By Joanne Z. Tan | 10 Plus Brand & AIXD — AI Experience Design
Warren Buffett said:“If you gave me $100 billion and said, ‘Take away the soft drink leadership of Coca-Cola in the world,’ I’d give it back to you and say it can’t be done”, as quoted in The Warren Buffett Way by Robert Hagstrom.
This statement is a testament to brand power. It is one of the clearest articulations of what I call the Brand Moat – a durable competitive advantage that is often underestimated.
Buffett built Berkshire Hathaway’s position in part on his own brand power. Yet most executives still treat brands as a marketing expense rather than a strategic asset. It is a line item to be cut when times get hard, rather than the fortress that protects everything inside.
That misunderstanding is costly, it may even be fatal in today’s AI-accelerated marketplace, where products are commoditized faster than ever.
In Warren Buffett’s framework, an “economic moat” is the structural barrier that protects a business from competitive erosion. He identifies several types: cost advantages, switching costs, network effects, and intangible assets.
One of the main intangible assets in Buffett’s moat defense system is a powerful brand. The brand is what allows companies to charge a premium for goods and services and maintain a competitive advantage. Buffett has always been a firm advocate of investing in businesses with strong brands that inspire customer trust and loyalty.
Coca-Cola is a world-famous brand that enjoys the power to raise prices without losing its brand position and customers. Its brand strength is based on consistent marketing and an emotional connection with consumers. As quoted above, Buffett saw its “brand moat” as virtually unassailable.
Apple has built intense customer loyalty with an ecosystem of products that emphasize design, simplicity, data privacy, and customer services. While insulated from market disruptions, Apple’s brand power allows it to charge premium prices.
In short, a Brand Moat includes: brand loyalty that competitors cannot buy, emotional belonging that users identify with, and brand trust as the foundation. Far more than a brand’s visual identity, design, name recognition, or functionality, a strong Brand Moat protects against customer “churn” in good times and bad.
“Competitors can copy products, match pricing, and deploy comparable technology. But they cannot quickly build trust that accumulates over years through consistent behavior and reliable value delivery,” according to a 2025 analysis from CooperativeComputing. Brand trust creates sustainable competitive advantages that are time-dependent. In other words, it takes time to earn trust.
68% of loyal customers say they would stick with their favorite brands even if prices increased, as revealed by UserTesting’s 2025 global research. On average, loyal customers are willing to pay 25% extra to stay with brands they trust.
However, brands cannot rest on their laurels. While legacy brands have the advantage of consumer “nostalgia,” they only maintain their positions by consistently delivering high quality products and positive consumer experiences.
These qualities are the “architecture” of brand loyalty. They translate directly into pricing power, retention, and compounding enterprise value. (For information about leveraging the AI Native Brand Architecture™ system to build a brand moat, contact AIXD.world, a subsidiary of 10 Plus Brand.)
As AI agents come online, they are changing the way people shop and buy, per the Harvard Business Review (HBR). AI can help consumers sift through mountains of data to compare features, prices, and reviews, and to recommend options.
Research by the HBR and others shows that consumers are willing to trust AI in what the authors call “low stakes” decisions. But when decisions are more consequential or carry emotional weight, consumers want safety and reassurance.
That is why brand trust is one of deepest and widest moats available. “That is the moat AI can’t automate,” according to MarTech’s December 2025 analysis. Along with trust in their products and services, brands must also build trust in their technology. If brands use AI tools, they should commit to standards for data privacy, security, and explainable results.
Brands that show integrity, reliability, and responsiveness when consumers are facing “high stakes” decisions build trust that AI models and agents cannot duplicate. “It’s not just trust in the product. It’s trust in how the brand behaves when consumers are scared, stressed, confused, or facing real loss,” per the MarTech report. More than functionality, how customers feel they are being treated matters.
This is the heart of what I mean by the Brand Moat in the AI era: your brand is not what you advertise. It is what your customers experience, remember, and tell others.
In my work with founders, executives, and growth-stage companies, I’ve identified three elements for a genuine Brand Moat.
Brand is the sum total of every experience a customer has with your organization, from the first search result to the post-purchase follow-up, from how your team handles a complaint to how your AI systems interact with users. Every touchpoint is a deposit into or withdrawal from the trust account.
The companies with the widest brand moats, like Coca-Cola and Apple, distinguish themselves by being consistent across countless small interactions over many years. They maintain their position by staying focused on customer experience. Bond’s 2024 Loyalty Report, for example, found that the top driver of loyalty is when a brand makes the customer feel special and recognized.
Trust is the foundation upon which pricing power, customer lifetime value, and referral networks are built. Yet many brands underestimate its value. For example, SAP’s consumer data shows that “deep, trust-based connection” to brands dropped 5% from the year before, to just 29% in 2025.
That’s a big loss, since loyal customers shop more frequently, and spend more each time than casual customers. The report also finds that customer acquisition costs have increased by almost 60% in the past five years.
Brands that consistently build trust, both in their products and in their integrity, have an advantage their competitors will find nearly impossible to duplicate.
The best Brand Moats are built not just on what a brand does, but on what it stands for, and who it stands for. When customers say “I’m a Mac person” or “I only use Amex Platinum,” more than describing a product preference, they are expressing an identity. They are saying: this brand is part of how I see myself.
A study published by the MIT Sloan Management Review found that the most powerful brands are the ones that “most accurately represent a consumer’s cultural identity.” They have become “identity marks” through which people communicate who they are and which communities they belong to.
A brand that becomes part of customer identity has an advantage that can’t be copied.
First, map every customer touchpoint and ask: does this experience reinforce our brand promise, or undermine it? Inconsistency is the primary destroyer of brand moats. Every gap is a leak in the fortress wall. (To schedule a brand audit initial consultation with 10 Plus Brand Inc., contact us.)
Do not wait until a crisis to establish your data governance, your transparency practices, your communication protocols. Trust infrastructure built before it is needed is a moat. Trust infrastructure built in response to a crisis is damage control.
Ask the deeper question about your brand: more than “what problem do we solve” but “who does our customer become when they choose us?” The brands that command the highest loyalty and the highest pricing power are those that answer that second question with clarity and conviction.
AI can automate the routine, surface insights, and personalize at scale. But the brands with the best moats are those that use AI to make every human interaction more meaningful. Technology can only amplify what a brand already stands for.
A strong brand needs to constantly put itself top of mind of their customers at all times. That’s why we see Coca Cola ads all the time, everywhere – in movie theater ads, super bowl ads – rain or shine, through thick and thin, year after year. Coca Cola’s average annual ad spend is between $4.2–$5 billion in recent years. Its revenue is consistently around $40 billion, according to Atlantis Press, 2024. Their advertising share of total revenue is between 5 % –11 %.
However, the brands that will define the next decade are not the ones that move fastest or spend most on advertising. They are the ones that understand this: user experience is brand experience. Brand experience determines enterprise destiny.
The most defensible advantage you will ever have is more than products and services but the trust, belonging, and identity you create for the people who choose you. That is an undefeatable Brand Moat. A relentless focus on designing and improving brand experiences for the end users is the AI-human symbiotic future.
If you would like to learn more about building a brand moat for the AI Native age:
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Joanne Z. Tan is a global brand strategist, thought leadership coach, and founder of 10 Plus Brand, Inc. and its subsidiary AIXD.world. She advises executives, founders, and organizations on building influential, differentiated brands that drive visibility, credibility, and revenue growth. Her work integrates strategic positioning, AI-era brand architecture, and executive thought leadership to help leaders become recognized authorities in their industries. Also as a content strategist and branding expert, and a dynamic speaker, Joanne helps decode Brand DNA to elevate successful businesses to powerful brands in the AI age.
Her coaching emphasizes comprehensive strategies, business modeling, multidisciplinary thought leadership, high-authority content creation, brand building, GTM, user experience design, AI Native Brand Architecture™, and AIXD™ (AI Experience Design). Trained in law and business with a liberal arts foundation from Brandeis University, Joanne is also a former journalist, award-winning photographic artist, poet, and avid wilderness backpacker.
AIXD (AI Experience Design) is a global platform and community focused on advancing responsible, human-centered artificial intelligence. It brings together leaders, technologists, strategists, and innovators to explore how AI can be designed, implemented, and governed to enhance human experience and long-term business value. Through thought leadership, collaboration, and strategic dialogue, AIXD aims to shape the future of AI – human symbiosis with impact, innovation, and integrity.
© Joanne Z. Tan, 2026. All rights reserved.
