Juan Isaza is Vice President of Strategy and Innovation at DDB Latina and the President of DDB Mexico.
Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has made a remarkable incursion into our workspaces, and it has gradually become an essential tool for those involved in strategic brand planning. The speed at which it has earned a pivotal role in understanding consumers, brands or markets is indisputable. Many compare it to hiring an intern who assists with daily tasks, particularly gathering information or bouncing ideas during the early stages of brand concept creation. In this article, I will review some of the ways generative AI tools like ChatGPT can become strong allies for consumer analysis.
What are the central concepts of GenAI?
To start, it’s worth reviewing the central concepts of tools like ChatGPT or Bard. At their core, they are large language models (LLMs), algorithms capable of mimicking written language. They are based on vast amounts of information, allowing them to predict the next word in a text. As The New York Times explained in a highly instructive and interactive article, with each round of training, these models learn word shapes and structures and punctuation marks until they eventually can predict the most appropriate word in the context of each sentence. Being predictive indicates that the tool will tend to follow rules and behave like an average person (consumer). And, as we will see, this can be critical for brand planning.
But just like with any interview, I’ve learned that asking the right questions is essential to getting the precise answer we want. Many brand strategists have developed their own best set of prompts or ways to get tools like ChatGPT to provide them with the required information. The best advice I have found is to be as specific as possible about the expected result, explaining to the tool the context and the task to be developed as well as the expected result and the desired format.
Based on my experience and conversations with colleagues who have been also incorporating it into their work, here are five areas where GenAI models can be useful when working on a brand strategy.
1. Help With Identifying Clichés
As many specialists have explained, LLMs are essentially a massive statistical exercise. If you ask them to complete a sentence, they’ll try to provide the most “predictable” answer—likely something an average consumer would say. Their processing capacity could be likened to speaking with many consumers at once and obtaining a summary of their thoughts. They probably won’t bring you a game-changing idea, but they will give you the obvious, which can serve as a basis for what to discard so you can seek truly differentiated ideas—a crucial factor in any creative process.
2. Supporting A Point Of View, Statistic Or Stance
In brand planning, you often have a notion or hypothesis about a point that helps you support a vision or brand concept. GenAI tools can help you find support, examples, cases or statistics to back up your concept. Bard or Writesonic can be particularly helpful here, as they provide a reference to the website from which the gathered information was taken. This is useful for verifying information and avoiding “hallucinations” (plausible-sounding but false claims made up by the AI), which can lead to erroneous data.
3. Thought-Starters About A Brand Or Market
In the construction of a communications brief, it is essential to understand the basic points on how a category or market operates, as well as the main competitors involved. AI generative tools can explain the structure of a business, including its sources of income, distribution channels, the critical issues faced by the category, and more.
A tool called Rationale, for example, allows you to quickly construct SWOT analyses, including pros and cons, over any topic, which can simplify the task of making a brief. However, it is always essential to understand the time limitations of tools like ChatGPT, whose training was done in 2021 and therefore may not have information on recent events or innovations in your category.
4. Exploring Tones For The Brand
You can ask ChatGPT to, for example, adopt the style of a movie or writer, or take on the personality of a comedian or a typical consumer in order to generate the type of opinion you can expect from that group toward your brand. This can be a valuable source of insight because when you force a viewpoint in the words of a particular type of consumer, the AI will have to generate tensions or find unexplored angles of the brand that fit into that mold. Asking it to narrate something about the brand in the words of a centennial, for instance, can allow you to understand from the style (although perhaps not from the substance) what the relationship is between the brand and those consumers.
Keeping The Human Element
However, some tasks should remain in the hands of human creativity—for example, understanding cultural changes or emerging movements. In an article from Harvard Business Review led by Professor De Cremer, he says, “Culture changes much more quickly than generative algorithms can be trained, so humans maintain a dynamism that algorithms cannot compete against.” Generative AI can help us identify motivations or tensions in people, facilitate generating hypotheses and the conceptual framework for research, or even give us part of the exploratory basis, but it cannot replace the precision and specificity of ad hoc research.
We should never forget that brand strategy is a creative job that needs to break schemes and generate new visions and innovative positioning territories. Human creativity historically has been a balance between information and disruption. These spaces of rupture are not predictable and are not in the information, but rather in the imagination. In that sense, we should continue to celebrate and utilize human creativity when it comes to giving brands a new focus and unexpected spaces of disruption in their brand ideas and positioning statements.
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