56% of marketers don’t understand AI

The headline in a recent Marketing Dive report reads, “56% of marketers think AI will negatively impact branding in 2020, study says.”

Apparently, it’s beyond time for marketers to clearly understand what AI means for marketing.

There is no other explanation for the fact that the majority of marketers believe that AI will negatively affect brands, as Bynder’s research “The 2020 State of Branding” suggests. AI, at least in the way it’s currently leveraged by marketers, is not about replacing creativity. It’s about introducing previously-unavailable insights that empower creatives to be more relevant and, in some cases, more personalized when building content for brands. Just over six months ago, McKinsey published an essay titled “The Future of Personalization,” in which authors Julien Boudet, Brian Gregg, Kathryn Rathje, Eli Stein, and Kai Vollhardt began: “Advances in technology, data, and analytics will soon allow marketers to create much more personal and ‘human’ experiences across moments, channels, and buying stages.”

Since when has attaining a better understanding of customers and using that understanding to build improved experiences hurt a brand? Here are three specific examples of insights that AI is currently making available to creative teams at some of the world's largest and most sophisticated companies.  

Connections that matter: Empathy at scale

AI is being used to identify the emotions that resonate with audiences, segments, and individuals. As brand interactions have moved online, it has become difficult for businesses to understand and establish the correct emotional connection with customers. Today AI can be used to classify individuals using primary, secondary, and tertiary emotions, enabling the customization of messages. This means that marketers can stop using underperforming emotions like Urgency (“ends today”) and start using higher-performing emotions like Gratitude (as a “thank you”).

Personal narratives

AI is also helping businesses understand the personal narratives that support relationships with brands. “Personal narratives” is a specific term used by Persado to describe the actual words, stories, and phrases that resonate with individuals and segments. Think of the term “Prestige” as a core personal narrative with concepts like “Turning heads” and “Dressing like a star.”

Some customers associate with brands to achieve Prestige (“turn heads this fall”), while others are looking to achieve a personal refresh (“a new you”). Understanding personal narrative through the use of AI unlocks a broad range of creative opportunities for brand marketers.  

Product descriptions

Finally, AI is helping businesses understand how language used to describe a product or service impacts customer engagement. There are thousands of ways to describe the features of an automobile, the capabilities of a laptop computer, or the benefits of a specific credit card. AI enables experimentation that shows creatives how descriptive language drives results. It should be no surprise that no single description resonates the same way with every individual, so understanding what really matters to specific segments can allow creatives to do justice to the branded products they represent. 

AI is about more insight, more understanding, and yes, as a result, more creativity. AI empowers creative teams with data to support the choices they make and the content they develop, freeing them from meetings with the C-Suite, in which subjective statements like “that’s not our voice” can ruin some of the most engaging content developed.