Turn your old photos into animated videos! Make your grandmother laugh with a still photo! Engage with Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa in an incredible conversation! Or, while relaxing on your couch, you watch ‘Baahubali’ over and over again, but each time, you get a fresh experience with new settings, unexpected twists and alternate endings. While watching the movie, you see an ad in which you get recommendations for your favourite delicacy, Indian or continental. You get a notification on your phone telling you that you can get 40% off if you order within an hour. Isn’t it like the world is tailor-made just for you?
These changes are no longer a mere invention, they have already started to happen thanks to the power of Generative AI (GenAI). GenAI has ushered in a new era, transforming the way we consume and create content.
GenAI, a branch of artificial intelligence, focuses on generating code, data, documents/text, audio, video, and images. GenAI can produce realistic and diverse content that meets individual preferences and interests, enabling a personalized and immersive experience. This way, you receive the right content at the right time if marketers target you, based on your tastes, feelings, and intentions. However, it is important to know how you feel about AI knowing so much about you and influencing your choices? Should there be limits or regulations on how AI can use your personal data? How can you protect your digital identity and autonomy in a world of hyper-personalized content?
How GenAI is empowering marketers
GenAI is resurrecting the creator economy! It’s making waves across a wide range of industries. Marketing is no exception.
GenAI acts as a powerful ally, helping marketers understand their target audience and support them in their efforts. It can analyze large amounts of structured and unstructured data much faster than a human team, and segregate it based on demographics, geography, interest, intent or sentiment, etc., and thus help them target distinct customer groups, predict their behaviors and adapt their marketing strategies to meet the customer’s requirements. By creating dynamic web pages, landing pages and product recommendations, tailored to each visitor’s profile, location, device and browsing history, GenAI helps marketers not only create content quickly, but also personalize content and reach each customer at the right time.
GenAI also helps marketers automate repetitive, time-consuming, or human-intensive tasks and workflows by automating email marketing, social media posting, content curation, and lead generation, freeing up their time and resources for more creative and strategic work.
With GenAI, marketers can forecast customer demand, sales, revenue, and churn, and suggest optimal pricing, budget allocation, and bidding strategies. Additionally, GenAI can perform scenario and what-if analyses, allowing marketers to explore different possibilities and test assumptions, enabling them to make data-driven decisions and improve their performance.
What is responsible marketing and why is it important?
Interestingly, according to Forrester, by 2024 alone, 60% of the world’s population could interact with GenAI technology, consciously or not. Many factors such as technological advancements, easy access to the internet, and the popularity of social media have given rise to a new generation of empowered, informed, and demanding customers. They want hyper-personalized, seamless, and engaging experiences across different touchpoints and channels. But hyper-personalization raises certain ethical and social concerns, such as privacy, consent, bias, and manipulation. Thus, responsible marketing stands out as a model of integrity and trust.
Responsible marketing is essentially about promoting products and services in an honest, ethical and socially responsible manner. It is not just about selling a product or service, but about building relationships with customers and contributing positively to society.
One of the main reasons why responsible marketing is crucial is to build trust. When consumers feel that a company is honest and transparent in its promotional activities, it helps to establish the foundation for long-term relationships, fostering loyalty and retention.
Additionally, responsible marketing considers the impact on society and the environment. According to a study, 55% of Generation Z buy from environmentally friendly and socially responsible brands.
Responsible marketing also plays a vital role in a company’s reputation. In the age of social media, information spreads like wildfire. Any misleading or unethical marketing practice can quickly damage a brand’s image.
Another aspect to consider is the legal framework. Governments and regulators are increasingly scrutinizing marketing practices to ensure fairness and protect consumers.
Ethical Marketing Practices
Marketers must use GenAI responsibly, ensuring transparency and authenticity. They must advocate the values and goals of responsible AI to external stakeholders, such as customers, partners, regulators, and the media.
Given that GenAI’s ability to create content that is indistinguishable from human-created content can sometimes raise issues of misinformation and intellectual property rights, proper human review should be mandatory.
Second, to preserve brand reputation, companies must stay ahead of regulatory scrutiny to ensure fairness and protect consumers by complying with regulations.
Marketers should also develop a clear roadmap for AI use, including information such as the purpose, inputs, outputs, performance, and governance of each AI system, as well as potential risks and mitigations associated with them. This can help marketers identify gaps and opportunities to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and ethics of the AI systems in use.
And most importantly, the commitment of senior executives across the company – the impetus for collaboration from the top – is essential to ensure that internal efforts are made to identify and mitigate key risks.
Conclusion
Responsible marketing is not just a buzzword: it is a fundamental approach that benefits both companies and consumers. By prioritizing honesty, transparency and social responsibility, companies can build trust, improve their reputation and make a positive contribution to the world.
