Brand Semantic Governance in AI-Mediated Brand Systems

This working paper develops Brand Semantic Governance as the fourth contribution to the MVB research line and as the semantic layer of Brand Governance in AI-mediated brand systems. The paper addresses a specific governance question: what must remain semantically governable for a brand to be expressed, adapted, distributed, scaled, and evolved without losing continuity? It distinguishes three levels: Governed Brand Semantic Commitments, representing what the organization intentionally commits the brand to represent; Expressed Brand Meaning, representing what decisions and outputs actually express; and Interpreted Brand Meaning, representing what stakeholders construct through exposure, experience, context, and interaction. On this basis, the paper defines Brand Semantic Drift as the progressive, unintended, or unauthorized deviation of Expressed Brand Meaning from Governed Brand Semantic Commitments. It further distinguishes Brand Semantic Drift from Perceptual Drift Risk and Observed Perceptual Drift, and develops the constructs of Meaning Continuity, Brand Semantic Coherence, Semantic Boundaries, Protected Meaning, Controlled Semantic Variables, Change-Eligible Meaning, Category Framing, Promise–Proof Alignment, and Brand Semantic Memory. In AI-mediated environments, generative systems can increase the speed, volume, and fluency of brand outputs without guaranteeing the preservation of semantic commitments. The paper therefore frames semantic continuity as an explicit problem of organizational governance under conditions of distributed decision-making, change, and AI-mediated execution. The central thesis is that organizations cannot govern the meaning audiences ultimately construct; they can govern the semantic commitments and expressions through which they contribute to meaning formation. The paper operates at a conceptual level and does not disclose proprietary tools, scoring systems, semantic maps, prompts, workflows, registry mappings, module routing, or software implementations associated with MVB OS or Pink Different proprietary methods.