AI Vs Human Touch: How Marketing Departments Will Adapt

AI Vs Human Touch: How Marketing Departments Will Adapt

According to a recent study, roughly 80% of chief marketing officers are planning to increase their organisation’s spending on artificial intelligence (AI) and data for 2024.  

As AI becomes more sophisticated, this is a number only set to rise in the 2020’s and beyond. 

So, are marketing departments set for the chop? We don’t think so.  

In fact, we’ve collated three reasons why we think human marketing will always win over AI and technology.  

1. Adding Narrative and Emotions to Marketing 

AI can be programmed to write emotive narratives, sure, but they miss the benefit of, well, having real emotions! Where AI falls short, and will always fall short, is applying emotional engagement, which is something that only comes from human experiences – this is the essence of the most successful marketing campaigns of all time. From Apple to Nike to Dove to the inspirational GoPro campaigns; these are brands who have made their customers feel something, either by presenting them with pain points, or by evoking feelings of nostalgia or sentimentality, or feelings of hope and desire.  

In fact, 71% of customers recommend a brand based on the emotional connection they have to it.

So, when it comes to making your clients feel emotionally tied to your product, then the human touch will always have the upper hand. 

2. Personalisation   

AI can deliver a highly targeted audience based on the behaviours of customers, such as occupation, interests, and hobbies (implicit data). It can also segment your email lists to give your clients a more tailored journey. The challenge is that like all AI, it’s only as good as the data you feed it. If your data is not accurate, then your efforts will have been wasted. Additionally, a large part of personalisation is being able to relate to your customer, and vice versa. Again, this is where AI simply cannot compete. You can personalise an email with a real story that you know your customer base will be able to connect to – AI can only attempt to emulate this. 

3. Creativity

The dangers of relying on AI for marketing creativity are that it lacks intuition, common sense, humour and most importantly, the human experiences that are the pillars of creativity. In order to nurture curiosity with your audience (as well as being head and shoulders above your competitors) you need creativity in your marketing departments to create unique campaigns with compelling content. Take Uber’s anti-racism billboard, or Gillette’s ‘Perfect Isn’t Pretty’ campaign – could AI have come of with these? We think not.

Final thoughts… 

Modern AI excels in many areas of marketing, such as automation, behavioural retargeting, data processing, predictive analytics, dynamic pricing and creativity too. Additionally, it doesn’t need breaks or sleep like we do (but be warned, there are dark sides to AI you should know about). 

The only areas where AI cannot compete are adding emotions, narrative-based personalisation and by being brilliantly creative in a way that only humans can. If you can include storytelling in your content marketing, then you could be the Netflix of the marketing world!

The truth is, if you can combine AI into your marketing strategy, then you’ll have the best of both words.  

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