We have spent the last year enhancing and applying audience intelligence to Identify, Develop, Enhance & Accelerate (I.D.E.A.) value for brands and investors using AI. And working with social data and machine learning we have created actionable insights and strategies, based on real audience behaviours, that have been used to inform every step of the brand building process.”

Top-performing companies are more than twice as likely to be using AI for marketing (28% vs. 12%) according to Adobe’s latest Digital Intelligence Briefing¹ and it is becoming clearer by the day that businesses need AI technologies to excel in areas such as media buying, programmatic advertising and content personalisation.

However, AI is not the sole domain of marketing teams and the ability to improve the brand experience using AI doesn’t start with the customer journey. In a previous blog post we wrote about how AI, analytics and big data are pivotal in defining a brand, its personality and positioning, and that data-driven insight is as important to the ‘why’ of brand as it is to the ‘what’ of marketing. So how is AI used to build brands or reposition them to respond to AI insights?

We have spent the last year enhancing and applying audience intelligence to Identify, Develop, Enhance & Accelerate (I.D.E.A.) value for brands and investors using AI. And working with social data and machine learning we have created actionable insights and strategies, based on real audience behaviours, that have been used to inform every step of the brand building process.

Using AI in this way is largely a different way of analysing data to understand what consumers want; it is about listening and learning more than monitoring and tracking. Sproutsocial² describe it perfectly when they say that “monitoring tells you what, listening tells you why”. So in the case of social media, monitoring uses data to drive reactive responses, whereas listening uses insights to proactively make decisions. And it is exactly this proactive decision-making that means AI significantly improves how we build brands.

Audience Intelligence

In today’s world product differentiation and competitive advantage are often minimal or unsustainable over the long-term. For instance, an average of 30,000 new products³ are launched every year, fuelled by technologies that enable consumers to find what they want at the touch of a button. And with a report by CapGemini⁴ revealing that AI is offering a 340-billion-dollar saving potential for retail, the sector is turning to AI to find new ways to improve the customer experience.

The shift to this consumer driven market means brands have to know their audiences intimately, understand their psyche and engage them directly in order to maintain success and grow. Intuition and standard risk assessment are therefore no longer enough to make important brand decisions, and traditional research into audiences and brand development can be costly and time-consuming – particularly for young and investable brands. Using AI to Identify, Develop, Enhance & Accelerate brands can make the process affordable, faster, deeper and highly accurate.

It works by flipping traditional brand processes on their head. In the past, brands have been built by creating a purpose, personality, values and narratives first and then finding and trying to engage an audience with an affinity. However, AI allows businesses to identify a highly concentrated, fertile and primed audience first and build a brand and messaging accordingly based on their personalities, needs and interests; and it enables businesses to listen to their existing audience and more proactively integrate their behaviours and passions in the brand.

After all, people engage with brands and personalities they trust, relate to and aspire to; meaning successful brands must exhibit the perfect blend of specific audience traits, needs and values – all of which can be identified and measured by AI to the nth degree.

Audiences then look to buy from brands with a strong positioning, provenance and story, which need to be based on tangible themes, trending topics and authentic points of conversation that can be pinpointed using AI. And ultimately, consumers are loyal to brands that deliver an experience, influence and true purpose, which must respond to, and correspond to, consumer lifestyle choices, community sentiment and brand benchmarks that can be analysed through AI insights.

In short, AI goes beyond traditional demographics and data to provide clear insights into how brands can engage, convert and retain audiences.

A more intelligent way to build brands

Without going too far into the full science, algorithms and agglomerative hierarchical clustering etc., AI uses a combination of personality profiling, psychology and behavioural economics, powered by a set of computer vision machine learning and natural language processing models trained to analyse content datasets that link performance to engaged individual behaviours. Crucially, it does this quickly, accurately and consistently – constantly updating insights as audiences, brands, influencers, topics and trends evolve.

It’s applications in building and moving brands forward are far and wide and at every step, AI allows us to accelerate processes and base brand decisions on intelligent data and insights – always starting with audiences (known or unknown):

– Audiences: analysing and targeting audiences by personality, density and engagement propensity
– Competitors: deep and accurate sector and competitor analysis
– Strategies: defining tailored brand strategies and brand modelling
– Opportunities: identifying investment opportunities and brand accelerators
– Partnerships: matching and authenticating sponsorships and collaborations
– Resources: focusing spend efficiently
– Engagement: delivering more effective marketing, advertising and social activities, and
– Insights: trends, managing brands, monitoring and measuring performance

AI + Brand Intelligence

Next time you are wondering how to position your brand in a fast moving fluid world or how to set your brand strategies to truly resonate and deliver, consider how AI could streamline and accelerate the decision-making processes to ensure the outcomes are fully aligned to your audiences, goals and partners.

Using AI audience intelligence alongside market intelligence, brand intelligence and creative intelligence, brand building will benefit from the perfect combination of machine learning plus business acumen, human expertise and creative flair – the latter of which (at least for now!) cannot be substituted and will require the right experts to interpret and put into practice. But together, this approach will enable brand builders to better Identify business opportunities, Develop unique audience insights, Enhance brand performance & Accelerate growth (the I.D.E.A. of AI).

For further insight into how to integrate AI and Brand Intelligence, please contact us.

¹ https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/uk/modal-offers/pdfs/Econsultancy-2018-Digital-Trends.pdf
² https://sproutsocial.com/social-listening/
³ https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/article/2019/bursting-with-new-products-theres-never-been-a-better-time-for-breakthrough-innovation/
⁴ https://www.capgemini.com/gb-en/research/building-the-retail-superstar-how-unleashing-ai-across-functions-offers-a-multi-billion-dollar-opportunity/