How Artificial Intelligence will Enhance Brand Management

How Artificial Intelligence will Enhance Brand Management

In Today's business world, how a business is perceived in the market matters most. Ideally, your brand represents

In Today’s business world, how a business is perceived in the market matters most. Ideally, your brand represents who your company is and what it stands for (Sanjay). Marketing managers and product managers must work closely to guard the overall brand. By definition, we can say that brand management is the discipline of crafting, defining, positioning, sustaining, and delivering a brand value to your clients.

The bottom line is that brand management is important since it helps in achieving:

  • Influences purchasing behavior
  • Reassures customers that your business values them,
  • Drives repeat clients to your business/ help in achieving customer loyalty

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the technologies businesses can leverage to enhance brand management. According to tutorialspoint.com, Artificial Intelligence refers to a way of making a computer-controlled robot think intelligently in a similar manner to a human being would think.

Google and Microsoft are among the leading international brands that have realigned their groups to focus on AI research. The leading brands aim at changing their primary user service platforms and applying Artificial Intelligence to these platforms.

Other industry leaders like Alibaba, TenCent, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple are not far behind from this target. This indicates that AI is becoming the core technology for enhancing consumer engagement and managing interaction models. The overall effect will certainly be enhanced in brand management.

In this article, we feature how Artificial Intelligence will enhance brand management. Therefore, keep reading to find out how and why your business should embrace Artificial Intelligence. Without further ado, let’s get down to business.

Using Artificial Intelligence to Improve Customer Experience

Companies are focusing more on brand management through customer experience. Happy customers will definitely market your brand. Through improved customer experience, the business can achieve better customer loyalty. In addition, a positive reputation contributes greatly to increased growth.

Artificial Intelligence has helped improve customer experience through the provision of fast and efficient solutions. For instance, voice and speech recognition, understanding human emotions, and the ability to predict consumer behavior have greatly contributed to improved customer experience. According to Blake Morgan on Forbes.com, the future of customer experience lies in the use of Artificial Intelligence. She estimates that by the year 2025, 95% of customer interactions will be supported by AI.

By the year 2025, 95% of customer interactions will be supported by AI. #CustomerExperience Click To Tweet

Companies are also focusing on leveraging the power of Artificial Intelligence to deliver personalized recommendations. This is the number one effort that aims at achieving a better customer experience. We have seen chatbots helping brands to enhance personalization, which is critical to brand management.

As companies focus on understanding what their clients want and how they want it, brand management is getting to the next level. This is because these efforts altogether help in achieving a better customer experience. Happy customers will in return trust your brand. Therefore, we see that by using Artificial Intelligence to manage customer experience, businesses achieve better brand management.

Example

A good example of a company that uses AI to offer a better customer experience is the outdoor retailer North Face. Through IBM’s AI supercomputer Watson, the company offers customers a personalized experience as they shop. For instance, if a customer is searching for hiking gear, the AI system asks the customer where they intend to go hiking and on which day. Based on the feedback entered, the system recommends the appropriate gear to the customer that suits the weather and the hike activities.

Application of Artificial Intelligence to Guard Reputation on Digital Media

Through digital media, opinions can spread like wildfire! By now you already know that word of mouth, and social media posts are powerful when it comes to building or damaging a company’s reputation. Online customer review websites are also another form of digital media besides social media that companies should watch closely.

Artificial Intelligence has been used to develop systems that allow companies to guard their online reputation. These systems are allowing companies to achieve advanced brand management. This is through enabling brand managers and product managers to conduct large-scale research and analysis on social media platforms, blogs, online news websites, and other online forums.

We know that these forms of digital media have been used by people posing as genuine customers to carry out malicious attacks on businesses. These attacks have been hampering their brand management efforts. However, thanks to Artificial Intelligence businesses can be able to counter such attacks before they erupt into infectious attacks.

Andrew Medal on entrepreneur.com argues that the Internet gives people various avenues that they can use to form an opinion about a business. He further explains that it is important for businesses to be proactive about their online reputation. Through just a few characters on Twitter.com, a hungry customer can destroy the reputation of a company.

Based on the above arguments, it is important that businesses embrace Artificial Intelligence for online brand management.

Example of Application of AI to Monitor Online Reputation

A good example of how to achieve this is by monitoring mentions online. Mentionlytics software can help businesses to identify when they are mentioned online and as such respond appropriately. This is a powerful system for delivering advanced brand management through AI.

Leveraging Marketing Engagements to Improve Brand Management

Did you know that through marketing engagements a business can effectively achieve brand management? There are different platforms that customers are using to engage with your business. If you don’t respond to your customers online, your competitors will definitely do that. This means that you will be leaving your competitors to satisfy your customers.

Promita on entrepreneur.com argues that wowing clients is critical to sustaining your business. She continues by saying that a planned customer engagement platform is important for creating compelling content and offering a great value proposition. Some companies will use survey sites to engage with their clients while others leverage social media. These efforts are critical for achieving brand management goals.

However, to take your brand management a notch higher, you might leverage Artificial Intelligence to drive marketing engagements. AI will help a business to effectively target customers maximizing their engagement efforts. For instance, you can effectively target a customer at their early purchasing stages and offer a recommendation.

A good example of where AI is used to engage clients is targeted advertising. As you target customers who are searching for products that you supply, you are getting the word out there that you have the best products. Eventually, your business is able to establish itself as an authority in a particular line. This is an effective method that allows businesses to achieve brand management online.

Example

A company that has achieved great success through maximizing marketing engagements is tripadvisor.com. Whenever you search for “things to do in ….” on any search engine, Tripadvisor.com will be among the top search results. Later as you browse various destinations where you probably want to visit, Trip Advisor intelligently targets you and displays their trip plans.

Embracing Artificial Intelligence to Deliver Customer Care Hence Improved Customer Trust

Customer care is another critical component when it comes to the management of your brand. Essentially, a business ought to make sure they attend to customers’ concerns in a timely manner and effectively.

Failing to respond to concerns that are raised by customers in a timely manner will eventually lead to mistrust from your customers. When your customers no longer trust your business, this means they will no longer buy your products or subscribe to your services. According to Greg Shuey on Business.com, customer service and marketing should have a harmonious relationship. He further explains that businesses rely on marketing to draw in new customers and therefore they should also rely on customer service to strengthen their relationship with the customers. This is a good argument that shows the importance of customer service in achieving better brand management.

AI technology exists to improve how customers offer customer care. For instance, through the use of AI-powered Chat Bots, customer concerns can be addressed even after business hours. Therefore, on long weekends, your customers don’t have to wait until your customer care personnel resume service to have their queries answered. On the other side, such initiatives help companies to save thousands of dollars that could have gone into paying overtime when customer care reps have to work through weekends. Therefore, we can ascertain that AI-powered customer service helps businesses in delivering success in more than one way.

Example

A company that uses AI and machine learning to respond to customer care questions is KLM. The Dutch airline has deployed an AI-enabled chatbot that answers customer queries. For instance, Dubbed KLM BB the Chatbot helps customers in various ways including booking a ticket. See the screenshot below

KLM - AI - brand management

Artificial Intelligence to Secure Customer Data Hence Achieving Customer Trust

Customer security is also important in guarding a company’s reputation. In the wake of advanced cybercrime, clients want to be assured that their information is safeguarded. In the recent past, we have seen legislation in the European Union seeking to secure customer data.

The issues of customer data security are not new in the digital age. In fact, we have heard about online security long before the emergence of social media platforms. Companies that have been implicated in different scandals that involve leaking sensitive customer data have had their reputation damaged badly.

To reinstate the confidence that customers have in your company, it is important to embrace Artificial Intelligence. Thus through AI-enabled security systems, customers will trust your brand. This is a very important initiative when it comes to brand management. For example, by using customer recognition systems like facial recognition, and voice and sound recognition customers are sure their security will not be compromised.

We have seen various companies come up with such applications that allow customers to register their biometrics. Then later customers are able to use these details the next time they want to receive services. Companies that have embraced AI when it comes to matters of customer protection are on the right track to achieving enhanced brand management. This is based on the level of trust that such companies earn from their clients.

To Sum Up

These are some of the ways through which Artificial Intelligence helps companies in brand management. Through better brand management techniques, customer loyalty is achieved. Eventually, companies can achieve higher revenue in terms of increased sales. Loyal customers will market your products and services to their friends and family members. Therefore, businesses should embrace technology that focuses on improving their brand management.

This is through applying AI to improve customer experience. Satisfied customers as indicated above are your brand ambassadors. These help in spreading the word to other customers. Another tactic is using AI to monitor your brand on social media and other digital media. Your reputation on review sites and these other digital platforms matters most in your brand management initiatives. Also, we have the use of AI in achieving marketing engagements with an initiative of improving how your brand awareness. Marketing engagement initiatives that improve brand awareness will, in the end, result in better brand management.

Therefore, brand managers and marketing managers should talk to senior executives and seek funding to invest in AI. As illustrated above, AI has a huge potential in delivering advanced brand management. Enhanced brand management is crucial to surviving in the modern-day competitive business environment.

Further reading:

John Kopanakis

About John Kopanakis

John is a co-founder of Mentionlytics supervising Business Development and Business Processes. He is a Professor of Business Intelligence with interests in Data Analytics and Innovation.