Your brand story can take on a life of its own as soon as it leaves the building. A journalist picks up one angle, a creator adds their experience, a community debates the implications and an AI assistant draws on available sources to answer a question about your business. Each brings a different interpretation, and occasionally a detail your communications team would very much like to correct.
At Meltwater Summit on Tour London, expert speakers from across PR and marketing explored how brands can navigate that complexity. Their discussions offered practical lessons in understanding developing narratives, contributing credible information and choosing where to act.
Contents
Understand how the narrative is being built
Treat AI answers as part of your reputation
Keep a consistent story across channels
Decide when a response will help
Earn a place in the conversation
Connect intelligence to decisions
Start with one narrative that affects your business
FAQs about managing brand narratives in the age of AI
Understand how the narrative is being built
A communications plan gives your team a shared direction, and once people encounter the story, they bring their own questions, priorities and experiences to it.
Deloitte Digital partner Nick Purdon made that point through the idea of “joining the narrative.” Brands participate in conversations that communities and creators are already shaping, but their ability to contribute depends on understanding the conversation and offering something relevant.
The live Data Malarkey podcast, hosted by Sam Knowles with Canon EMEA’s Gareth Crew and Golin Ketchum’s John Brasington, also questioned the ambition of controlling a brand narrative. Their discussion focused on how teams can understand what is happening and identify where they have influence.
For PR and marketing teams, a useful starting point is to investigate how a story is being built, by looking at the claims people repeat, the sources they reference and the audiences carrying the conversation forward.
Meltwater Chief Product Officer Chris Hackney described the connections between news and social narratives in the opening keynote. Journalists, creators and communities can contribute to the same developing story, and understanding its trajectory helps teams judge its significance.
A spike in attention is a signal to investigate, while the more useful questions concern which interpretations are gaining traction, how the story is changing and what that could mean for the business.
Treat AI answers as part of your reputation
AI adds another place where people can encounter an interpretation of your brand; for example, an assistant may summarize coverage, compare products or offer an assessment of an organization.
That interpretation deserves attention from reputation teams. In the Data Malarkey discussion, Brasington encouraged a broader view of how AI represents organizations, including the questions investors, employees and other stakeholders might ask.
A brand could appear prominently in a product recommendation while being described inaccurately in an answer about its business, so measuring mentions alone would give you a very incomplete picture.
The generative AI panel, hosted by Meltwater’s Jenny Force, explored the importance of accurate portrayal, while Snap Inc.’s Alicia Edmonds-Smith emphasized factual accuracy and a consistent narrative, including the implications when published information resurfaces in AI answers.
Make brand accuracy part of AI visibility reporting. Review a set of questions relevant to your audiences and examine how your organization is described. Check product details, business information and the context surrounding the mention. Look at the cited sources where the answer provides them.
The GenAI Lens demonstration at Summit showed how examining AI answers and their citations can help teams investigate the information behind a brand’s appearance. That offers a more useful brief: understand the account people are receiving, then identify which parts of the information environment you can improve.
Keep a consistent story across channels
Consistency becomes harder when different teams, markets and partners describe the same business, and Unilever’s Laura Thomas discussed that challenge during the brand visibility panel. Brand names and associations can vary across markets, making it important to understand the product attributes the business wants to be known for.
Those attributes give teams a shared foundation, the language and examples can fit the audience, while the underlying facts remain aligned.
Edmonds-Smith also emphasized the value of a strong narrative told consistently through different channels. For a communications team, that means looking beyond the latest press release to the wider body of information people encounter.
Review your website, spokesperson materials, social content and partner briefs for conflicting claims or outdated descriptions. Check whether your content answers the questions people actually ask about the business.
Chloe Singleton of eight&four described work for Sandals Resorts that used detailed customer questions and community discussions to inform an assessment of AI visibility and content gaps. It illustrated how listening can reveal the information a brand needs to make clearer.
Consistency starts with facts people can use. A clear explanation of what a product does, who it serves or how a business operates gives audiences something concrete to work with.
Then keep that information current, because a new message has a better chance of making sense when the surrounding material supports it.
Decide when a response will help
An uncomfortable story can create pressure to respond immediately, but a response can also introduce that story to people who had never encountered it.
The Data Malarkey discussion explored this problem, including the challenge of correcting inaccurate information without unnecessarily amplifying it. Brasington raised the value of making the brand’s factual account available through owned content, so its position can be found alongside other accounts.
That requires judgment about the audience, the claim and the likely effect of speaking, so before responding, assess whether the story is gaining traction among people whose decisions affect your business. Examine whether credible sources are repeating it, whether it contains a material factual error and whether your organization can add useful information.
The right response might be a correction to a published article, a clear explanation on your website, direct communication with an affected group or continued monitoring while the situation develops.
Choose the response according to the problem you need to solve. Correcting a product detail calls for a different approach from addressing a customer’s experience or explaining a business decision.
When you publish a clarification, make it specific, accessible and supported by evidence, and give people a clear account of the facts and your position. That creates a reliable reference point, but whether an AI system later cites it will depend on the question, the system and the sources it retrieves, so continue checking how the issue is represented.
Earn a place in the conversation
Purdon’s discussion of creators offered another route to influence: work with people who understand the community you want to reach. Creators bring their own credibility and relationships, and a useful partnership builds on that understanding and gives the audience a reason to engage.
Purdon encouraged brands to consider cultural relevance, emotional meaning and lasting behavior change when assessing creator relationships. Those qualities help explain why the size of an audience provides only part of the picture. This means listening before writing the brief, so you understand how the community talks about the subject, which experiences people share and where the brand can make a worthwhile contribution.
Purdon’s Vaseline example showed how consumer ideas about a familiar product can give a brand something relevant to support and amplify. The conversation provides the starting point, and the brand helps develop it.
A similar principle applies to subject specialists, employees and spokespeople - give them accurate information and room to explain it in a way that fits their expertise and audience.
The goal is a credible contribution people find useful, and a tightly scripted message can satisfy every line of the brief while leaving very little reason for anyone else to join in.
Connect intelligence to decisions
Understanding a narrative becomes valuable when the team can decide what to do about it.
Heineken’s Narek Garit described the problems caused by fragmented information and separate interpretations across teams. His approach emphasized shared intelligence, relevant context and working backward from the decision a stakeholder needs to make.
That is particularly useful when a story crosses departmental boundaries, because communications may see a reputation issue, marketing may see a change in audience perception and regional teams may understand a local factor that changes the interpretation.
Bring those perspectives together before settling on a response - agree on the facts, the questions still unanswered and who will make the decision.
Antony Cousins’s session added a related caution about using AI for insights, describing how a confident answer can rely on limited or outdated evidence, reinforcing the importance of grounding analysis in appropriate sources and methods.
For narrative management, AI can help organize information and surface patterns. People still need to assess the evidence, interpret the context and take responsibility for the recommendation. After acting, examine whether the intended audience received the information, whether inaccuracies were corrected and how the conversation developed. Use that evidence to improve the next decision.
Start with one narrative that affects your business
A practical place to begin is a story your team already cares about: a product launch, a reputation concern or an audience perception you want to understand. Examine how it appears in news, social conversations and relevant AI answers, then identify the influential sources, the recurring questions and any gaps in the information your organization provides.
Bring the appropriate teams together and choose an action with a clear purpose, which might involve updating owned content, improving a spokesperson brief, clarifying a factual error or supporting a relevant community conversation.
In her closing remarks, Meltwater Chief Strategy Officer Alexandra Bjertnæs emphasized connected intelligence, curiosity and action. Applied to narrative management, that means staying interested in how the story develops and using what you learn to make a better decision.
Your team may have written the original message, but understanding what happens next gives you a stronger basis for influencing where the story goes.
FAQs about managing brand narratives in the age of AI
What does managing a brand narrative mean in the age of AI?
Managing a brand narrative means understanding how people and information sources describe your organization, then making informed decisions about how to contribute. That includes news coverage, social conversations, creator content and AI answers. Teams can influence the narrative through accurate information, credible relationships, relevant content and appropriate responses to developing issues.
How does AI affect brand reputation?
AI assistants can shape perceptions by summarizing information about a business, recommending products or answering stakeholder questions. Those answers may draw on owned content, news and other sources, and can include inaccurate or outdated details. Reputation teams should examine both whether the brand appears and how accurately it is represented.
How can brands respond to misinformation without amplifying it?
Assess the claim’s reach, credibility and potential effect on relevant audiences before choosing a response. A correction to the source, direct communication with affected people or a factual explanation on owned channels may be appropriate. Make the response specific and evidence-based, then monitor whether it improves understanding or gives the inaccurate claim additional attention.
What should teams measure when monitoring brand narratives?
Measure how the story develops, which sources and voices influence it, which interpretations recur and whether key information is accurate. In AI answers, examine brand portrayal and cited sources where available. Connect those findings to a business objective, such as correcting a misconception, supporting a launch or protecting trust among a priority audience.
Who should be involved in managing AI brand narratives?
PR, marketing, content, social and search teams should work together, with relevant regional, product and subject specialists contributing context. Agree on the facts, responsibilities and decision process. AI can support analysis, while people with appropriate expertise evaluate the findings, decide on a response and assess its effect.
