Beige is the New Bland: Why AI Can't Fake Your Brand’s Voice

By all means use AI to prompt the brief, but trust a human writer.

The New Adventures of Beige Blandy

Years ago, when I was more heavily involved in South African theatre, I used to hang out with the brilliant actor and directors, the two Roberts Whitehead and Coleman. They had a whole series of comedy tropes they’d made up and popularised among their clique; one of which was the character, Beige Blandy.

Beige Blandy was an innocuous, pasty-faced private detective who took on dull clients, and helped them solve predictable cases, against almost no odds, way too quickly and easily, for very little money.

We’d spend hours brainstorming and acting out low-stakes scenarios where Beige could lope into inaction, stumble into obvious clues, utter an endless supply of crime fiction cliches and put in minimum effort before inadvertently solving the mystery with all the fanfare of a damp whoopie cushion. Good times.

I hadn’t thought about Beige Blandy much until very recently.

The Obvious Case of the Anodyne Algorithm

Over the past few months, I’ve been using the words ‘beige’ and ‘bland’, along with ‘generic’, ‘soulless’, ‘predictable’, ‘cliched’ and ‘hollow’ etc to describe my increasingly visceral reaction to the tsunami of bot-written spew that’s come to spoil my personal browsing and my professional livelihood.

Beige has arrived. He’s ingratiated himself into the hearts and minds of any B2B communicator who’s ever struggled to craft a meaningful sentence.

He’s there in your device. Legs splayed carelessly. Arm lazily draped over the back of the sofa. A lukewarm smile in a symmetrically handsome face, void of emotion.

His voice is a toneless, flatulent stream of borrowed-consciousness as he tells you not to worry. He’s got this. He can crack the writing for you.

He can pump out hundreds of perfectly puffy sentences and then herd them, sheep-like, into an endless landscape of intelligible but forgettable paragraphs, pages, blogs, books, reports and other assorted ‘outputs’.

And to be fair — he’s getting pretty good at it. If all you need is a few hundred words of predictable flatulent fluff, Beige Blandy’s your mAIn man.

He’ll promptly take the pains out of painstaking.

The Blandification of the Brand Voice

AI tools can give you generic headlines, popular hashtags and standard marketing funnels in the time it takes to kill a career. But if all those words don’t resonate with what your brand stands for — or doesn’t understand why you want to sound the way you do — you’ll just muddy your own messaging with a slurry of same and forgettable.

Because beige isn’t brave. Bland isn’t honest. As a tool, AI can do a lot of things, but it can’t be truly original or inherently witty. It can’t be genuinely vulnerable or weird or tentative. And those quirks are the qualities that elevate the chaos of human creativity over and above acceptable mediocrity.

When Beige is Baked Into the Brief

I’ve seen the pattern repeat itself with increased frequency over the past few months. A client says, “Don’t worry, Nick — we’ve got the copy covered,” (for which I read, “Beige Blandy’s spewing it out.”)

And sure enough, sometime later a cheerful email arrives with a video script, email sequence, report or an eBook that reads like a synthetic soup of business buzzwords. Clogged with clunky metaphors floating in a dense forest of filler words.

What they say is. “could you just take a look and give it a bit of an edit?”

What I do is rewrite it from scratch on a much tighter deadline than I would have had before Beige Blandy became the world’s go-to copywriter.

The Limitations of Enormous Potential

And I get it. No judgement. It’s not pure penny-pinching or laziness — it’s the seductive idea that AI can do creative clarity.  But it can’t.

Genuine creativity feeds off individual worldview, personal experience, team dynamics and the accidental collisions that forge their ah hah moments. And creative clarity is about more than slavishly summarising complex content, it’s about balancing the needs of the client with the interest of the audience. It’s about blending disciplined, inspired editing with audience empathy. Nuanced voicing. A strategic perspective. These are ingrained attitudes honed over years, not dashed out prompts to a pre-trained algorithm.

Look, I’m not anti-AI. I use it every day. It’s incredibly useful at level one thinking. But unless your brand is going for beige and bland, use it to brief your human creatives not replace them. It’s not going to help you stand out in a crowded market.

Bottom line:

AI can save you time. It can structure, summarise, suggest.. But it can’t listen for nuance, challenge your assumptions, or care about your results. That takes a human creative’s commitment, expert judgement and personal perspective.