How to super-charge brand personality via AI?

In increasingly commoditized markets, a strong brand is critical. A distinct and strong brand personality works to strengthen the relationship between customers and the brand.

However, brands have always been struggling with how to make the brand essence penetrate all customer touchpoints to maximize influence on customer behavior. As examples, how to enable that:

• the sales assistant in retail presents the garment in alignment with the brand?;?
• the service letter coming out from the local dealership is saturated with the brand?;
• the call center employee is empowered to engage in a dialogue right on brand?;?
• the customer enjoys all relevant features of the device (smart phone, car, washing machine, etc);?
• the expression of the brand is personalized against the history of all interactions that the customer has had with the brand???

Ensuring brand personality at scale across touchpoints and time – in a relevant way that connects with a diverse audience – is historically hard.

Now, there is a window of opportunity to implement generative AI at the core of brands before the competition, to unlock Share of Life: close, loyal relationships with your customers that run deeper than the latest experience, new feature, function or ad.

Brand personality is defined as a “human embodiment” that is expressed by a brand. Focusing on the weaknesses of a traditional brand personality, it features:???

• A representation of a person
• High-level
• Static
• Must be interpreted
• Does not have memory
• Little or no guidance on how to act in different contexts / audiences
• No ability to provide information beyond its static description??

Such traditional brand personality is designed for an excess of push communication, but only enables a low resolution brand experience for a given customer who has been interacting with the brand over a period of time.?

Now, enabled by the strides in AI sophistication, the market will witness the implementation of highly trained AI cores, equipped with a rich branded emotional blueprint, connected in real time to vast volumes of organizational knowledge, and the ability to adapt to contexts and audiences - interacting, advising and providing dynamic brand personality-at-scale. We call the use of AI cores in this context “Assistive Brand Personality”.??

Accordingly, the new brand personality can transition into:??

• A human-like embodiment of a person
• Highly fleshed out with vast trained knowledge
• Dynamic: interacts, learns, grows, adapts
• Directly represents the personality
• Has a global & individual memory of interactions
• Knows how to adapt content and tone to different contexts and individuals
• Can act as an internal advisor and also report everything it learns to the organization

Abstract? Here is a use case on how a brand may permeate an otherwise functional and brand devoid transaction between a customer and a brand, namely the customer receiving invoices for services rendered (e.g. maintenance fees for cars; repairs of electronics; healthcare bills; a subscription, etc). In the below example, the Assistive Brand Personality is integrated into the receipt of a physical invoice. It is accessed via a barcode and mobile phone, allowing the customer to ask any questions related to invoices and the answers being defined based on the brand and the full understanding of the customer’s past with the brand. On access, the customer is greeted by the AI agent, and suggestions of questions are provided and opportunity for open questions offered. Examples could be: do you feel the invoice is too expensive; do you want an explanation for why the brakes were changed?; does the car drive better now after the issues with steering wheel; do you feel we did a better job than last time, etc.????

Or the Assistive Brand Personality is installed into a car, integrated with the calendar of the car, hooked up on the CRM of the brand and linked to the driver’s Smart Watch.

In this instance, the AI core recognizes that the driver is late and frustrated, and offers to send messages to the upcoming meeting participants and order his preferred cup of coffee for his late arrival.???

A unified customer experience across channels obviously necessitates a comprehensive IT ecosystem including a single CDP, an integrated Martech stack, a bespoke LLM, etc. However, it also necessitates, what in most instances has never been defined in the brand and marketing departments, which is the character and tone of voice of the brand in the new contexts such as the above described use cases. A RAG model needs to be connected to the infrastructure for referencing evolving customer data and interactions.?

At Globant GUT we are working to define and deploy Assistive Brand Personality for our client brands. We are adamant that it will be a game changer in marketing across industries. Feel free to reach out to learn more.?

PS. If you want to read more about how brand drives customer experience, and customer experience, bottomline:?

Heleta ?vraki?, E., & Arslanagi?-Kalajd?i?, M. (2023). How Do Brand Communication and Brand Personality Shape Consumer Loyalty?. Economic and Business Review, 25(2), 118-127. https://doi.org/ 10.15458/2335-4216.1321?