The Balancing Act Impacting Brand Promises

It’s safe to say we all love a bit of tech and AI. We’ve let it transform our personal and working lives - helping us reconnect, get more stuff done and discover answers we’ve been seeking. But like anything in life, it may come at a cost without the right balance. It can keep our heads down, buried in the tech, disconnected from reality, and the things that typically define us as human, such as physical interactions and connections with the great outdoors. 

Who knows where it will end, but what’s clear is that a careful Yin and Yang balancing act is being played out between human and machine, and it’s one we’ve carried into the world of customer engagement marketing.  It’s here, ironically, where our human obsession with technology, coupled with a relentless drive for efficiency, risks leaving the humanity of our craft on the desks of strategists and creatives. The main consequence of this is that brands taking this path will find it harder to meet their promises of delivering truly personal, relevant and rewarding experiences. 

After a 30-year career in data strategy, from the days when data came on labels and mag tapes, I can tell you first-hand about the scale of change in our industry.  It’s incredible how far we’ve come and how much innovation is built into today’s marketing platforms. Only a few years ago workflow builds required strategists to design and brief detailed contact and treatment strategies, supported with deep journey insights and sentiment analysis, plus carefully crafted creative assets. But today, AI prompts will build recommended workflows in seconds, delivering AI-generated content, with AI-generated copy, at moments defined by AI decision engines. Seemingly everything you need from a black box to operate an efficient and effective customer marketing program.   

Yet it would be wrong for marketing teams to think that’s all it takes. It’s not a question of ‘turn it on, and they will come’. They won’t. That’s why we have almost 8bn emails sat unopened in inboxes every year, and amazingly low % click rates on digital ads despite the huge efforts and sums spent on getting the ads there in the first place. While the ROI uplifts appear to back the investments, how much of that incremental growth is coming from operational cost reductions versus real growth in customer connections that happen when brands meet their promises of delivering truly engaging experiences?  

The rate of growth in our capability certainly hasn’t been accompanied by a similar rate of growth in pure engagement and conversion in desired actions. In fact, the engagement benchmarks we use today, for channels such as email, look like those from 30 years ago. Are we simply maintaining the status quo, more cost-effectively, in the face of massive brand competition?   

Research from both Forrester (Marketing Survey) and Salesforce (State of the Connected Customer, 6th Edition) perfectly highlights the issue. Even back in 2023, these separate research studies showed 66% of marketing decision-makers were planning to increase their investment in automation and decision tools, yet 61% of customers said they felt like they were being treated as a number. Therein lies the issue; the gap between a drive for performance marketing gains built on propensity modelling and AI-generated content, versus what it means for a brand to benefit from its privileged position of using shared, personal data to deliver the promise of highly individual experiences that carry a human-to-human connection.  If most customers still feel like a number, despite all our talk of personalisation and relevance, we’ve gone wrong along the way, suggesting too many promises are being broken. It’s time to pause and think again.   

Growth through efficiencies alone will only go so far, and it won’t build brand love.  For significant uplifts, look instead to the roles and impact of strategy and creative craft. Remember, no one is sitting there waiting for your communication, they’re busy getting on with their lives, likely stuck in a digital world and inundated with advertising from all angles - and no doubt wondering why they shared their consent to be contacted in the first place.  Now more than ever it needs something truly engaging and different to grab their attention. It needs experiences delivered in service of the brand and the promises those brands make, not in service of the tech.   

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve witnessed and continue to work with some fantastic examples of tech and AI implementation across the breadth of different marketing platforms and their partners, and still get excited at the promise they present today and tomorrow. But the best and most successful case studies, and the most mature exponents of customer engagement, never rely on a pure self-serve, AI-driven ecosystem.  Instead, by retaining and integrating a human touch, they balance the efficiencies of technology with bespoke insights, a solid strategy that understands the brand promise and what it means for customers, a contextual view of market conditions, plus creativity that still comes from hours of ideation and connections between gifted people.    

If your tech teams are currently putting forward their business cases for more sophistication and AI-driven solutions, or if you’re rethinking the role of your agency, here are some questions to ask yourselves: 

• Is the tech in service of the brand and your customer promise, or the other way around? 
• How do we ensure the lived experience meets the promise we made to convert customers? 
• How do we levitate the every day, and avoid sameness and fatigue? 
• Can our content do the unexpected, and create moments of sheer delight? 
• How do we humanise the experiences we design? 
• Can our approach help us stand for something more than our competitors? 

It’s all about the balance, the Yin and the Yang, a symbiotic relationship between machine and human, between science and craft. Which way are you leaning?