Updated September 15, 2026
In this Clutch Conversations interview, Lindsay Smith, founder and CEO of the brand agency TAKT, unpacks what happens to branding when AI can spin up a logo, a voice, and a tagline for free. She explains why the real value is shifting from brand expression to brand strategy, walks through the Brand Identity Matrix her team uses to hold companies accountable to what they actually stand for, and lays out where human judgment still beats the machine.
Tim (00:26): Welcome to Clutch Conversations, where we unpack real decisions business leaders face on a daily basis. I'm Tim Condon, the CRO at Clutch. Marketers everywhere are finding new ways to incorporate AI to streamline their workflow. From brand voice to logo generation, AI is making it easier and cheaper to showcase your brand identity — but is it actually helping or hurting your competitive advantage? Joining me today is Lindsay Smith, founder and CEO of TAKT, a full-service creative agency known for its ability to shape brands. Lindsay, thanks for joining — tell us a little more about TAKT.
Lindsay (01:04): Thanks for having me, Tim. TAKT is a full-service brand agency — really a group of companies. TAKT is the parent, which oversees Signature, our brand and web division; Cadence, our marketing division; Residence, our product design and development arm; and TAKT Studios, our video, photography, and branded content team. So we run the whole gamut and see it from start to finish.
Tim (01:27): I was doing some research before this. You once told a room full of marketers that AI has basically commoditized brand creation — anybody can create a logo, a voice, a tagline. If all of that is now essentially free, do we still need marketers and agencies?
Lindsay (01:49): That's the fear for a lot of agencies, isn't it? It's been a hot topic ever since ChatGPT launched. My answer is absolutely, yes — though I'd be lying if I said I hadn't wavered over the years about which direction this would go. What we've found is that even though AI lets us write faster and spin up logos and ads more quickly, it's actually freeing agencies to go deeper on strategy. It used to be that you had to be enterprise-level to access strategy at that depth, which is why the larger agencies work with CPG and big enterprise B2B brands.
(02:37): The shift we're seeing is toward what brand means beyond expression. Brand expression is the logo, the visual identity, the typography, the messaging — but what is brand beyond that? CPG has mastered it at the product level, but there's still a huge amount of work to be done at the corporate level.
Tim (03:07): That's a great segue, because you often talk about the brand identity matrix. For listeners who don't know what that is, can you give a quick overview?
Lindsay (03:15): My business partner, Rene Thomas, and I stumbled on it back in 2019. It was written up in the Harvard Business Review by Stephen Greyser, a professor there, and Mats Urde, a professor at Lund University. The framework takes an alternative approach to brand messaging. Traditional frameworks — the brand pyramid, or April Dunford's positioning framework — each zero in on one specific area and don't look at all the elements together. They also tend to be hierarchical: you start at the bottom and work your way up to the external messaging. The brand matrix is a series of nine elements instead.
(04:08): Three elements are the external layer, three are internal, and three sit in what we call the gooey center between the external and internal messaging. The beauty of it isn't just the nine quadrants — it's that you can stress-test what you actually stand for as a company against what you say you are. We've all been in a room where a CEO says, "I want to be this, I have this huge vision, this is what the company will stand for," and they're great at rallying the troops behind it. But as the organization grows and matures, it often doesn't have the operational systems in place to hold true to that promise.
(04:56): The brand matrix was the first framework we came across that actually holds organizations accountable — to their culture standing for their relationships, their mission and vision standing for the positioning they want in the market, and so on.
Tim (05:11): Related to that, you've said you can prove whether a brand holds true. Can you give an example of someone doing it well — or poorly?
Lindsay (05:24): I'll give you a personal one rather than a client, since I'm under NDA for a lot of them. There's a company here in Canada — we're a Canadian-based agency — called EasyPark. The brand promise should ladder up to the name: it's all about making it easy to park. I've been a monthly parker there for years. I once got a ticket I didn't think was fair, and the response from their customer service team wasn't attentive — they didn't listen, and you could tell they didn't care.
(06:16): I asked to speak to the manager. Right when you walk in, their brand values are written on the wall — all about exceptional customer service and putting the customer first. That never left me, because I said to the manager, "You know those words on the wall? I don't feel like this organization is holding true to them." And they weren't. They've proven that in the market many times over.
(07:09): Just recently I noticed they rolled out different positioning. Their brand promise is now about safety, convenience, and access. They went through the process of realizing they weren't great at customer service — and honestly, I don't think they need to care about it, so they stopped claiming it. When we consult an organization on holding true to a brand promise, it's about digging into those conversations. It's not "I want a new logo." It's "What do you truly stand for, and what can your team actually stand behind?"
Tim (07:31): A lot of leaders reach out because they think they have a messaging problem — and I'm guessing that's not always the case. How do you figure out whether it's really a messaging problem or something deeper?
Lindsay (07:50): A lot of times people mistake a positioning problem for a messaging problem — and this is where the brand matrix is so valuable. We take their word for what they think they're good at, then do stakeholder interviews and customer or client interviews, depending on whether they're B2C or B2B. Then we run a workshop that extracts what they believe they are across the nine elements of the matrix. When you compare that against the market research, you start seeing really clear gaps.
(08:58): Suddenly it's exposed: we're not just working on a messaging problem, we're working on a deeper one — where your team internally sees you and believes in a set of values or a vision that completely contradicts what you're saying in the market. It also lets executive teams zone in on a deeper level and stop thinking of brand as just how they look or sound. It's how they actually operate day to day.
(09:47): A lot of sophisticated organizations have figured this out and hired the right agencies. But my message to the industry is that you no longer have to be a hundred-million-dollar company to afford that kind of strategy. We can now bring it to organizations of all sizes — even startups can start there and ask, "What can I actually hold true to?" And what's critical is that all of these elements pass through your brand promise. That promise sits in the middle and acts as the qualifier between your internal and external ability to communicate.
Tim (09:59): We've talked about brand strategy being so much more than expression. How much of this can AI actually do, and how much still needs a human in the loop?
Lindsay (10:11): You've got to train the AI model — it doesn't come out of the box knowing you. Yes, OpenAI and Anthropic are releasing models that do more of this, but every agency and every business has its own way of working. You can have a model spin up a great USP, but how you've trained it and who you are as an organization makes a real difference in the output. It isn't as simple as giving it good prompts — you have to give it the right prompts and the context it needs to produce outputs that actually benefit the organization.
(11:10): So we look at AI more as tooling and workflow augmentation now. Joe's Tire Shop down the street, who never thought about branding before, is going to be able to create a brand. I think small businesses will have the biggest leap in how they show up in the market — but they'll also struggle the most to set up operations that align with what the brand claims to be.
Tim (11:51): You've said that in two or three years companies will be able to execute their brand expression really well. What does that mean for the different types of agencies out there?
Lindsay (12:05): I think commodity agencies are going to struggle — the ones where the work can be learned quickly and executed quickly, like spinning up ads. The level of detail, finesse, and oversight that's still required is significant. With brand expression becoming commoditized, you can get to market 70 or 80% of the way there, but nailing the fine details still takes a lot of human oversight. That said, it's great for testing. We're seeing businesses come out with five half-baked-but-good ideas, test them in digital campaigns first because it's the cheapest way, then do the big reveal once they've zeroed in on the messaging.
(13:13): It used to be that you'd do the full creative, invest in all of it, hire a market research firm to validate the direction, and then launch — a much bigger process.
Tim (13:31): And back to Joe's Tire — smaller businesses are going to have access to so much more than before, probably for a fraction of the cost.
Lindsay (13:44): Exactly. Commodity agencies can take advantage of the fact that they understand how to market and typically work with these smaller organizations. They'll be able to walk a client through it and become more of a consultancy — "We can go to market with these ads; they're 70 to 80% there. Joe won't know the difference in the subtleties anyway, but we will." Then they start asking the better questions: "Joe, when customers come into your shop, how are you greeting them? How are we integrating this with your CRM?" Those shops are going to become more sophisticated themselves.
Tim (14:32): You've also said that inconsistent expression across channels usually traces back to an undefined personality — which is interesting, because you'd assume it's more about lack of oversight or poor execution. What do you mean by undefined personality?
Lindsay (14:53): If you know who you are and what you stand for, that comes through in how you express yourself. Sometimes an organization knows who they are but isn't taking the time to make sure it lands consistently across every channel — in how they talk about themselves and how the visual identity shows up. There's still workflow involved, but the brand matrix anchors you and gives you something to hold onto so you can spot the gaps, measure performance year over year, and ask, "Are we still holding true to this? Does it still make sense for where we want to go?"
Tim (15:55): Fun one. A new CMO walks in the door, and every agency starts salivating — because what does a new CMO want to do? A rebrand. As a CRO, I'm seeing dollar signs. How do you approach that request and make sure you're doing the right thing for the client?
Lindsay (16:19): A lot of it is asking the challenging questions up front and understanding why they want it. Is it just to leave a mark? A common one we hear is, "Our branding is outdated — it reflects who we were five years ago, not who we are or where we're going." You can take that at face value and build the expression around it, and some organizations genuinely just want that. Personally, I think those are the ones that will struggle in the years to come.
(17:03): So we probe deeper, ask the "why" questions, understand how they see themselves today, and set up workshops to dig in at the start. A PM once told me the best thing: "Slow is fast." It doesn't have to be long and drawn out, but really understanding where an organization is, what's worked over the years, and where their white space is sets them up for competitive advantage. A lot of teams just say, "We need to look better." You can pay us a lot to do that, but if it doesn't move the needle, no one's going to feel good about it in the end.
Tim (17:55): I imagine it gets touchy — you sometimes have to tell a client that part of their brand promise isn't being executed by another leader in another department. How do you handle that?
Lindsay (18:08): We have a label for it: good friction. It's about creating a safe space for those conversations at the executive and management levels and aligning everyone toward the greatest good for the organization. We go in and are honest: "Here's what we're seeing." And that's actually why we don't see ourselves purely as a creative or brand agency — we consider ourselves an organizational consultancy. That positioning has helped us do really well through the AI era, and I think more agencies will move in that direction, because that's the competitive advantage now — not just the pretty stuff.
Tim (19:04): Lindsay, big thanks for joining us at Clutch Conversations. Where can our audience find you and learn more about the brand matrix?
Lindsay (19:15): We've written a blog post on it — it's on our website at TAKT.com. Honestly, not many people are talking about the brand matrix right now, so if you look it up, you'll probably come across our work on it. You can find me there and on LinkedIn as well.
Tim (19:31): Great. Thanks again.
