Brand Journalism is the narration, using journalistic techniques, of a company — from the context in which it operates to its people, from its history to its products, from customers to collaborators and partners.
Brand Journalism can help a company be found, get known, be chosen and be remembered. It can also engage those who already work there more deeply and attract new talent. Over time, it can help strengthen corporate identity and image.
It is an activity with multiple benefits, known and practised by many of the largest companies, but which within the fabric of SMEs — especially in Italy — still finds little uptake.
What can be done to help these smaller organizations reap its advantages too?
The first step is to help them understand its value and usefulness.
Without this step, the risk is that Brand Journalism finds no space or, worse, is adopted half-heartedly — which today often translates into a “let’s do it cheap and fast with AI.”
So let’s start here: let’s identify together the value and usefulness of Brand Journalism through a list of benefits.
We’ll also explore the role of AI, a resource that — if well set up and governed — can help make Brand Journalism more accessible and sustainable for SMEs too.
The benefits of Brand Journalism in the relationship with the market
When you launch a Brand Journalism activity, it’s essential to identify a company’s various interlocutors and to understand their role, their interests and their information needs.
The interlocutors can be numerous: customers (existing and potential), partners, investors or lenders, media, journalists, trade associations, consumer associations, institutions, local communities and other parties.
Each has different questions, interests, languages and expectations, which we must consider when choosing topics, formats, channels and other relevant aspects.
In the steps that follow we’ll focus mainly on potential customers, even though many of the benefits described concern all of a company’s interlocutors.
Let’s start with “being found,” beginning with one of the most recent frontiers.
Content created through Brand Journalism, when it also meets precise technical criteria, can help a company emerge on search engines and in the answers provided by AI — as in the case of Google’s AI Overviews or the responses of assistants based on language models like Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT and others.
We recently explored the relationship between Brand Journalism and concepts such as AIO, GEO and AEO in a dedicated article.
Broadening the view, we can point out that the use of storytelling, reportage, in-depth pieces, research and other techniques characteristic of Brand Journalism can help strengthen the newsworthiness of what a company puts forward — benefiting press-office activities and the relaunch of press releases.
Not only that: Brand Journalism can also feed spontaneous circulation in contexts such as forums, industry portals, in-depth sites and other third-party platforms.
This is the case of “Earned Media” — that is, visibility obtained through spontaneous mentions, word of mouth and reviews.
Staying within this classification and turning our attention to owned channels (“Owned Media”) — such as websites, newsletters, social pages and other proprietary resources — Brand Journalism makes it possible to feed and enhance these channels through the content it produces: interviews, articles, research and other original content.
If we shift our attention from being found to “getting known,” we can say that content created with Brand Journalism techniques helps a company tell the story of its identity, its skills and its way of operating more coherently and recognizably.
Such content makes it easier for a company’s various interlocutors to draw closer, developing over time a familiarity with the company, its language, its stories and its people.
Over time this familiarity can foster greater closeness and, in some cases, turn into attachment.
Not only that: the quality of content created with Brand Journalism techniques can contribute to the perception of a company’s authority.
All of this brings us to Brand Journalism’s contribution to the choice of a company and its products.
Brand Journalism makes it easier for a potential buyer to get to know and frame the company and its offer to the market, reducing doubts and uncertainties.
Through the use of journalistic techniques, it is in fact possible to share information about a company’s various activities, including research and development, production, distribution, and customer service.
This greater knowledge can have a positive influence on the potential buyer’s choice.
Finally, let’s highlight the role of Brand Journalism in the memorability of a company or brand, examining this aspect on two distinct fronts.
On one hand, content created through Brand Journalism techniques often contains memorable stories — that is, accounts that lend themselves to being remembered.
On the other, the continuity over time of Brand Journalism activities allows a company to hold an ongoing conversation with the market, increasing the chances of encountering a single person more than once.
We tend to remember better the organizations we encounter continuously, and in different contexts.
The benefits inside the company: corporate culture and employer branding
Corporate culture and employer branding can benefit from Brand Journalism too.
In this context, the people who contribute every day to a company’s activities and objectives are involved in creating content through text, audio and video interviews.
Their testimonies become part of a choral account of the company in which the protagonists find space with their first and last names — helping to enhance experiences, skills and professional journeys.
This content is sometimes intended to circulate only within the organization, in company portals or newsletters aimed only at employees and collaborators.
In other cases, however, it is also distributed externally, published on sites, social channels and other resources.
In both cases, giving people a voice and recognizability can foster a sense of belonging and recognition of their contribution.
Giving people space in a company’s content also brings a further, high-impact benefit: it makes it possible to strengthen employer branding, making the company more attractive to new talent.
A company that gives its people space and helps them tell the story of what they do can be perceived as attentive to valuing individual contribution.
Finally, telling the story of company life through Brand Journalism techniques can help people better understand its values and priorities, so they can choose more consciously whether or not to apply to that organization.
The organizational benefits of Brand Journalism
To practise Brand Journalism at its best, it’s essential to set up work to gather, verify, organize and update company information and materials — including documents, data, interviews, business cases, images, videos and other sources useful for understanding and telling the story of a company’s work.
Some of these materials are already available and immediately usable; others must be retrieved, updated or produced specifically through activities such as interviews, the collection of testimonies, photographs or videos.
We can say that Brand Journalism helps a company get to know itself better, often bringing to light skills, experiences and distinctive characteristics of great value.
Moreover, carrying out a Brand Journalism activity in a continuous and organized way makes it possible to create an editorial heritage that accompanies a company along its path — and this has two main advantages.
On one hand, it can help bring people closer to a company’s history, its evolution and its projects; on the other, it makes it possible to obtain significant benefits from the use of AI tools.
How? Let’s see together.
Brand Journalism and AI: a winning combination
Today we have at our disposal increasingly advanced artificial-intelligence tools that are simple to use and economically accessible.
These factors make AI a valuable ally in numerous business activities, including those tied to Brand Journalism.
Thanks to AI, it’s possible to reduce the time and costs of many activities, making the in-house adoption of Brand Journalism and the creation of an editorial heritage more sustainable — for SMEs too.
The editorial heritage itself is tightly bound to artificial intelligence: on one hand, AI tools can facilitate its construction, organization, updating and preservation; on the other, a rich, verified and well-organized heritage makes it possible to obtain from AI results that are more relevant, reliable and consistent with a company’s identity. In this way a genuine virtuous circle is created.
There are, however, some cautions that shouldn’t be underestimated.
The first concerns content quality: an indiscriminate use of AI, without adequate sources and editorial supervision, can lead to texts that are generic, standardized, poorly documented and scarcely consistent with a company’s voice.
Search engines and AI assistants tend to give less visibility to this kind of content, and instead to value original, useful, documented content traceable to authoritative and reliable sources.
The same can be said of people: many are able to recognize impersonal, contrived or carelessly made content, and tend to perceive it negatively — extending this impression to the quality and reliability of the company as well.
The second caution concerns the people who work in the company. If a Brand Journalism initiative is presented or perceived as a mere automated production of content, the people involved may attribute little value to the process, devote less attention to their own contributions, and feel scarcely engaged.
Balance is therefore needed in adopting AI tools in support of Brand Journalism.
Artificial intelligence can contribute to research, the organization of sources, transcriptions, translations, the preparation of drafts, the adaptation of content and the analysis of results.
But listening, interpretation, the choice of stories, the verification of information and final editorial responsibility must remain with people.
Value therefore arises from a conscious use of AI systems within processes able to combine the human touch — made of sensitivity, experience and responsibility — with the capabilities of analysis, organization and acceleration offered by technology.
At Axura we help companies tell their story: we’ve been doing it for years with method, expertise and passion — including through brand journalism, together with our clients.
Want to know more? Visit our site for more information.
