AI as the Face of Your Brand

A useful informed survey.   We attempted to use AI as brand equity.  When does it work?  Particularly in the case of assistants, we often anthropomorphize.  Why or why not?

When AI Becomes the New Face of Your Brand
H. James Wilson,Paul Daugherty, Nicola Morini Bianzino  in the HBR

In the world of marketing, brand anthropomorphism can be a powerful mechanism for connecting with consumers. It’s the tactic of giving brand symbols people-like characteristics: Think of Tony the Tiger and the Michelin Man. Today some companies are taking brand anthropomorphism to a whole new level with sophisticated AI technologies.

Consider advanced chatbots, like Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Microsoft’s Cortana. Thanks to the simplicity of their conversational interfaces, it’s quite possible that customers will spend increasingly more time engaged with a company’s AI than with any other interface, including the firm’s own employees. And over time Siri, Alexa, and Cortana, and their individual “personalities,” could become even more famous than their parent companies.

The implications are numerous. As chatbots and other AI technologies increasingly become the face of many brands, those companies will need to employ people with new types of expertise to ensure that the brands continue to reflect the firm’s desired qualities and values. Executives should also be wary of how AI increases the dangers of brand disintermediation. As brands assume more and more AI functionality, businesses must proactively manage any potential ethical and legal concerns.

To study those issues and others, we surveyed how AI is being implemented at more than 1,000 global companies. We found that many of those firms are already using (or have been experimenting with) AI to orchestrate the brand experience across a number of business processes. These include customer service (39% of companies), marketing and sales (35%), and even the managing of noncustomer external relationships (28%) where brand power is key, such as in attracting top talent into the organization’s recruiting pipeline. Studying those deployments led to several insights around three new types of decisions executives face at the intersection of technology, personality, and strategy. .... "