Designing Adaptive Brand Experiences for the Context Economy

Context Changes Ownership & Campaigns

An “always on” strategy is no longer enough. We’ve entered the era of context management — where a brand must utilise signals taken from digital behaviour and real life to dictate how boldly or subtly they show up. 

Agentic AI operating systems — such as Contentstack’s Agent OS, revealed at ContentCon Europe — are crucial in helping brands navigate this shift. By merging real time data with composable digital experience platforms, brands can instantly personalise customer journeys, ensuring each interaction feels unique. 

But shiny new tools alone don’t deliver success. The human element remains essential to ensuring data and experience align — a responsibility that cannot sit with one individual. Instead of a single ownership model, context management should be distributed across three dimensions:

1. Empowerment: C-suite and HR should articulate the vision and empower the organization to deliver on it

2. Expertise: a small, cross-functional council should define the roadmap and decide which high impact, feasible opportunities to pursue

3. Execution: all department heads and discipline leads should  embed innovation into everyday operations, avoiding fragmentation

When it comes to setting the vision and defining the roadmap, a brand’s ambition must be matched by readiness. Data maturity, content operations and customisation capabilities have to be aligned before new technology and platforms deliver genuine value. Diagnostic tools, like the one Apply Digital launched at the event, are a great way to help identify opportunities for optimisation and prepare for adoption. 

When it comes to execution, it’s important to understand the new dynamics and pitfalls of marketing campaigns. One thing hasn’t changed: a campaign’s purpose remains prompting a customer to take a meaningful action. However, AI now allows for infinite variations of your campaign, based on contextual signals. 

While technology can manage rules, deepen segmentation and generate content to improve results, marketers shouldn’t just let the machine run. Infinite variations require close human oversight to catch mistakes and maintain integrity. In the past, the creative review happened before launching the campaign, but now it needs to happen non-stop throughout the campaign. After all, it takes a human being to spot hallucinations or undesired variations in the wild.

Think “Personal”, Not Just “Personalised”

Of course, it’s not just about avoiding errors. It’s about engineering adaptive brand experiences at scale and with impact.

Winning, in this case, hinges on more than building the perfect tech stack to power personalisation. It’s about leading with strategy to ensure the experience feels personal. The difference? “Personalisation” is a tactic consumers notice, and not always in a good way. Seeing the data at work in the background removes the magic and reduces the impact. “Personal” is a wonderful feeling that consumers experience, without wondering how the brand was able to deliver the right message at the right time.

Take Kraft Heinz. One of the world’s largest food and beverage companies spanning approximately 200 brands, Kraft Heinz wanted to deliver premium, cost-effective personalised content at speed. To achieve this, we developed TasteMaker — a bespoke Gen AI content scaling solution — that blended proprietary data (brand guidelines and specific visual learnings) with cultural context. 

TasteMaker wasn’t designed to get customers to notice a change in tactics. On the contrary, it focussed on developing better, more relevant experiences that resonated with each individual brand fan without them realizing there were infinite other variations out there. 

This meant getting the way ketchup flows or cheese stretches perfect, so consumers wouldn’t notice the AI. It also meant ensuring the brand adapted to different contexts without giving away the data that was hard at work in the background. Finally, it required giving Marketing time back to actually keep track of all content and opportunities to improve it.

TasteMaker achieved all of the above, with the adaptive brand experience generating increased engagement and conversion, while cutting content production timelines from eight weeks to eight hours.