Why your story matters (especially for these AI brands!)
How the many, many products in the AI personal assistant category differentiate from one another
ICYMI: We’re hosting an IRL retreat in the French countryside! Only a handful of spots remain. Let us know if you’re interested so we can reserve a château spot for you. :)
Hi there! You’re reading the Bonfire newsletter from Kevan Lee & Shannon Deep. Each week, we highlight brand, marketing, and creative learnings from our experience as in-house marketers turned agency owners who think a lot about creativity, our relationship to work, and how all of that impacts our identities. We’ll also feature insights from our digital community of super smart folks (which you’re welcome to join).
Wishing you a great week!
How to be different when you’re all selling the same stuff
When we last profiled a group of startup brands all selling the same things, it was remarkable how many of them said, almost literally, the exact same words on their website.
Everyone was #1.
(Oh, to inhabit a world where we could all be #1s!)
But all of them, whether they said it on their homepage or not, also had a unique story to tell.
We obviously think a lot about stories at Bonfire, whether we’re helping support our cool clients with messaging or we’re giving encouragement to our network of friends (you included) about career design. Stories matter. A lot! And if we leave this earth one day knowing there are more and better stories out there than before—and if those stories use the Oxford comma—we will feel we’ve done our job.
Therefore, we’re back at it, sticking our noses into other businesses’ business to figure out what makes them all unique and how they can lean even further into their authenticity through storytelling, channels, copy, and positioning.
This time around, we turned our gaze to the AI personal assistant category. We cherry-picked these eight favorites:
Athena
Duckbill
The Virtual Hub
Magic
Zirtual
Wishup
Perssist
Peachtree VA
Check out our overview of these brands below.
How AI personal assistants differentiate from one another
When we talk about brand positioning, we mean something very very different from product positioning. Brand positioning is all about emotional appeal; product positioning is logical appeal. Brand positioning is how you’re known, relative to the market. Product is what you sell, to whom, and what makes it the best.
At a glance, when we compare all these different AI personal assistant brands, here’s how the brand positioning breakdown may look:
What does a potential customer do with this information?
Well, the brand positioning sits in a customer’s mind as an unconscious bias of sorts. When you need a VA solution, you may already have a brand association with one of these eight. When you seek advice on which solution to buy, hopefully the customers of these brands are selling you on the brand’s reputation as professional or friendly or human-centered, etc.
Of course, there are other considerations like price sensitivity and product features, but the brand stuff is what gets you in the conversation to begin with.
Positioning is one of the most obvious ways that these companies differentiate from one another. But it is just one piece of the overall brand strategy. To show you how we think about this brand stuff, here is a breakdown of three of these eight AI personal assistant brands, based on what we can see from their online presence and what we’d imagine their brand foundations might look like.
Athena
The highest-order benefit that Athena evokes: Freedom!
I signed up for Athena years ago when I was an in-house marketing exec, and they recently came back on my radar when they resurrected their newsletter list, meaning, all of a sudden, they popped into my inbox. Surprise! But what I really appreciated about these emails was that they very clearly explained who they were from and what they were about:
Our aim at Athena is to give you your time back so you can spend it in the ways that matter most. In each issue of our newsletter you’ll get unique delegation tips.
When you read this and you pair it with the headline text on their homepage, you can very easily see the throughline. Athena is a virtual assistant service that helps high-performing leaders delegate. And this message permeates the brand.
How they differentiate
Description, in their own words:
“Athena Executive Partners empower leaders to unlock time abundance through the art of delegation.”
Who they're for: Executives and leaders
What makes them unique: A rigorous approach to delegation, combining human EAs with proprietary AI tools.
How they’ve positioned the brand: Athena hyperfocuses on the art and science of delegation, training clients to become better leaders by offloading tasks effectively.
Proposed brand purpose for Athena
When we create brand purpose statements at Bonfire, we look to identify a relevant cultural tension in the zeitgeist and identify the best version of your brand, product, and company. The intersection of these two—the WHY NOW and the WHY US—is where we find your brand purpose.
So in the case of Athena, their purpose may be the following:
Cultural tension: Ambitious people are overwhelmed by the myth that doing more requires doing it all themselves.
Brand’s best self: Athena transforms the way people work and live by making elite delegation effortless and deeply personal.
Brand purpose statement: Athena believes the world would be a better place if everyone could master the art of delegation.
Miscellaneous brand notes: 1️⃣ Athena is the highest-priced option among these competitors, which makes sense why they target executives with their messaging. 2️⃣ The idea of delegation is super strong and resonant. Their other concept of “time abundance”? Less so. This may be a more category-forward coined phrase they’re trying to establish, but it rings a bit more TikTok Business Influencer than they might intend.
Duckbill
The highest-order benefit that Athena evokes: Peace!
Duckbill is a modern personal assistant service for busy professionals that focuses on work tasks but also life admin: booking appointments, managing errands, etc. We first came across Duckbill when they graciously offered a discount to our Campout community members. Needless to say, this left a hugely positive brand impression! I’ll try not to be too biased here.
Among all the assistants that we reviewed, some lean into “personal assistant” positioning, others lean into “executive assistant” positioning, and still others lean into “virtual assistant” positioning. I’m sure there is nuance between the three terms, but I’ll admit to not knowing what the difference is myself! Maybe it’s because I connect with all three: I am a person in need of assistance, I like to think I could be an executive, and I would prefer if this person is virtual rather than on my doorstep every morning with my mail and newspaper. Duckbill takes an interesting approach by using “executive assistant” (same as Athena) but qualifying right away by saying they are “an executive assistant for your personal life.”
How they differentiate
Description, in their own words:
“Duckbill is an executive assistant for your personal life, led by expert humans and enhanced with AI superpowers.”
Who they're for: Busy professionals needing personal life management.
What makes them unique: A hybrid model combining human expertise with AI to manage personal tasks.
How they’ve positioned the brand: Duckbill positions itself as "life support," taking over personal tasks to free up mental space for users.
Proposed brand purpose for Duckbill
Cultural tension: Modern life overwhelms us with endless tasks, yet true personal assistance remains a luxury few can access.
Brand’s best self: Duckbill democratizes personal assistance by combining expert human support with AI efficiency, enabling anyone to reclaim time for what truly matters.
Brand purpose statement: Duckbill believes the world would be a better place if life admin never kept us from achieving our dreams.
The Virtual Hub
The highest-order benefit that Athena evokes: Control!
We had the chance to spend some time with The Virtual Hub team last year, and their approach to this space is very unique: They emphasize the human element of virtual assistants, relying on the quality of this connection and experience to build strong relationships with their customers. It’s a notable departure from others in the space that are combining humans and AI—or leaning into AI altogether.
How they differentiate
Description, in their own words:
“Dedicated VAs to scale your business 🚀 Helping companies work smarter, move faster & scale better.”
Who they're for: Businesses seeking to scale efficiently with trained virtual assistants.
What makes them unique: Focus on integrating high-caliber support to eliminate business bottlenecks.
How they’ve positioned the brand: The Virtual Hub presents itself as a partner in business growth, offering trained VAs to enhance operational efficiency.
Proposed brand purpose for The Virtual Hub
Cultural tension:
Ambitious entrepreneurs and leaders are drowning in operational chaos, clinging to the myth that growth means doing everything themselves.
Brand’s best self:
The Virtual Hub unlocks scalable growth by removing operational friction—offering elite virtual teams, training, and systems that free busy professionals to focus on their genius.
Brand purpose statement:
The Virtual Hub believes the world would be a better place if every leader had the freedom to grow their business without burning out.
Over to you
How do you see the differentiation between these products? Do you use any of them? Do you feel more or less inclined to now? Let us know!
Notable links, convos, and events
You can see all this and more in the Campout community.
Take a spin through our public events archive. There are some awesome replays of an AI personal voice session (sounds oxymoronic, but isn’t) and a session on finding your true fit at work!
Got any tips for excelling in your first 90 days in a new job? We’d love to hear ‘em!
But wait! There’s more…
Wanna be friends?
If you love this newsletter and wish it were more interactive, you’re in luck! Join us over in Campout, our digital community for creative marketers and the creative curious.
Wanna work with us?
If you need help with brand strategy and storytelling, fractional brand and marketing leadership, and bringing your brand strategy to life in impactful ways, send us an email at hello@aroundthebonfire.com to get in touch.
As always, you can find us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Threads.
