Will AI Kill Your Brand (Thinks Out Loud Episode 435)

October 9, 2024
Tim Peter
Artificial Intelligence (AI), content marketing, Customer Experience, Marketing, Podcast, Strategy

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Artificial intelligence will shape the way your customers interact with your brand. That’s undoubtedly true. In fact, it’s possible we’ll see cases where the customer might not interact directly with your business, letting their AI agent handle the transaction on their behalf. OK, that’s still probably a few years away. But it’s clearly on the horizon.

And that potential behavior might mean trouble for your brand. In theory, it’s possible that AI could kill brands for good. Or could it?

As it happens, I don’t think AI will kill your brand. At least not if you do it right. What does it mean to “do it right” in the age of AI? How might AI shape your customers’ behaviors in the not-too-distant future? And how can you make sure that AI doesn’t kill your brand? That’s what this week’s episode of the Thinks Out Loud podcast is all about.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

Will AI Kill Your Brand (Thinks Out Loud Episode 435) — Headlines and Show Notes

Show Notes and Links

You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here:

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Transcript: Will AI Kill Your Brand

Hello again, everyone, and welcome back to Thinks Out Loud, your source for all the digital expertise your business needs. This is episode 435 of the big show, and thank you so much for tuning in. I very much appreciate it. I think we have a really cool show for you today.

I was talking with someone recently about artificial intelligence, and we got going on the idea of what artificial intelligence will do to brands, and more specifically, will artificial intelligence kill your brand? Will the flood of low cost, decent quality content overwhelm customers and pretend them from ever finding you? Will AI agents lead customers away from your products and services?

So let’s see, that’s three questions:

Will AI kill your brand?
Will content overwhelm customers?
Will AI agents lead customers away from you?

The answer, I’m pretty confident, is no, no, and no. I feel pretty strongly about this.

Now obviously, I’m a fan of artificial intelligence. I’ve talked about AI and its potential impacts to your customers and your marketing a ton over the last bunch of months. But AI isn’t going to kill your brand. At least not if you do your jobs properly, because on the contrary, brands are the mechanism by which you’re going to compete in the era of AI, in the age of AI. And I want to dive into this a bit and explain what I mean.

For starters, keep in mind that AI agents are coming. We’re still in the early innings of artificial intelligence, particularly with regard to how customers will use AI. Most people still haven’t used AI very much. Only about half of people use it regularly.

If you’re unfamiliar with the idea of an artificial intelligence agent, you can think of AI agents as software robots that will perform tasks for you. So instead of interacting with a chatbot or performing a Google search to research a product or service, you’d get an agent to do the legwork for you.

Agents will undoubtedly aid discovery. That’s absolutely true. And appearing in the answers that agents provide will make a difference for many, many businesses, just as search is a difference maker for many businesses today.

At the same time, I don’t think those agents are going to kill good brands. There’s a few reasons for this, and I want to start with customer behavior.

Think about it. Do you think people will use agents to say, “Hey, agent, find me some random thing I’ve never heard of before?” Or, “hey, agent, book me a trip to someplace warm that I don’t know anything about.” Right? I mean, maybe some people, some of the time, will do that. They’re certainly going to aid discovery where we, today we have topics we don’t know anything about. We might say, “hey, AI agent, I’ve got this problem I’m trying to solve. What can you learn about it?” That’s true. That’s absolutely true.

But most people, when they’re ready to buy, most of the time, we’ll say something more like, “Hey AI agent, can I get a better deal at Amazon or Walmart on my favorite brand of moisturizer?” They’ll say, “Hey AI agent, what can you tell me about the consulting firm Tim Peter and Associates?” (Which by the way, you can find more at timpeter.com if you care to.)

But you get the idea. We’re mostly going to ask questions of these agents to help us understand, can we buy the thing that we’ve actually become interested in?

I think what the agents are more likely to do is supplement or shove aside what today we consider non-branded search. It’s going to be that top of the funnel activity. And then when we get to the bottom of the funnel, it’s still going to be a branded experience. It will remain where the money is.

If you look at the bottom of the funnel today, if you look at when customers buy on your website, or they buy through your app, or they buy in your stores, it’s because they already know your brand. They’re asking for you by name when they’re ready to buy. I really don’t see how that’s going to be any different in a customer behavior sense when we are using agents for that. We’ll just ask the agent to take care of the transaction for us.

It’s certainly possible that branded activity will occur in ChatGPT, or Copilot, or Siri, or Apple Intelligence, or Alexa, or MetaAI, or some other agent we haven’t heard of yet, instead of Google search. And maybe you’ll conduct that search with your voice more often than not. Maybe it’ll be a dialogue rather than just typing into a search box.

My friend Stuart Butler just had a great line that I love, that “we’re moving from an era of information to an era of conversation.” I love that. It is so good. And I think that’s probably right.

But if you’re doing your job right as a marketer, customers will still be looking for you. They’ll be engaging in a conversation about you.

Second, I suspect the agents will be molded by their principal’s behavior. By principal, in this case, I mean the person, the customer, on whose behalf the agent acts. We’ll all be principals of one or more agents at some point. It could be two years from now, it could be five years from now, it could be later this year. But at some point, we’ll start using agents to do these things on our behalf.

We’d also expect our agents to act in our best interests, or else why would you want to use the agent in the first place? Those agents will be influenced heavily when determining what our best interests are, by things like ratings and reviews and other trust signals. They’re going to need to. They’re going to need to understand “what is the right product, or service, or company, or brand for my principal.” And they’re going to have to go to trusted sources for that. I’m going to come back to this in a little bit more detail in a moment. The point remains that customers will almost certainly use agents to discover new brands. And they’ll use agents to interact with brands they already like.

But the brand will still need to be discoverable and likable. That’s the key takeaway here for your brand to stand out. When these tools start to come online, you have to be discoverable and you have to be likable, just like you do today. Just like brands have done for businesses for 150 years or more.

The thing you want to remember is that you don’t need technology to kill your brand. You don’t need AI to kill your brand. Bad brand activity is what’s most likely to kill your brand. You don’t need AI’s help to do that.

You’ve heard me say many, many times on this show that content is king, customer experience is queen, and data is the crown jewels. What happens to that framework when you add artificial intelligence to it?

Well, using AI to create boring content will kill your brand. I’m really confident that that’s true. Using AI to create bad experiences will definitely kill your brand. Again, we don’t need any help. Using AI to cut costs without listening to what your customers need will kill your brand. The problem isn’t artificial intelligence. It’s how people, how marketers, how business leaders choose to deploy AI, just as it is with everything else in the world of marketing and branding. It doesn’t take AI to do a bad job of that. People have been managing to do that for years all by themselves, right?

Let me give you a couple of real world examples to think about.

It is very well known within the hospitality industry that using pleasant fragrances in lobbies and guest rooms boost business. There was a post on the Cvent blog about a year ago that noted that 91% of surveyed hotel guests stated that pleasant hotel smells positively impacted their experience, with 67 percent noting that it made them more relaxed.

You don’t really need a survey to tell you that. If you walked into a hotel room, or you walked into a hotel lobby, and it smelled bad, right, you’re probably pretty likely to turn on your heel and immediately walk out the door. That doesn’t take AI to figure out. It didn’t take AI to do. It took understanding what matters to your customer.

Similarly, Retail Brew reports that 2 out of 3 shoppers won’t buy products in locked display cases. According to the article, this is actually one of my favorite things I’ve read about this. Retail Brew’s article said, “Most end up trying to find the product in another store.”

That is a remarkable quote if you think about it. Because to put that in a different light, creating a bad experience is the same as creating an advertisement for your competitors. Creating a bad experience is the best way to tell your customers to buy from someone else. Seriously.

That’s true because we’re always dealing with people here. Great experiences matter when building your brand. And great experiences will help customers to seek you out, no matter how they actually do their seeking, whether they continue to use search forever, or whether they switch to artificial intelligence and AI agents over time.

We also know that when people have great experiences, customers will still tell their friends and family and fans and followers about the brands with which they’ve had great experiences. We know creators will absolutely tell their fans and followers about brands providing great experiences. That’s how they get paid. That’s their whole business model.

I also suspect customers will still create reviews — or maybe have their artificial intelligence agents take care of it for them — telling the world about their experience with brands that they enjoy, and with brands that they hate.

I told you earlier I’d come back to where the agents are going to look to trust signals. I’m fairly confident that those reviews will be a key source of content that AI agents will use to understand the brands that work best for their principles, just the way that regular, ol’ human beings do today.

The agents have to understand from some place whether or not the product or service or brand or business that they’re looking at is a good option for the person on the other side of the glass, for the person on the other side of the screen. Where are they going to get those signals from? They’re going to get them from the content on your website. They’re going to get them from ratings and reviews.

So you still need to create great content. You still need to create great experiences. Because that’s how you build a brand.

I also have one more teeny, tiny piece of evidence that brands will still matter in terms of artificial intelligence. There was a news article on The Verge that said Google is testing verified check marks in search results. When you do a search for specific brands, and they used Microsoft as an example; they also used a couple of others that I’m not recalling off the top of my head, but the link will be in the show notes for you to check out.

Anyway, when you searched for specific brands, when the brand was in the search result, there was a little check mark right next to it saying that Google certifies this is actually the brand. It’s not some counterfeit. It’s not some squatter. It’s not somebody trying to deceive you. It is actually the correct brand that you’re looking for. Google clearly wants to convey to customers that the item they’re linking to, that the resource they’re linking to, is the real deal. And most relevant to this discussion, Is the brand the customer wants to find.

Google has more data around customer behavior than just about anybody because they get billions of searches every single day. Customers tell them what they need and they know how to react. So Google understands, hey, we really need to let people know when this is the actual brand that people care about. And they’re at least testing the idea of making it clear to customers that this is, in fact, the brand you’re looking for.

What I take from all of this is that AI is a tool that you can use to create better, more relevant content for your target customers. That’s a fact. AI is a tool that you can use to create more engaging, more delightful, more memorable experiences for your target customers. That’s a fact. AI is a tool that you can use to listen to what customers are saying about your products, about your services, about you as a business, and about you as a brand. AI is a tool that you can use to interpret data about your customers to create better content and better customer experiences — or, if you choose not to do those things.

So when I come back to the question of will AI kill your brand, the real answer to me is “only if you let it.”

Show Wrap-Up and Credits

Now looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week. I want to remind you again that you can find the show notes for this episode, as well as an archive of all past episodes, by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. Just look for episode 435.

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Show Outro

Finally, and I know I say this a lot. But you have a lot of choices of where to get your information and insights on podcasts and on the internet more broadly. I want you to know how thrilled I am that you keep listening to what we do here. It means so very much to me. You’re the reason we do this show.

So please, keep your messages coming on LinkedIn, keep hitting me up on Twitter, sending things via email. I love getting a chance to talk with you, to hear what’s going on in your world, and to learn how we can do a better job building on the types of information, and insights, and content, and community that work for you, and work for your business.

So with all of that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day. I hope you have a wonderful week ahead. And I will look forward to speaking with you here on Thinks Out Loud next time. Until then, please be well, be safe, and as always, take care everybody.

Tim Peter

Tim Peter is the founder and president of Tim Peter & Associates. You can learn more about our company's strategy and digital marketing consulting services here or about Tim here.

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Will AI Kill Your Brand (Thinks Out Loud Episode 435)