8 ways brands are leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Picture this: all your marketing communications are personalized, your SEO-rich content is completed in minutes and your ad copies are produced in seconds. Too good to be true? Well, these brands are proving why Artificial Intelligence (AI) is paving the path for brands in automating mundane tasks and producing effective results. Let’s look at 9 different ways brands are leveraging AI in their marketing strategies.

1. Personalization

Personalization is essential when it comes to building a community of enthusiasts, eager to use your product. Some brands like Netflix & Spotify are leveraging AI to curate the feed for a smoother user experience. This is precisely why everyone’s Netflix’s homepage looks different. On Spotify, users can find daily playlists crafted especially for them keeping in mind the genre of music they prefer listening to. Starbucks has also gone a step further to create Deep Brew, an AI platform that enhances the customer experience by personalization. The platform also handles the store’s efficiency by managing supplies to ensure that stores always have stock of their customers’ favorite Starbucks drinks. They started out this venture by collecting data back in 2011 via the Starbucks app which collected customer’s preferences and they launched the AI platform in 2019. The AI platform is not only helpful for the customers but the baristas as well. It ensures there is effective staffing, supply & inventory data is readily available, and much more.

2. Advertising

We have seen some brilliant AI-driven advertisements in recent years, while many have jumped on the AI bandwagon Cadbury's Diwali ad with Shah Rukh Khan was the first to use AI, and it won big at the Cannes Lions Awards. During the pandemic, when small businesses were struggling, Cadbury used AI to clone Shah Rukh Khan's voice to say the names of local shopkeepers, depending on the viewer's location. The ad was a huge success, with over 150 million views on YouTube. It was also praised for its creativity and innovation and for its support of small business owners who faced monetary loss during the pandemic.

Another brand to effectively use AI in its advertisements is Nike. Nike’s Never Done Evolving campaign starring Serena Williams shows an AI-generated version of Serena winning her first Grand Slam title in the year 1999 versus the 2017 Serena who won the Australian Open. The campaign was an honorary campaign for Nike’s 50th anniversary, while also celebrating Serena’s retirement announcement. This campaign went on to win the Digital Craft Grand Prix at the Cannes Lion Festival, the campaign was a massive success and garnered 1.7 million views on YouTube.

3. SEO Management

Ranking on Google’s search engines can be puzzling to a lot of marketers, ClickUp which is an AI platform themselves made effective use of AI to scale their search engine optimization. ClickUp used a tool called SurferSEO, which helped ClickUp launch 150+ blog articles rich in keywords, optimized for Google’s search engines. This allowed ClickUp to reach 85% of blog traffic in a total of 12 months. SurferSEO aided ClickUp with SEO recommendations to have a blog rich in relevant keywords, assimilated their data in one space without ClickUp having to manually search the ranking on Google, and provided an easier way for ClickUp to track all data points in one place.

4. Content Production

Here are two brands – Far Fetch and JP Morgan Chase who have used similar AI marketing tools to generate content for different use cases.

Far Fetch is a luxury fashion retail store; they have a wide reach online but were struggling to produce fast & effective on-brand content in for their emailers. Far Fetch soon realized they had a problem and AI was the solution. They went on to pair up with Phrasee, an AI platform that generates data-backed content tailored to the brand’s persona, this content is further optimized with the human intervention.

Far Fetch saw an impressive improvement of 38% average click rate and 31% average open rate in their trigger campaigns which are generated if a customer abandons the cart or is simply browsing on the website. For their promotional broadcast campaigns, Far Fetch saw an improvement of 25% average click rate and 7% average open rate.

Whereas JP Morgan Chase, a giant in the financial sector struggled to find quick and effective ad copies from their team of copywriters. Hence, they turned to Persado.Inc, a company that develops AI-powered and highly personalized marketing messages, for copywriting help. With the aid of Persado, Chase saw a 450% increase in the click-through-rate on their ads. Chase went on to sign a five-year deal with Persado after scaling their CTRs.

5. Packaging

Design creating new & improved packaging is taxing as there are many factors to consider – colors, appropriate text styles and size for effectively communicating in a stocked supermarket aisle. Nutella chose to try AI powered designs for their packaging as they wanted to revamp their design to be more eye catchy. Nutella turned to Ogilvy Italia, and they came up with Nutella Unica – an AI powered algorithm which created 7 million different designs which were pasted on Nutella’s original jars.

Each individual purchased a jar unlike the other leaving a lasting personal yet unique touch, making it a collectible item. The campaign was a massive hit and Nutella Unica went on to sell 7 million jars in under 1 month. With millions of social media posts where individuals posted about their jar, it garnered vast attention and engagement as well.

6. Retail Shopping

Sephora is beauty retailer; they are always looking to have seamless shopping experience for their customers. They use AI powered tools to allow customers to find fragrances, a virtual assistant for picking the right shade of cosmetic products from lipsticks to foundations. Sephora has encouraged the usage of AI and dates to their use cases in 2013. Not just that, Sephora even heavily relies on AI chatbots to make the shopping experience seamless and engaging for the customer.

Macy’s is another giant retailer that adopted AI for a new feature called Image Search this enables customers to take a photo of a clothing item on their phone which guides them to shop similar products that are available at Macy’s, all this can be tracked on the Macy’s app for a smoother experience.

7. Customer Service

Several brands use AI chatbots for a simple communication via their website or app to provide customer service. Almost all top brands, be it financial, food & beverage to retail use AI chatbots.

These chatbots are designed to converse with humans using machine learning, natural language processing, and of course, AI to interpret even complex conversations. Brands such as The Wall Street Journal use their chatbot via the Facebook messenger app to communicate news and other updates too.

8. Price Optimization

Amazon pioneered the use of AI in their e-commerce website and app and not just with the personalized shopping experience. Amazon used AI to power its dynamic pricing model. The pricing model is set such that when the demand for the product is high, the price of the model is higher, likewise when the sales are lower for a particular product, Amazon’s algorithm prices the product at a lower cost.

The use of AI has endless possibilities as seen above and it is fast growing. The only word of caution is to choose tools that fit your requirements but not use too many to complicate your current processes.