As digital brand experts, we believe that the perception of brands is not only dependent on advertising. Meaningful experiences with brands are at least as important - and they often shape people's relationship with a brand in a deeper and more lasting way. This is exactly where AI comes into play - as a driver of meaningful brand experiences. "Are you crazy?" say the cultural pessimists indignantly. Not quite. Here are the ingredients that can make human-brand interactions more relevant, warmer, more personal and - yes - more human.
Let's imagine a chatbot. Based on a large language model like GPT4, it accesses a comprehensive pool of secure information that it uses to answer user questions. Let's also imagine that we give the chatbot a personality. Perhaps this comes from GenZ, perhaps from a significantly older target group. It has preferences for brands, opinions and trends, visits certain websites, believes in certain cultural truths and speaks a certain language - all based on the comprehensive data of precisely developed personas.
And now it's getting personal. Our chatbot becomes the nice grandma next door who bakes cakes with us. A sports and fitness freak who shares training and nutrition tips with a great sense of humor. A loving storyteller for the little ones. Or an understanding midwife with valuable tips for young parents. The chatbot not only shares information from the data pool, it also sees it through the eyes of its own personality and communicates in the same way. And that gives us endless possibilities. Depending on the brand and target group, we can, for example, allow different chatbot personalities to access the same recipe hub. Where one recommends hearty family meals, the other remains veggie and vegan - but makes jokes about meat eaters.
Or let's take the corporate sector: young professionals and students exchange information with a chatbot that suits their generation, while investors get information from a chatbot with a financial expert attitude. And internally, too, it helps to exchange information at eye level: not only can we check whether a text complies with a certain brand tonality, we can even find out how it is received by school leavers - or by their parents, or by the much-cited GenZ.
But we can go even further on the road to meaningful brand experiences and enter the world of AI agents: In addition to a likeable personality, the cake-baking grandma from above now gets a cuddly avatar with a cozy voice. A virtual companion in the kitchen - who you can talk to while baking. Or maybe it's the cartoon stars of our children's brands, who tell bedtime stories with a wink as chatbot-based cartoon avatars.
What do these approaches have in common? They bring people and brands closer together. And create brand experiences that become meaningful through a new level of personal relevance and accurate tonality. AI-based - and yet more human.
Incidentally, you don't need an artificial alien like the one created by our colleagues at Media Monks. Even if the funny creature "Wormhole" shows in an entertaining way what is possible when you create an extensive data pool and have it viewed by an AI with an idiosyncratic personality. "It has a distinctive personality and communication style. It has an edgy humor and a sassy attitude," they say about it. Sounds pretty human - and adapts to the respective context just the same.
What is our takeout?
A well set-up and secure chatbot has great potential to make brand communication more human - even if it is AI-based. The technical possibilities are already there.
