How to market real AI solutions in a cynical world
The business world is fast-moving, and staying relevant is an unending challenge. To keep up, companies increasingly invoke AI in their marketing regardless of their true expertise in the area. As a result, the real promise of artificial intelligence is lost in the hype, and it sinks into a sci-fi version of snake oil.
The unfortunate outcome is companies that stand to benefit considerably from AI-driven solutions are becoming wary of the claims of vendors. At the same time, marketers looking to highlight the business utility of their AI products are struggling to sell to a disinterested or distrusting audience.
So, how do you sell AI without causing your audience to roll their eyes?
Textio, a predictive writing platform used in talent recruitment, continues to find success using conventional tactics like videos, case studies, and co-branded events with customers like Johnson & Johnson, Vodafone, and Nvidia to demonstrate its business value. However, this strategy is not universal. If a competing client views your solution as a true differentiator, they obviously won’t rush to share that information and might even ask for non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). A new startup may very well have exceptional technology, but without big-name clients willing to publicly tout its virtues, it will need to turn to new avenues.
To explore these avenues, we spoke with leading AI marketers and brand communicators to find out what unique strategies they employ to stand out in an already saturated marketplace.
You might be a savvy techie who genuinely understands and uses words like “neural networks” or “deep learning” in everyday conversation, but some people — including Protagonist‘s early prospective customers — might find that uncool.
“Protagonist started by trying to hammer home their unique technology by pioneering the buzzword ‘narrative analytics’, but this just wasn’t resonating with customers,” recalled Damon Waldron, vice president of marketing.
A veteran B2B marketing expert, Waldron currently heads the team at Protagonist, a company that leverages AI to capture the stories and beliefs that drive people’s behavior. Fortune 500 companies like Wells Fargo, Starbucks, and Microsoft use the product to assess consumers’ true feelings about their brands to develop a more effective communication strategy. Asked to distill the biggest challenge in communicating AI innovation, Waldron responded, “The tech news cycles are overly saturated with frilly buzzwords. It’s been a challenge to truly communicate the significance of a product via pen and paper when competing against so much noise.”
When the phrase “narrative analytics” did not connect with buyers, Waldron decided instead to position Protagonist against well-known, commonly used marketing strategies that his customers did understand. In comparison to his company’s solution, traditional market surveys are limited in scope and introduce bias, whereas social media monitoring tools are often shallow and don’t extend beyond positive or negative sentiment analysis.
He also uses Protagonist to market Protagonist. “We recently did an analysis of Harley Davidson as an exercise in how to reinvigorate a stale brand. We did that in three days. What we want is for the CMO of Brooks Brothers or another brand in the same situation to think about how they could use Protagonist,” he said. Waldron and his team can quickly assemble educational content on any trending topic, such as whether traditional investment managers are under threat from robo-advisors. “We can easily host a webinar on the topic or throw together an infographic on how millennials are investing and insert them into our sales and marketing emails,” he added.
Artificial intelligence is comprised of many technical approaches, only a few of which are currently overhyped in the media.
