5 Ways To Use AI In Marketing

Hey my dear fellow marketing fans,

I am so excited to share this talk with you here.

Its a talk I gave on using Artificial Intelligence i.e. AI in Marketing at CSI, Ahmedabad in 2021. You can watch the video below or read the transcript given ahead!

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Imagine you just found out that Priyanka Chopra is coming to your house today and that you are supposed to impress her. What would you do?

Would you focus only on what to wear, your hairstyle, etc or will you also think of conversation topics to amaze her?

You will need to do both, right?

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Don’t you think this is similar to the confusion you face everyday at work? About how to impress your valuable customers?

Should you use fancy technology and AI or should you focus on engaging and witty marketing and communication?

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That confusion is what I hope to clear up today. I will cover 5 ways to woo the customer by combining AI and marketing in the right way.

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AI In Marketing Gone Wrong!

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In 2012, famous retail brand Target did a shocking thing. It correctly sent maternity coupons to a teenage customer who was secretly pregnant. She had not even told her father of her pregnancy.

So how did Target know that she was?

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Through Artificial Intelligence!

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By analyzing purchase habits of all their women customers, their AI had managed to predict pregnancy, almost accurately.

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When this story came out, customers were really angry with Target for digging into such personal health information.

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Target was trying to increase long term sales. They wanted to hook the customer right before she became a new parent so that she would keep coming back even after she delivered.

But it backfired because they didn’t know where to draw the line.

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This is a very tricky balance to maintain- between AI and marketing- how much to use and how to use without angering the customer?

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Before I answer these questions, let's first understand what we mean by AI.

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What is Artificial Intelligence i.e. AI?

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Most of us think AI means self-driving cars or robots or Iron Man’s Jarvis.

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While those too are powered by artificial intelligence, AI is a much larger umbrella term.

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?AI has 3 core tools: Statistics, Semantics and Logic. Using these 3 tools in different combinations and proportions, we can make machines smarter.

So Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing, etc are just the different AI methods used to make machines smarter.

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As you know, the most common and popular of these AI methods is Machine Learning.

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What is Machine Learning?

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To understand what Machine Learning is, let's suppose you want to buy some clothes and you decide to visit Myntra for that.?

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If you login to Myntra for the 1st?time ever, you have to set filters according to your preferences because Myntra does not know you. It has zero data about you.

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As you start buying a lot of clothes, it starts keeping a track of what kind of clothes you are adding to the wishlist, your frequently used filters, what kind of clothes you normally end up buying, whether you mainly shop before Diwali or before Raksha Bandhan and so much more.

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Now when you login to Myntra for the 100th time, it will immediately show you the kind of clothes it knows you would like for sure, suggest the right size for you, send special coupons just before Raksha Bandhan because that’s when you are most active.

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This is machine learning. Its main purpose is prediction.

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The Myntra algorithm collects data during your past and current purchases, analyzes it and then predicts what you will want in future. And its accuracy on your 100th visit will be far better than its accuracy on your 3rd visit because it is continuously learning on its own.

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Steps to start using AI in Marketing

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Step 1: Get a marketer to train the AI

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If you want to use AI in marketing, then you must have a marketer train it (using training data from marketing), not an IT person.

Because if you want to train a junior cricketer, will you ask a footballer to mentor them or will you ask a senior cricketer to do that job?

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Step 2: Define the right hypothesis

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All of us who wish to bring in AI to help with business, need to start with the right question or hypothesis we want the machine to find answers to. That is the very first and most critical step.

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Step 3: Find the right set of data

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After we ask the question, we need to find the right data to get quality output.?Basically, if we ask the wrong question or feed garbage data, we will get rubbish answers.

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Where Target went wrong

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This was what caused so much trouble for Target.??

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Their first question to their statistician was, “If we want to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that?”

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The question itself was morally wrong. No wonder the output was also morally wrong.

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Responsibility of Marketers and Business Owners

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As marketers and business owners, we must realize that no one knows the customer as well as us. It is our job to understand customer behavior, needs, expectations. Hence, the responsibility to find customer insights without violating their privacy lies with us.

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AI is only there to help us do our job smartly and quickly. It will only follow our lead.

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So if we want to ensure that our use of AI in marketing wins over customers hearts and not their anger, what is the right way to approach it?

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5 ways to use AI in Marketing correctly

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1.???Customers First. Then Marketing. Then AI

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Remember when Uber offered free taxi rides to and from vaccination centers for eligible people?

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This is the kind of marketing and AI integration that wins the hearts of customers. Because, it lives the primary principle of marketing i.e. ‘Customer comes first. Always’.

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Uber did not create the technology first and then think ‘what shall we do with this technology?’

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They first started with the question ‘How can we make our customer’s life easier in these crucial Covid times’?

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This is marketing at its core. They created the entire marketing strategy in terms of what to offer, to whom, at what price, where. Then figured out how to promote it.

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Only after this, they brought in AI to help execute these strategies.

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AI helped them identify eligible customers and offered a free ride only to those eligible customers and that too only if they chose a vaccine center as the destination. This level of granularity and this speed would not have been possible without AI.

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This Uber experience made their customers happy and if customers are happy, business will be happy.

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Focus on creating positive, memorable customer experience.?

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Products or services that are loved by customers today, become outdated and forgotten tomorrow. Only the experience we offer, stays with the customer and thus becomes our differentiator.?

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And the only way for us to give a memorable experience to every single customer, meeting their every need and expectation, is through AI.

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Uber started with the question- 'What will give my customers a memorable experience?' And built their AI Marketing solution on that base.

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Whereas Target started with ‘What will make my company more revenue and for a long time?’ Customers did not feature in their equation at all.

Is it any surprise they failed to make the customer happy?

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Bottomline?

To woo customers, first build a customer centric marketing foundation and then bring in AI later, to augment and support it.

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2. Personalize the experiences

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I love this quote from Brian Solis

"Welcome to a new era of AI marketing, where machines help make marketing more personal and human.”

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What can be more personal than designing your shoes such that you are the only one with shoes of that design?

?Nike Makers Experience

Source:?Nike

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In 2017, Nike launched a system called Nike Makers Experience that allowed customers to?design their own sneakers in-store.

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Customers had to put on blank Nike sneakers and choose their own graphics and colors. Using augmented reality and projection systems, the system then displayed the design on the blank shoes.

The designs could be printed on the sneakers and be available to the customer in about 90 minutes.

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This customer engaging feature not only drove sales but more importantly, it allowed Nike to collect data about customer preferences.

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Nike then used this data with machine learning algorithms to design future products and deliver personalized product recommendations and marketing messages.

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Who wouldn’t be excited by this speed and level of personalization? And it was all possible because of the right use of AI.

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Personalization makes the customers feel special.

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Just ask my husband. When Swiggy was launched, he was an early adopter. We started ordering from his Swiggy account.

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Although I too have a Swiggy account, because of his longer history of orders, Swiggy’s AI knows him much better than it knows me.

It knows what type of cuisine he likes, his favorite foods, restaurants, etc. That’s why it sends him marketing offers and coupons that are far more tailored and far more frequent than it sends me.

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He keeps getting superb offers absolutely suited to his tastes and hence we keep ordering from his account, not mine. Since we order more from his account, he gets even more superb offers.

And the cycle continues; not letting Swiggy know me well enough and my preferences.

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A brand that makes its customers feel special and showers them with attention, earns a rightful place in their hearts and wallets.

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But personalization at the cost of privacy can be disastrous.

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3.???Privacy. Privacy. Privacy.

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Like Spiderman said “With great power, comes great responsibility”.

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There is a very, very thin line between collecting enough data to personalize communication and continuing to collect beyond that.

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The most difficult part about using AI’s power in marketing is to know when to stop. If we cross that line, we may become a brand people hate.

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Try this question as a litmus test of sorts. “Will using AI like this create a positive experience for my customer?” If the answer is yes, go ahead. If no, can it.

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Suppose you have just created an app that tells you the ingredients in a dish simply by clicking on an image of it.

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Now obviously, you will have to get access to the user’s phone camera and gallery to identify that photo. But you don’t need to access to their calendar or their contact list.

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Or suppose you have created an app that syncs with the smart lights in my home.

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When I switch on the TV, the light turns soft and contains more red because that is good for my eyes.

When I sit to read a book, through the webcam of the room, your app can see me reading, so it automatically turns the lights bright and white.

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Now to do all this, your app will have to get access to my webcam feed and other smart appliances. That is someone else’s sensitive information in your hands.

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You need to ensure right from the time you start building the app, that you collect only as much data as absolutely needed to give the customer a delightful experience, not one iota more.

And also that the data is kept completely safe and not sold to other interested parties.

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That is respectful of customer privacy.

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Apple and Privacy

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Apple does this very well. That is one of the reasons Apple continues to be a beloved brand of customers simply by making customer privacy their first priority.

You can continue reading the rest of the article at www.ifiweremarketing.com

To read examples of AI disasters faced by Microsoft and Google, why that happened and how to prevent that, to know how Cadbury and Healthify helped the society by combining the power of AI and Marketing and more.

Happy reading!