Knowing Me, Knowing You: The Death of Brand Experience?
It’s Thursday afternoon and you’ve been eating healthily all week, so you’re in the newsagents picking out a chocolate bar. A pretty simple task, yes?
Or is it? Are you really making the best choice? Are you
indeed even the best qualified to make that choice? Or could a machine do it
better?
In essence, can a machine actually know you what you want,
better than you do?
Think about it – a machine can track everything about your
chocolate bar preferences. It can access your smartwatch or fitness tracker,
your calendar, your emails, your social media, even your spending. It has a
better idea of the composition, flavour, and nutritional value, of each chocolate
bar. And it can overlay that information onto your sugar levels, your budget,
your mood. So it could, in theory, predict which chocolate bar (out of the hundreds
out there) you would most like to eat on a Thursday afternoon.
That might work sometimes, but would you trust an AI to really
know these things? Or are there some factors that simply cannot be quantified? If
the answer is yes, then brand experience is safe. At least for now.
One day though, we could be faced with an AI so smart that it
knows your preferences better than you do.
Of course, that’s dependent on a circle of trust developing
between us and our AIs. Because the more we trust them, the more we’ll tell
them – and the more we tell them, the better their choices will be. And arguably,
the better our experiences will be off the back of that.
But that’s something to worry about in the future. In the
meantime, brands can learn a little something from AIs. By hypertailoring services
to customers’ needs, brands can reach people in ways that are genuinely transformative.
Using algorithms to convert data into useful analysis, insight and output means
that we can work more accurately and usefully. A union between people and
machines in pursuit of the perfect brand experience.
So the next time brands think about a campaign, they should
ask how AI could help. Is there a way that scheduled social posting can ease a
team’s workload? Can we use AI to customise tone of voice to speak directly to
the individual consumer in CRM?
Rather than being the death of brand experience, AI might just be its saviour.
