Are you correctly balancing Branding and Promotion with Data and AI?
Have you ever felt as if your home or personal devices were hearing at you? That whenever you speak with your friends about buying new running shoes, you coincidentally receive ads focused on that? I’m sure we all have felt it and it’s all related to data and AI. Sometimes is well received by consumers, but other times, it’s rejected as a privacy violation, immediately generating refusal from the consumer towards the advertiser. Because of this, the importance of well placing the ads, AI, and the correct use of big data, and its impressive amounts of information on the buying patterns and transaction histories of identifiable customers. The key to this is not focusing just on sales and pushing advertisements to consumers, but pulling them with engagement. You must balance branding and promotion while using data and AI.
What is Good about Data and AI
Finding the right balance between promotions, revenue-building, and brand building has become dramatically harder in the age of data-driven targeting, but not impossible. With proper use of data, you can correctly target your customer to prevent brand budget expenditures on consumers that aren’t interested in your products, and build brand and revenue by engaging relevant ones. And integrated with AI, human errors are minimized, and your company’s productivity increases. This is all because you’re strategically substituting humans whose productivity is limited, on every day, and repeated work that may usually bore them, with AI machines that are efficient 24/7. Nevertheless, if your brand relies on data and AI 100%, then you’ll become a non-human brand, that will possibly lack human experience and have little to none engagement with customers. To maximize and balance data and AI and achieve effective branding and promotion, we must understand what are the “don’ts” so let’s dig into them.
What is Negative about Data and AI
Our lives and interests have become public, and constant data selling among companies has led to ad saturation and disinformation. Because of this, the world has become a battleground on which consumers must closely pay attention to all ads they see to recognize fake information and veridic ones. Therefore, it’s important marketers prevent brands from losing sight and bad use of data and AI. They must strategically reach customers to keep them engaged while providing accurate information.
As much as AI leads to you being available 24/7 assistance and faster decisions, they cannot replace the human connection. Human engagement is made up of a team, the bond human creates with others, the touch we have with customers that lead to loyal consumers, and thinking out of the box campaigns which should be the top priority of brands nowadays. Data can certainly be used to target correctly customers by their interests, but AI should not become the main character in campaigns, since robots are just effective with programmed tasks. Whenever a brand loses the emotional customer focus, they become a brand that just sends emails, without a purpose and depth.
The perfect balance
Understanding that simply using the data to target and distribute messages with automated actions will not deliver much value, it’s just the first step. Driving sales must never be the ultimate and unique goal of your business. It literally can cost you everything. Life is a balance, and engagement, brand building, emotion, and attraction of your brand are important sales drivers as well. The reason why brands such as Subway, engage with their five-dollar ads by featuring some of their “famous fans”, and their presence in the ads is for branding, not just sales. Meaning, balancing their price promotion with the human touch, which is irreplaceable.
In conclusion, consumers are tired of meaningless promotion ads. Throughout time, they have become (including myself) more sensitive on whereas you’re reaching with something that touches their emotions or not, or whether the product is from their interest.
As a marketer, the use of data and AI are tools made to simplify advertising, which effectively increases quantitative reach. However, it must be well balanced to maintain quality reach, which in my opinion, must be done by humans. And as for customers, it’s important to always beware and pay attention to what you see. By now, you must have developed an ability to identify fake ads and not believing whatever you see. Remember, not everything that shines is gold, and if it shines too much, something’s probably off.
