AI (Artificial Intelligence) is a powerful tool in the creation and optimization of branding and marketing strategies.
As part of brand audit to find out who our primary competitors are, their core value propositions, market share, branding strategies, business models and how they are compared with our brand in terms of the relevant parameters, AI will surely help.
For the other pillar of brand audit concerning customer perspectives, AI will also be useful: How do our customers think and feel about our brand and offerings? What have excited them buying our products instead of our competitors'? How can we do better to capture a bigger market share? What is the value of our brand and intellectual properties? How well will AI monitor the infringement of our intellectual properties?
AI will encompass all the mentioned aspects concerning branding strategy, if it has not already. However, AI is not there yet and may not be so for quite some time, especially for SMEs.
One major obstacle is that we may not be able to feed the AI applications with accurate and relevant information for branding purpose as much of the information is confidential, scattered and not yet digitalized. A motor vehicle workshop has its information all over the place - individual technicians' handphones, company's computers and tablets, hardcopies... To digitalize and organize the information for AI training will take much effort, time and incur significant costs.
What an SME may do is to start small commencing the AI journey in critical strategic branding areas, for instance on exploring which product category or sub-category the company will focus on. AI is as good as how we make use of it to optimize our search and/or generate new ideas.
Another impact AI may have on branding and marketing is that consumers may rely too much on AI's product recommendations which tend to favor new and value products/services and/or whichever pay them more (unless legislation is in place to deal with it).
Despite the above, AI will serve as a quick cross-check of the branding strategies we have selected and make our branding strategies more data-driven.
Branding will find AI a very useful and valued companion as the technology evolves.
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