
These four layers are what separate a Brand Constitution as a document from a Brand Constitution as a working system.
Why this matters more for B2B than consumer brands
There’s an irony in the Agentic Lovemarks discussion: the examples are all consumer brands, but the companies most affected by agentic mediation may be B2B.
Think about how B2B purchasing decisions already work. An information technology leader evaluating software platforms doesn’t browse shelves. They ask colleagues, read G2 reviews, check analyst reports, and increasingly, consult AI assistants. The “agentic shortlist” isn’t a future scenario in B2B—it’s already here. When a procurement team asks an AI tool to compare customer relationship management platforms or cybersecurity vendors, the brands that surface will be those with the most structured, consistent, and verifiable presence across data sources.
B2B brands also operate in a world where brand consistency is harder to maintain. Multiple product lines, partner channels, international markets, co-branded materials, technical documentation sitting alongside marketing content. The surface area for brand fragmentation is enormous. And the teams managing it are typically smaller than their business-to-consumer (B2C) counterparts, not larger.
If you don’t govern your brand patterns, agents can’t read them. And if agents can’t read them, you’re invisible in exactly the channels where your next customer is making decisions.
Three agentic moves for brands that aren’t Nike
If you lead brand or creative operations at a scaling company, you don’t need to wait for the agentic revolution. Here’s where to start.
Codify your organizing idea into operational rules. Take whatever brand strategy you have, even if it’s rough, and translate it into concrete parameters: tone of voice guidelines that an AI tool can follow, visual rules that a template system can enforce, messaging hierarchies that a new team member can apply without interpretation. The goal isn’t perfection, but rather structured repeatability.
Build governance before you need it. Most scaling companies add brand governance reactively, after inconsistency has already become a problem. By then, you’re cleaning up fragmentation rather than preventing it. Establish approval workflows, content review criteria, and AI usage guidelines now, while the patterns are still small enough to shape intentionally.
Think in metadata, not just aesthetics. Agents don’t evaluate your brand by looking at your logo. They evaluate it through structured data: consistent naming conventions, tagged content, verified claims, coherent product taxonomies. The brands that win in agentic shortlists will be the ones that treat their content infrastructure with the same rigor they bring to their product infrastructure.
Soul and system, for all brands
Kapteijns ends his article with a strong line: brands need “a soul and a system.” I agree. But that challenge isn’t reserved for iconic global brands with cultural density built over decades. It belongs equally to the thousands of growing companies that have real meaning to offer but no infrastructure to make that meaning legible.
Marzano gave us the standard. Kapteijns gave us the strategic logic. What’s needed now is the practitioner’s work of translating these ideas into the operational reality of scaling teams, limited budgets, and AI tools that multiply both the opportunity and the risk.
The Agentic Lovemark isn’t an aspiration reserved for the Nike’s of the world. It’s an operational challenge for any brand willing to do the work.
Cover image: Niroworld