ChatGPT Won't Capture Premium Brands, and They Know It

Hermès doesn't sell in supermarkets. Why would it answer through ChatGPT? Two markets: commodities in the generic assistant, story-driven brands in their own space.

Hermès doesn't sell in supermarkets. Why would it answer through ChatGPT? Two markets: commodities in the generic assistant, story-driven brands in their own space.

The tech consensus is settled: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity are becoming the universal point of contact between consumers and brands. Search gives way to the assistant. The site gives way to chat. The brand becomes an answer in a stream of questions.

That consensus is half right. And the wrong half will cost the brands that believe it dearly.

For categories where brand barely matters, the thesis holds. "Best vacuum under $300?" "Cheap car insurance?" "A hotel in Chicago this weekend?" These queries migrate naturally to generic assistants. The consumer wants a fast, comparative, frictionless answer. A brand-specific interface adds nothing.

That market is real. It will grow. Commodity brands are right to adapt to it.

The consensus forgets that markets aren't homogeneous. There are categories where the brand is a commodity, and categories where the brand is the product.

A universal assistant applies, by definition, the same treatment to every brand. It can be competent, precise, useful. It cannot be the voice of a house. Its business model runs on indifferentiation, exactly what story-driven brands have spent decades fighting.

The conversational market will segment the way physical retail did. Generalist giants on one side: marketplaces, comparison engines, infinite shelves. Houses with a story on the other, the ones that always refused to reduce their experience to supermarket shelf space. They won't accept it in conversational space either.

And the clock is running. Every brand will soon talk directly with its customers, the question is where, and on whose terms. It's the mobile-app shift all over again: those who "thought mobile" early built their channel. The rest existed in other people's stores.

Brands with high image value, luxury, premium craft, B2B expertise, community brands, will choose to own their conversational space. For them, delegating the interface to a generalist wouldn't be a simplification. It would be a surrender.

Scenaro is built for these brands. Not because universal LLMs will fail, they'll thrive, in their segment. But because the most profitable part of commerce, in margin and loyalty, will never reduce to a query in a generic assistant.

Owning your space, concretely: a recognizable voice, memory that carries across sessions, versioned scenarios that hold the house's expertise, and multimodal staging, voice and interface in sync, the way Urbansider, a Paris travel concierge, runs it in production. Club Français du Vin gained a marked improvement in engagement. Lupi, in pet e-commerce, is building its customer relationship there.

Should your brand be visible in the LLMs? Probably, data, citations, discovery. Should your brand experience live there? If your value rests on that experience, certainly not.

Commerce will segment between the universal and the intimate. Premium brands have always known which side they're on.

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