Brand Experience

Will AI diminish what makes a brand special?

What are your favorite products? Are there qualities or features about them that you just adore, even if others don’t get why you do?

We like what we like. No getting around that. But what happens when we make purchases through an AI assistant that perhaps doesn’t have a strong connection to your brand?

Which brands will stand out when the AI is just being “objective” about a particular product and giving you “just the facts, ma’am,” versus bonafide brand experiences?

The following article highlights:

• AI's Influence on Purchasing: AI assistants will prioritize products based on objective criteria and personal user preferences, diminishing the traditional influence of brand loyalty.

• Brand Meritocracy: A product's intrinsic quality and value become more important than its brand name, pushing brands to focus on genuine quality and innovation.

• Adapt or die: Merchants must adapt their strategies to appeal to AI and human customers by emphasizing product quality and leveraging data for better customer experiences.

For example, you can book travel through AI now. The AI doesn’t care about a brand, but evaluating flights and hotels based on criteria you set. Sure, you might have preferences going into the transaction, but the AI could sway you to another “brand”, as long as it meets your criteria, and maybe a few other factors you never even considered.

From the article:

For everyone, AI-enabled Brand Meritocracy shifts additional focus onto improving brand experiences. Like outsourcing memorization of phone numbers to our phones, the task of remembering the name of an excellent product can be outsourced as well, so drilling in recall through advertising is less important than creating impactful moments.

We’re entering this world very soon. How will you stand out even more?

Marketing Experience

AI’s impact in everyday marketing

Here’s a podcast from a local station in Minnesota talking everything AI. Worth a listen:

User Experience

A discussion on conversational AI, context, and the importance of human judgment

For all you designers and UXers out there, this one’s for you:

"Curation is King. Content used to be king - content's going to be so easy to create by everyone that it's going to be the curation of that we're already seeing it in the migration back to newsletters and roundups and these taste makers deciding what is worth it."

"By design not by necessity we're going to as humans want to be in the loop on the decisions that these systems make we want to make sure they run it past us even if it's just to feel a sense of agency and happiness in our lives."

Enjoy.

Customer Experience

Should Customer Success extend beyond success with the product?

Our CS team lead will probably hate me for this. She works so hard to help clients achieve their goals, and then I read this article, and I got to thinking.

Customer Success is already such a value-generating function in any company. But what if customer success extends beyond the product's success and morphs into a strategic partnership? What could this mean? From the article:

Transitioning to a partner role signifies a fundamental change. As partners, your company must understand customers’ business objectives, goals, and challenges. The focus shifts from merely selling your product or service to becoming a vested ally in customer success.

It’s different, but as the most front-facing role in most companies, CS teams can be the difference between brand trust and brand avoidance, between retention and churn.

Employee Experience

Happy developers are productive developers

Do you think developers are people, too? Ha! Of course you do, but how we treat them in practice is what matters, right?

According to Andrew Boyagi, who currently leads the DevOps Evangelism team at Atlassian, says the following:

According to Andrew, the impulse to “measure everything,” and in particular, people’s productivity, can backfire.

So, show some love to your developers. More here:

Data Experience

US customers are more brand loyal—and more demanding

From the article:

78% of U.S. consumers are willing to pay more to shop with the brands they’re loyal to, an increase of 8% compared to last year’s report, according to Marketing technology firm Marigold’s 2024 United States Consumer Trends Index Report. This figure is notably higher than the 63% reported among global consumers.

More here: