I went down a fascinating rabbit hole recently and learned a great deal about the future of business.
I asked three computer programs - ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity - to answer the same question.
“When an AI agent, such as yourself, recommends a competitor’s product, what can businesses do to make their brand/product “sticky” enough that the customer or prospective customer disregards or resists the AI’s recommendation?”
The results were mind-blowing in their consistency and insightfulness.
To summarise, the three AI agents suggest businesses can overpower AI agent recommendations by focusing on four key areas. That’s right!
When you compare AI against human-generated recommendations, the bots still think we humans have the edge.
The explanations below each of the four recommendations are mine.
Building emotional connections
Businesses need to craft narratives and experiences that resonate personally with consumers. Obviously, this gets trickier as your customer and prospective customer base expands.
The key is to use powerful advertising narratives that resonate at both personal and societal levels.
Think Nike’s “Just Do It” or even Apple’s “Think Different” slogans.
Fostering direct engagement
Create opportunities for customers and prospective customers to interact directly with the brand or its representatives. For a retail brand, this is easy.
With that said, if you’re a liquor brand, you likely need to utilise experiential marketing or event activations. When you consider professional service brands, especially for prospective customers, things get interesting quickly.
Offer unique experiences
Provide products, services, or events that cannot be fully replicated. Has anyone been to an airport lounge lately?
The credit card companies are diving into this strategy extensively, and if you’re a frequent traveller, chances are you’ve given some thought to AMEX or Chase Sapphire as your card of choice.
Cultivating communities
Encouraging customer and prospective customer participation and loyalty through clubs, events, or similar advocacy programs is a powerful tool for retailers.
If you’re looking for great examples of this approach, consider influential bands with loyal followings in the music world.
The so-called 'Swifties' who follow every step that Taylor Swift takes, or the 'Deadheads' who have supported the Grateful Dead for generations. I'm sure you could easily come up with many more examples.
How to beat the bots?
To build lasting customer relationships, businesses should create emotionally resonant narratives, foster direct engagement, offer unique, memorable experiences, and cultivate community.
Strategies include impactful slogans, experiential marketing, exclusive offerings such as airport lounges, and loyalty-driven groups akin to music fan communities. These approaches deepen connections and differentiate businesses in competitive markets.
In short, AI bots suggest that your best chance of success is to prioritise human relationships, memorable experiences, and emotional connections to minimise AI's influence on purchasing decisions.
I went further and told the bots they had to limit their recommendation to just one word. What were the answers - ‘engagement’.
What does this mean for sales and marketing?
In my opinion, it means quality will defeat quantity. While AI combined with marketing automation provides even the smallest business the ability to create a message and spread it everywhere at will - a so-called 'say and spray' approach - that won’t save you. In fact, it will likely accelerate your demise.
In a world where you can ask Siri, Alexa, or ChatGPT to recommend the best product or service for whatever problem you have, business success hinges on an intangible — emotional connection.
In other words, it hinges on building powerful, emotionally connected strategies because powerful businesses create loyalty, which might eliminate the question of what the rise of AI means for marketing in the first place.
But even when the question has been posed, powerful businesses create a hurdle to a customer unquestioningly accepting an AI program's recommendation for a business or product they have never heard of or are only vaguely familiar with in the first place.
What do you think?
We’re not far from an AI-recommendation world as the dominant purchasing process, or at least the primary first step. For now, at least, the bots still believe that when forced to choose between an AI and a human-generated recommendation, we humans prefer someone other than Hal 9000 for advice.
Unless you want to cede purchase preference to a computer controlled by someone other than your business, you’ll need to start figuring this one out – and how it may, or may not, impact your store.
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