You can’t help but notice the rise of ‘brand storyteller’ roles, some of which are paying high six-figure salaries. Also, you may have seen more chat around ‘personal branding’. Why now? For me, it’s all about differentiation in an age of AI slop and ‘comfortable sameness’ (my definition).

When you’ve been around the block as many times as I have, you get used to seeing things come around again. For example, all the boys seem to have the same curtains hair that I did at their age back in 1992; or explaining AI to the C-suite is just like describing social media to the same cohort in the late noughties. And so it is with two terms that are enjoying something of a moment, ‘brand storytelling’ and ‘personal branding’.

If you look at these Google Trends charts (screen-grabbed on 24 February 2026), you can see the recent explosion in comparative popularity of both in the last year. I remember ‘brand storytelling’ being a thing around 2014, although this chart doesn’t seem to imply it was as big a deal as I remember.

Differentiation in a sea of sameness is key

The challenge with AI-generated written content is that much of it looks the same. For B2B content strategy consultants and copywriters like me, the move towards generative AI has been a painful watch. Many brands and agencies believed they could generate the same quality of content via machines as they could with expert human copywriters. While some efficiencies can be found, often the result is samey-looking content, to the point where the media is sceptical of many PR approaches and associated content. 

And, given the many and diverse channels that brands must find/establish their voice on nowadays, it’s no surprise that many brands are looking for someone to lead that ‘brand storytelling’ in an era when there’s so much content out there, and so much of it feels the same.

I am hope we are either near, or over, the hype cycle when it comes to AI-generated written content.

What is ‘brand storytelling’ anyway? For me, it’s a handy (if Marmite/divisive, I’m not a fan personally) term to communicate a company’s core mission and showcase its value through human stories, in a way that resonates with audiences and drives engagement and sales while improving sentiment. The best device for brand storytelling, in my opinion, is the customer case study; show, don’t tell.

‘Personal branding’ is the other one that’s gaining traction. Again, promoting oneself has always been important, but more so now than ever, because of the reasons above (standing out) alongside the benefits of being perceived as an expert by large language models (LLMs) for AI search reasons.

We all have a personal brand. We’re all unique. We just need to get out there and tell that story in our own way.

The challenge for many B2B companies is that they don’t have the time or the resources to plan and create that brand storytelling content or develop personal branding in-house.

That’s where people like me come in… If you need a human expert to help you with your brand storytelling or to develop the personal brand of your senior executives, please drop me an email or DM me on LinkedIn.

The post ‘Brand Storytelling’ and ‘Personal Branding’ are making a comeback. Why now? appeared first on Eight Moon Media, B2B Technology Copywriters.

Writing for the Web is an art in itself and there are three key reasons for this:

1) Attention spans are shorter than ever

In an era where a great deal of content is consumed on mobile devices, our attention span has now slumped to less than eight seconds, shorter than that of goldfish.

If that stat is true and you’re still reading, you’re doing well!

2) We have a global audience 

Our content – once consigned to print, radio and TV in designated geographies – is visible everywhere by people with a good level of English. Many of them are potential customers or advocates.

3) Search engines

When people use search engines they use plain English, whether it’s text or voice search.

The enemy of all these three is corporate speak. [Continues]

Kill corporate speak

Corporate speak is becoming less and less relevant.

I wrote an article for PR Week as long ago as 2008 appealing for an end to corporate speak. As a former journalist, I’ve been confounded by the ways businesses have found increasingly complex ways to describe what they do, as if using expansive language actually makes them sound more professional.

In earnest, the reverse is true; many organisations sound the same. They’re all global leaders providing a wide range of innovate business solutions and services.

The problem is that when we go online, we don’t search for ‘innovative business solutions provider’, we look for ‘accountancy software’ or similar plain English with a view to answer our query.

Plus corporate speak is just plain dull. Companies should be optimising more of their content around how they solve business problems rather than pushing what they sell.

As marketing legend Seth Godin said; “If you can’t state your position in eight words, you don’t have a position.”

This is what people want. And increasingly, as Google gets more intuitive, the people get what the people want served up to them.

Writing for the Web is an art

There’s more to writing for the Web than just plain English, of course.

There are two audiences to impress: humans and search engines.

How we break up copy to make it easy to read is key as we increasingly scan content to get what we need or want from an article.

You’ll notice that my sentences are short and that the opening, above the fold gambit that people are most likely to read is bulletised as a list. This is to impress the human audience. They get what they need.

To impress the search engine is also key. This means doing the search engine optimisation (SEO) housekeeping to make sure that search engines can read and index your copy, and deem it relevant and significant to potential searching audiences.

Data is key to success

The only way we can understand how our content is performing is through regular data analysis and iteration. Are people reading our content? When are they dropping off and why might that be? What is their click path? Are they sharing our content?

These are all questions we need to answer if we want to succeed.

We run training sessions on Writing for the Web. If your business is struggling to articulate its offering online, then please contact us.

The post Writing for the Web: Plain English has never been so vital appeared first on Eight Moon Media, B2B Technology Copywriters.