Autonomous Branding — designing your brand for AI
The idea of ‘brand personality’ as a way to make faceless corporations easier to connect with was first coined in 1961. But for the next 50 years or so the idea could really be seen as a metaphor. A set of values and attributes were combined together to give a corporation a few humanising attributes. But not too many. While some brands might create a full-blown Tony the Tiger or Alexandr the meerkat, the ‘personality’ element of the average brand guideline tends to come in at several pages shorter than the instructions on logo placement.
In the social media age, the term has started to be taken more literally. Brands have jumped off the page and into the real world, anthropomorphised through the words of community managers. Forced to engage in two way dialogue, brands have had to build a much deeper understanding of their personality traits — to inform how they ought to interact and react in numerous new situations. And this understanding has had to be ‘programmed’ into any staff representing the brand anywhere in the world, whether they’re writing content for emails and social posts or interacting with angry audiences in the comments sections. Brands like our own client Adidas have demonstrated the importance of a distinctive personality and others like Skittles have pioneered distinctive new ways to bring these rules to life.
That’s the easy bit done with.
We’re at the start of a shift from mobile to conversational interfaces will be even quicker and more profound than the shift from desktop to mobile ten years ago. The future of brand interaction is conversation, powered by AI. If chatbots are the 1.0 prototype, Siri, Alexa and Cortana are a sign of things to come. Already 39% of the top 1,000 global companies surveyed by HBR are investing in AI platforms to deliver customer service, while 28% were doing the same to cover areas as sensitive as recruitment.
And crucially, building an AI personality isn’t only a problem for Google, Apple and Amazon. It’s a problem for any brand who wants to continue to communicate directly with their customers will have to face in the age of the conversational user interfaces. Already brands like Capital One and our own client Samsung have developed their own autonomous brands — Bixby and Eno. Just like in ecommerce, the brands who don’t build it themselves risk being disintermediated.
We’re entering the age of the Autonomous Brand, when brands will start taking on a life of their own in consumers’ pockets and homes. And this introduces a whole new kind of challenge for the modern brand builder. It will become impossible to pass challenging conversations up to ‘head office’ to be dealt with one at a time — AI technology will need to fend for itself in challenging, unpredictable and unprecedented scenarios. Just ask Tay.
Traditional notions of ‘brand personality’ will be a woefully inadequate way to rear your brand ambassador of the future. We will need to conceive our brands personas more like actors stepping into a new role: about the nuanced and complex dimensions of ‘character’. The simple concept of brand purpose will need to evolve to answer new questions around motivation. The of brand archetypes will need to be augmented by ‘shadow’ archetypes that give them more tension and humanity.
The technology that allows AI interfaces to take on more human attributes is developing quickly. Already Siri gets jealous if you call her Alexa by mistake. Startups like Koko are developing empathy traits for their AI platforms. ‘Joke telling robots are the final frontier of AI’, says Vice. But they’re closer than we think.
Disney’s Imagineering Unit have already started developing autonomous droid-like characters that can interact with visitors to their parks. The latest, Pascal from Tangled, will be a miniature robot lizard that fits in the palm of your hand. Bringing ‘character’ to inanimate objects has been Disney’s thing for the past 100 years. The data generated by these experiments are crucial for the team to understand what boundaries and rules need to be set to keep this going into the machine learning era.
Right now, we’re all in the experimental phase. We can be pretty sure that in 5 years from now the most successful examples of modern brand building will involve Autonomous Brands, fuelled by AI, finding new ways to interact with and add value to consumers lives. But we can also be sure that the majority of brands will be delivering generic, characterless ‘me too’ conversational experiences a bit like 99.9% of the thousands of chatbots already in the market. But the data generated by these early prototypes will be crucial to separating the wheat from the chaff further down the line.
At iris, we’re undertaking our own experiments in Autonomous Brand building for the likes of Samsung and Adidas. We’re also talking to developers around the world at the sharp end of these experiments and will (hopefully) be sharing our findings at SXSW in April.
If you’d like to know more on this subject, please vote for our SXSW presentation here. And watch this space for more.
