AI Marketing Tools: where we are today
While AI is celebrated for streamlining marketing operations and boosting productivity, its potential in marketing extends far beyond these benefits. With the right training framework, AI can also provide marketers with a completely new way to understand and engage with their customers.
Today, marketing finds itself in the early growth stage of the AI product lifecycle. This stage is characterized by delivering operating efficiency gains at scale. The value extracted isn’t necessarily from “smarter” but rather from “more”, “faster” and “cheaper”. While these benefits are significant, they represent a step toward more automation rather than true innovation and that… is just the tip of the AI iceberg.
Take a closer look at the AI-driven applications on offer to marketers and you realize that most of them focus on “more”, “faster” and “cheaper”. Tools like copy.ai and jasper.ai generate content and marketing copy at scale, Hubspot and Mailchimp use AI to simplify and automate email marketing campaigns, and Google Ads leverages AI to automate bidding and ad generation. These tools streamline “jobs to be done” but don’t necessarily provide marketers with new insights or smarter approaches to communications.
The point is that most currently available marketing AI solutions are essentially taking an existing way of doing things - admittedly a proven one - to automate tasks and minimize human intervention in order to achieve productivity gains. Few of them are re-thinking our current approaches and proposing new frameworks from which AI can learn from to formulate new and better solutions to existing marketing problems. And that’s selling AI short.
AI allows marketers to re-think customer segmentation and targeting
The recent proliferation and accessibility of data has long been touted as an opportunity for marketers: richer customer insights, personalization and better campaign optimization leading to a much improved customer experience are just a few of the expected potential benefits.
However, due to multiple reasons including data integration challenges, an increasingly stringent regulatory environment and growing consumer data privacy concerns all leading to the current uncertainty around how to make the “cookie” less intrusive, the path to customer experience nirvana is becoming increasingly difficult to navigate. Today’s marketers have to look at alternative options to “size-up” their customers and communicate in a differentiated, efficient manner.
That’s where Lifemind comes in. Lifemind is an AI-driven insights platform that not only delivers operating efficiency gains but also offers marketers a completely new perspective on their customers. By understanding and prioritizing the personal values that influence purchase decisions for a specific brand, product or service, Lifemind transforms how marketers think of their target audience and engage with their customers.
Market Segmentation: three sets of values that make all the difference
Lifemind is trained on data derived from research studies in cultural geography, sociology, anthropology, DNA and Census data. A total of 168 values have been identified and categorized into 3 distinct sets: life outlooks, regional values, and generational values to represent the US population.
Values such as reliability, empathy, tolerance, perseverance, patriotism, hard work, financial stability, social activism among others have been codified and assigned to every zip code in the US. When matched to a company’s list of customers by zip code,
Lifemind generates highly differentiated customer values-aligned segmentation and targeting with corresponding goal-based recommendations that fuel campaign testing strategies and creative development.
This approach offers a significant advantage over traditional segmentation and targeting solutions. For one, it eliminates the need for PII; Lifemind only requires a list of zip codes with corresponding customer counts to generate a comprehensive market segmentation and customer targeting strategy.
Secondly, unlike traditional customer segmentation models such as Claritas’ PRIZM segments or Acxiom’s Personicx, Lifemind’s output is actionable: target audiences can be activated in digital and broadcast platforms along with test plans and values-aligned creative assets.
Aligning values for better results
Ultimately, Lifemind is built on the premise that aligning a brand's projected values - derived from its various marketing channels - with the values held by its target audience leads to a better customer experience and improved results. This value proposition is supported by the segmentation, targeting, audience profiles, test plans, and creative assets that Lifemind generates.
Lifemind represents a new paradigm in customer insights, moving the needle beyond operational efficiencies to leverage AI's generative and analytical capabilities and invent a new lens by which to target customers. It is made possible by an AI system specifically designed to understand and catalog the values of both target audiences and brands.
For AI to have an immediate, meaningful impact on marketing ROI, its potential has to extend beyond efficiency gains toward new targeting paradigms and impactful campaign outcomes.
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