The Power of Transformational Marketing and AI

Last week, I had the honor of co-hosting a webinar with Albert™, the world’s first fully autonomous digital marketer. We had a great discussion about the power of transformational marketing and the use of AI. Thank you to those who were able to attend – I hope you found the information helpful. You may access the full video presentation, here.

Below, you will find an overview of our discussion and five takeaways to help you leverage the power of transformational marketing and the use of AI.

1. Transformational Marketers focus their efforts on the 3S model of thinking. The world’s most successful brands, like Amazon, Apple, and Netflix, all have a simplified Story, a clear Strategy, and aligned Systems. They have a unified “Why” behind their company’s Story, straightforward goals that propel an organization forward as one unit, and a scalable System that allows all of the above to function smoothly.
2. To be a transformational marketer, you have to focus on the customer and how they experience your brand. It requires abandoning traditional ways of thinking. Ideas like the sales funnel, the 4 P’s of advertising (product, place, promotion, and price), and basing your product as the hero are all outdated ways of thinking. Change isn’t about improving what you already have, it’s about rethinking your strategy from the ground up.
3. Tools like Albert are having an outsized impact today for brands in marketing execution, analytics and certain aspects of customer engagement where complexity, predictability, and repetitiveness are high. Incorporating AI into marketing is often misunderstood or even feared, but it doesn’t have to be. Some equate AI with a loss of jobs, but that’s often far from the truth. Harley-Davidson’s experience with AI is a prime example. Despite being a century old, successful brand, they were struggling to find quality leads. With the implementation of AI, the number of leads they gained per day increased from 1 to 40. Instead of cutting back on the number of employees, they had to open a new call center just to handle the number of daily inbound inquiries. AI might take over jobs that humans have previously done by hand, but they simultaneously make room for new opportunities that need humans to work to the best effect.
4. There are some things machines do better and some things people do better, that’s just a fact. Machines are best suited to tasks with high predictability (meaning that their action is initiated under clear circumstances, such as daily social media posting) and high complexity. On the other hand, humans are most suited for (and successful with) strategy building and creative tasks. Tasks like customer engagement fall in the middle of the spectrum, and depending on the situation, can be managed by either humans or machines (or both!). In the case of Evisu, a premium denim and lifestyle brand, approaching customer relationships with AI led them to uncover entirely untapped, high-value audiences they wouldn’t have been able to find without some level of automation. Machines may not exude creativity, but they get the job done fast and they get it done well.
5. The future of marketing is now and it’s about to get a little crazier. While it’s impossible to say exactly where the future will take us, we know that re-targeting and personalized marketing will only continue to advance. Mass marketing will take on an entirely new meaning as the masses will control much of the dialogue (and all of the authentic advocacy) about brands and their reputations. Connected customers will demand full control over the timing and process of communication and content consumption. Marketing campaigns will become two-way streets with continuous levels of engagement. Static, rules-based processes will go out the window as faster, smarter and more predictive marketing processes and algorithmic decision-making will be required. And, this is just the beginning!

Despite the ongoing evolution of marketing, we can rely on one constant – and that is the customer. If you’re ready for more insights to transform how your customers perceive and interact with your brand – and you want tactical tips to accelerate growth – take a look at our Transformational Marketing ebook for a deeper dive into the Story, Strategy, Systems Methodology.