When I first studied marketing 19 years ago, I was mainly taught the traditional marketing approach to brand management. Today, managing your brand image in the age of AI is a completely different ballgame, especially online. From customizing communications to predicting public opinion, how will new technologies impact marketing and shape brand reputation?

AI offers brand protection

AI can help safeguard brand reputation online. Take social media listening tools, for example. Using natural language processing (NLP) models, AI can understand and decipher what your audiences are saying. This enables you to adjust your content strategy, address people’s concerns, and figure out how to improve engagement.

Guarding a company’s reputation has largely to do with customer security. In the wake of advanced cybercrime, customers seek assurance that their data is protected. And AI does just that. It protects data using behavior modelling, identifying malware, and employing automated measures to counter potential attacks. While humans are limited in their capacity to monitor and flag such issues, AI has no such limitations.

AI improves marketing strategies

AI provides content for everyone’s taste. The high level of customization AI offers is phenomenal. You can’t remember the preferences of thousands of customers. AI can. It helps you match each customer’s taste. A basic example is YouTube, which offers video recommendations based on your viewing history.

AI also enhances the search engine experience. Previously, it wasn’t as easy to find what you were looking for on Google. Google is always updating its algorithms to enhance the user experience. Even if you don’t use the exact same keywords, you will still get relevant results since the search engine learned about you over time. All this may sound creepy and raise questions about privacy, but AI is all about leaning from user behavior. Other big brands like Amazon and Netflix are also giving product recommendations by understanding user intent.

AI also improves the quality of marketing campaigns. With AI, you can monitor your campaigns and get valuable insights into what works and what doesn’t, where to spend more and where to cut your budget. AI can also give you valuable inputs on the right visuals, layout, and copy, enabling you to create dynamic ads targeting different customer segments.

AI enhances customer experience

AI connects brands with the right audiences. Today, we enjoy much more opportunities, as marketers, to use our multi-channel environments to target specific customer groups. In this context, AI can refine our target market using advanced tools. It allows us to develop an in-depth understanding of customer behavior, pick up on specific patterns, and consequently create and update our campaign strategies.

Before AI, companies were categorizing customers into broad groups and making bulk decisions about customer experience. AI has changed how companies monitor their customer experience. AI records and analyzes user actions such as the items browsed or added to the cart and then removed, the call-to-action clicked, the forms half-filled and left midway, etc. AI improves customer experience by using accurate data and giving customers just what they want. For this purpose, companies have been heavily investing in AI-powered technologies including chatbots and customer service applications.

According to Forbes, AI is the future of customer experience. By 2025, it is estimated that 95% of customer interactions will be managed by AI. In a fast-paced online marketplace where word of mouth spreads like wildfire, AI is increasingly becoming the thin line between enhancing brand reputation and wrecking it altogether.