The 70-Year-Old Marketing Lesson Behind AI
Artificial intelligence may be revolutionary, but its success comes from a design principle created more than seventy years ago by industrial designer Raymond Loewy. Here’s an AI marketing lesson.
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The 70-Year-Old Marketing Lesson Behind AI
Have you ever noticed something curious about artificial intelligence?
ChatGPT looks like a text conversation. Claude looks like a chat window. Microsoft’s Copilot lives inside Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Google’s AI doesn’t ask us to abandon Search and learn something completely new. Instead, it appears in the same search box we’ve been typing into for decades.
AI technology is supposed to change everything, but it sure feels surprisingly familiar.
I found myself wondering why. After all, if these companies are spending billions and billions of dollars inventing the future, why are they working so hard to make it feel like the present?
But First, a Story.
I don’t think I’ve given Raymond Loewy much thought since design school. Every once in a while I’d see a Studebaker Avanti at a car show and remember that Loewy had designed it. I’d admire the lines for a moment and move on.
But once I started thinking about him again, I realized I’d been surrounded by his work my entire life.
Even if you’ve never heard of Loewy, you’ve certainly seen what he created. Loewy helped shape the iconic Coca-Cola bottle, redesigned Lucky Strike’s packaging, streamlined Greyhound buses and locomotives, influenced the look of Air Force One, and even worked on America’s first space station, Skylab. His fingerprints are all over products and experiences most of us know, use, and simply take for granted.
What made Loewy remarkable wasn’t merely his ability to design beautiful things. It was his understanding of people.
His clients came to him because they wanted to build the future. Loewy understood that customers were fascinated by innovation only until it became unfamiliar enough to make them uncomfortable. He knew that his job wasn’t simply to design the future. It was to help people accept it.
He called this philosophy MAYA: Most Advanced Yet Acceptable.
As he liked to explain it, “To sell something surprising, make it familiar. To sell something familiar, make it surprising.”
I’ve always loved that idea because it explains so much more than industrial design.
Why AI Feels So Comfortable
Once Loewy’s principle came back to mind, I couldn’t stop seeing it.
The companies leading the AI revolution aren’t asking us to change the way we interact with technology. They’re building extraordinary capabilities into experiences we already understand. We know how to have conversations, so ChatGPT and Claude invite us to chat. We know how to write documents and build spreadsheets, so Microsoft places Copilot inside the applications we’ve already mastered. We know how to search the web, so Google brings AI to a place that already feels familiar instead of asking us to learn an entirely new system.
Making AI feel familiar wasn’t an accident. It was the strategy all along.
Once you notice it, you start seeing MAYA everywhere. The companies leading the AI race understand that people are far more willing to embrace something new when it feels connected to something they already know.
The Lesson for the Rest of Us
The same principle applies whether you’re introducing a new product, rolling out a new process, proposing a new strategy, or asking customers to see your business differently. People rarely resist good ideas because the ideas lack merit. They hesitate because they’re being asked to make too large a leap all at once.
Raymond Loewy understood that more than seventy years ago, and the leaders in AI understand it today. While the technology has changed dramatically, human nature hasn’t changed at all.
The next time you open ChatGPT or ask Google AI a question, take a second to notice how comfortable it feels. You’re not just looking at artificial intelligence. You’re looking at Raymond Loewy’s idea, quietly at work more than seventy years after he first described it.
If your organization is looking for ways to introduce new ideas, strengthen your messaging, or create more value by helping customers embrace change instead of fear it, I’d love to help. That’s exactly what I speak to organizations around the world: adding value by making the unfamiliar feel meaningful, memorable, and worth choosing.