AI has revolutionized how creative content and ads get done, but faster creative content can only go so far. Speeding up creative is one thing - unlocking new strategies for growth is another.
The current offering of AI creative tools, while delivering clear operational efficiencies, are still limited in delivering substantial value. This is because they all process the same inputs that were used before. They are very good at churning out more of the same. For example, AI can read and learn your business using your website, but your website doesn’t represent something that is fundamentally new for your market to drive new growth. Yes, you can generate Facebook or Google ads faster, but you end up with variations on the same theme. The result is a possibility of incremental growth for clients, not consequential growth.
How will AI ultimately deliver consequential growth for clients?
It Starts With Customer Insights
If you want to make a larger impact in achieving business objectives, it takes more than faster creative. It takes new strategies that feed new creative - and those new strategies almost always start with new customer or market insights.
The problem is that methods for generating customer insights haven't changed much over the past ten or fifteen years. The options tend to include the same type of geodemographic segmentation, behavioral segmentation, customer surveys, or some promise of 1:1 marketing that is never realized. Most sophisticated customer insight systems are also expensive, slow, and yield so-so results.
AI is now making its way “upstream” to improve the very inputs the AI creative tools use. The result will be a true transformation of marketing because new AI tools focused on customer insights strike at the heart of improving performance, customer value, and expanding markets - because these tools are about how customers think.
The State of AI Customer Insights
Today there is a crop of AI companies focused on speeding up customer research to get to new insights, such as Outset and Voicepanel. But similar to new AI creative tools, the benefit is more operational - it’s more about research speed and less about tapping into a new way to go to market. What’s more, customer profiles and insights derived using this kind of research are rarely actionable with media teams and often get combined, making the insights watered down.
What’s needed is an AI solution that fundamentally evolves how we think about customers to take a bigger step toward consequential growth.The best way to change how you think about customers is to not think about them at all, but to think with them - to look through their eyes at your marketing to better understand how they see your marketing through their personal values. These are the same values that shape purchase decisions and determine if a product fits in their lives. This new stance means “turning the tables” - to stop analyzing customers and to see how they analyze what you produce - your marketing.
How AI Powers New Customer Insights Using Personal Values
Fortunately, there are hundreds of research studies in social psychology and social anthropology that reveal the values customers use to make purchase decisions. The challenge is synthesizing it all into something coherent that applies directly to your business, brand, and marketing. That’s where AI comes in - as a large language model (LLM) - to understand your business, customers, and the values that drive the most purchases. AI short circuits the work required to align your marketing with customer values to improve performance.
When you adopt this different stance with your customers, you discover that your market is “pluralistic” - it’s made up of many value segments that each require different messaging and targeting. Without AI, applying these ideas would be near-impossible. It would require creative and media teams to put themselves in many different sets of customer shoes - to create something distinct from their own personal values.
With AI you can rapidly understand your customer value segments, learn who they are and why they buy, and quickly generate the targeting and creative content you need to increase performance. That’s what lifemind is all about - to power your upstream strategic thinking about customers so that your AI creative goes further in lowering acquisition costs and growing your market - because now you align to what your customers want to see.
