Artificial intelligence goes back to the 1950s when Alan Turing, crowned as the father of AI, proposed that a computer can possess artificial intelligence if it can mimic human responses under specific conditions.
"A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human." —Alan Turing
War games
My first dose of AI was in the 1983 movie War Games when high school student David Lightman (Matthew Broderick) unwittingly hacks into a military supercomputer while searching for new video games. After starting what seemed like a game of Global Thermonuclear War, Lightman led the supercomputer to activate the nation's nuclear arsenal in response to his simulated threat as the Soviet Union. Once the clueless hacker comes to his senses, Lightman, with help from his girlfriend (Ally Sheedy), must find a way to alert the authorities to stop the onset of World War III. AI is scary, right?
FDD 2023
Fast forward to 2023, artificial intelligence has been featured in many Hollywood movies and, in some of them, has scared the bejeebus out of movie goers. Still, in real life, AI has evolved into one of the fastest-growing industries and continues to move at breakneck speeds. It has infiltrated many big brands and is starting to play significant roles in people's experience with brands.
Traditionally, creating a solid brand involved teams of designers and marketing experts working together to develop a cohesive aesthetic that accurately reflects a company's mission and values.
The mere mention of AI entering marketing departments triggers fears of being boxed in by rigid analytics or automated out of a job entirely. Yet, despite reluctance, AI might be marketers' best bet for building closer connections with their customers.
how can AI make brands connect more with consumers?
First, let's nail down the definition of "brand." While many marketers see a brand as the sum of the designs and content they create, those are just one aspect. At its heart, a brand is a customer's collective impression and experience. Therefore, every experience customers have with a company contributes to that company's brand. With that definition in mind, the role of AI in creating an authentic brand experience comes in a few forms.
Accessibility
On the most basic level, brand authenticity begins with accessibility. Accessibility brings brands to larger audiences and allows those audiences to experience it more fully.
AI helps brands create more video content by generating video captions that manually can take up time. AI-generated video captions allow brands to improve video accessibility effortlessly. Usable even on live video, AI-powered captions add a depth of experience to video content.
For those with visual impairments, the image-rich world of social media marketing can be challenging. However, Facebook and Instagram's built-in AI-generated image captions feature breaks down those barriers. As a result, more people can enjoy social media content, regardless of whether a brand has added an image description.
By removing the effort required to create an accessible brand experience, AI allows for broader brand connections.
Customer Experience
AI can also remove barriers to understanding. For many marketers, collecting customer feedback is equally enlightening and time-consuming. While brand reviews and online mentions provide a window into customer brand perceptions, they're often hidden in the depths of raw data.
AI-powered sentiment analysis lets AI do the dirty work of sorting through data to produce insights into how customers see brands. Beyond simple "positive," "negative," and "neutral" perceptions, newer methods of AI-driven sentiment analysis are even beginning to weed out sarcasm in customer feedback.
Unlike customer surveys or interviews, sentiment analysis leverages unfiltered customer feedback. Combined with AI's data, it can offer a complete picture of how consumers perceive brands. Then, by comparing these brand perceptions against their intended brand, marketers can better understand where they might need to improve. In working to close this gap, brands can become the most authentic version of themselves.
Personalized Experiences
A brand's value is connected to the relationship it builds with its customers – namely, how well they relate to and trust it.
AI has allowed brands to personalize consumer experiences and build deeper relationships. One of the biggest obstacles to brand authenticity is how impersonal marketing becomes as it scales. While marketers try to mitigate this issue through segmentation, more than segments are needed to create the level of personalization consumers seek.
To create the ever-elusive "segment of one," AI offers a simple solution. Solutions like Google's Recommendations AI learn the content and products each customer prefers to serve them more of what they want.
By strategically presenting the parts of your brand each customer connects with, brands can offer personalized experiences. This kind of one-to-one connection makes customers feel understood by brands.
Brand Assets
Marketers might more readily accept AI's role in accessibility, analysis, and personalization, but genuinely creative AI can still be alienating. But even AI capable of generating design and content has an important role in making brand experiences more authentic.
Authentic brands need a unique angle that sets them apart from competitors. Still, marketers spend much of their effort on generic first drafts. Generated designs and content allow marketers to put effort into fine-tuning rather than focusing on foundations. Providing more time to work on the details that distinguish brands, AI-generated assets shift the focus toward customer experience, so marketers can invest their time in the aspects of their assets that customers will remember.
Brand Authenticity
From the basics of brand accessibility to generated brand assets, AI can be a powerful tool for marketers. Rather than adding a barrier between brands and customers, AI excels at removing barriers.
AI puts marketers back in the driver's seat, and the data it creates allows marketers to develop better strategies, execute better, and personalize a brand's experience. Marketers brave enough may find the magic of AI is that it will help you see things as they are, not as you wish them to be.