When Does Clarity Become Optimisation image by APPLE & BEARS
A Founder Perspective by Dean Butt, Co-founder of APPLE & BEARS
Technology has changed the path between intention and choice.
For an independent brand, that path once felt relatively straightforward. You created a product for a person. You explained what it was, why you made it, and what you believed made it worthwhile. The customer encountered it, considered it, and made a choice.
That journey now has several additional intermediaries.
Search engines interpret the words on our websites. Ecommerce platforms categorise our products. Algorithms decide what is relevant. Artificial intelligence increasingly summarises, compares, and recommends what consumers might want to buy.
Before a person experiences a product, a machine may already have formed an understanding of what that product is.
Recently, I shared a post about the growing role machines play between a product and the person it was created for. I received a reply that raised an interesting point.
The suggestion was that adapting to algorithms does not necessarily mean changing the truth of a brand. Sometimes it may simply mean expressing that truth more clearly — saying plainly what the product is, who it is for, and why it exists.
I thought that was an interesting perspective because it challenged me to look at the question from another direction. If greater clarity helps both machines and people understand a product, then optimisation is not necessarily the enemy of authenticity.
But it left me with another question:
When does clarity become optimisation?
The Value of Saying Something Simply
Founders are often surprisingly good at explaining their businesses in conversation.
Ask someone who has spent years building a product what it is and why it exists, and the answer can be remarkably straightforward. There is no keyword research, metadata, or carefully constructed marketing language. They simply tell you.
Put the same founder in front of a website, however, and things can become considerably more complicated.
We add terminology because search engines might recognise it. We restructure sentences because an ecommerce platform needs particular information. We repeat certain phrases because research suggests people are searching for them.
Some of this is simply good communication.
If technology encourages a business to answer three basic questions — what is this, who is it for, and why does it exist? — that may be beneficial for machines and people alike.
Clarity should not be something independent brands fear. The question is what happens next.
The Small Changes Nobody Notices
The change rarely happens dramatically. Nobody arrives one morning and decides to surrender control of their brand to an algorithm.
Instead, there are hundreds of small decisions:
- A product description is rewritten because a search engine appears to understand a particular phrase better.
- A title changes because a marketplace categorises the product differently.
- Certain language disappears because a digital platform struggles to interpret it.
- Other words become more prominent because they perform better in search.
Each decision may be perfectly reasonable.
I have encountered versions of these decisions while building APPLE & BEARS. Running an independent beauty business today means thinking not only about what we make and what customers experience, but also about how digital systems interpret what we say about it. That is simply part of modern business.
The danger is not necessarily any individual change. The danger is accumulation.
What Happens When the Machine Becomes the First Audience?
A product should ultimately be created for the person who will use it. Yet increasingly, it must also be described for machines before that person gets the opportunity to experience it.
That creates an unusual tension.
If a search engine needs particular terminology to understand a product, we use that terminology. If an AI system relies on structured information to compare products, businesses have an incentive to provide it. If algorithms reward clarity, companies naturally become clearer.
None of that is inherently negative.
The problem begins when businesses stop asking “How can we describe this product accurately?” and start asking “What description will the system reward?”
Those questions sound similar, but they are not the same.
One begins with the product and searches for the clearest language to describe it. The other begins with the machine and works backwards.
The Feedback Loop
This matters because technology does not merely observe markets — increasingly, it can influence how businesses behave within them.
- A company creates something with a particular intention.
- It describes that product online.
- Search engines classify the description and algorithms determine where it appears.
- AI systems interpret the available information and may use it when making comparisons or recommendations.
- Businesses observe what receives visibility and adapt their language accordingly.
- The adapted language becomes new information for the machines to interpret, and the cycle begins again.
Over time, the possibility arises that businesses do not simply change how products are described — they may begin changing what they create because certain characteristics are easier to communicate, categorise, or surface digitally.
That is where a question about marketing becomes something larger.
Independent Brands Have Something Worth Protecting
Large companies can have entire departments devoted to search, data, ecommerce, advertising, and artificial intelligence.
Independent businesses often have something different: proximity to the original intention.
The person deciding how the product should be described may be the same person who helped develop it, chose its packaging, dealt with the manufacturer, and spoke directly with customers.
That closeness can be a disadvantage when it comes to resources, but it can also be a considerable advantage.
You remember why something exists.
At APPLE & BEARS, technology, marketplaces, and terminology have changed enormously since we began in 2011. We have had to learn, adapt, and communicate in ways that would have been difficult to imagine when the business started.
Adaptation is necessary. Losing the original intention is not.
Perhaps the Answer Is Both
The reply to my earlier post made an important point: clear communication does not have to compromise authenticity.
In fact, stripping away unnecessary marketing language and explaining a product plainly may bring a business closer to its original purpose rather than further away from it.
Machines should be able to understand what we make. Customers should certainly be able to understand it.
The challenge is remembering which of those two audiences ultimately matters.
We should make our businesses understandable to machines without allowing machines to become the reason the business speaks the way it does.
Technology will continue changing. Search will change. Artificial intelligence will change. The vocabulary businesses use to remain discoverable will change with them.
Products will evolve, too.
But their integrity should not depend on an algorithm.
Perhaps that is the distinction independent brands need to protect:
Clarity helps technology understand the truth of a product. Optimisation becomes dangerous when it starts deciding what that truth should be.
And however sophisticated the technology between us becomes, the product at the end of that journey still has to be made for a person.
