My most helpful brand of 2022

 

With all the trend reports and round-ups of 2022 I’ve been reading, I gave pause for thought. What has been my favourite brand of the last year? I was tempted to go for something that had done brilliant brand communications, but realised pretty quickly that I’d probably only seen those communications by reading Campaign and the rest of the trade press.

Rather, it’s a brand that entered my life just over a year ago, and one that, in the words of the “meaningful brands” questionnaire, I’d be genuinely upset if it disappeared. 

It’s DeepL. In November 2021, I was searching around for a decent online translator that would do a better job than my memories of Bing, or Google or Facebook. I’m still not sure whether DeepL found me or whether I found DeepL, but does that matter?

It’s a quiet, unassuming, unobtrusive brand - in fact, I’m not sure whether it officially thinks of itself of a brand or not. But it has a logo and a look, so I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt. What is certainly true is that I have developed an extreme loyalty to DeepL over the last few months and it has become ingrained in my working life, particularly when I’m working with predominantly German clients, as has been the case recently.

DeepL is just one of many AI-based brands that I’ll be getting used to using in my work. The next one could be ChatGPT - but that’s a story for another day.