Artificial intelligence (AI) has come a long way since its inception. It has reached the point where its conversational skills and generative capabilities are believable — but can you use it to craft authentic brand communication?
What Is Emotional Intelligence in Marketing?
Emotional intelligence is the ability to manage your feelings and understand others’ emotions. Self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy and social skills are four of its main components. In marketing, you’d use it to create an emotional connection with consumers to build trust and loyalty. The goal is to override the logical part of their brain to influence their buying decisions.
“Understanding and empathizing with a customer’s needs makes your marketing messages resonate on a fundamental level, positively influencing how they view your brand or product”
The Value of Emotional Intelligence in Marketing
Emotional intelligence in marketing is invaluable because it taps into consumer psychology. Understanding and empathizing with a customer’s needs makes your marketing messages resonate on a fundamental level, positively influencing how they view your brand or product. Over time, it helps you connect with them, driving sales.
The Link Between Emotional Intelligence and AI
To put it simply, AI lacks emotional intelligence. While large language models, chatbots and generative models can mimic it very well, they’re only stringing words together logically. Think of it as the algorithm and its training data being a puppet and a puppeteer — the performance may be believable, but it isn’t real.
Will AI ever have emotional intelligence? While research strongly indicates it will become emotionally aware soon, there’s no telling when that advancement will develop. Fortunately, that may not be an issue. As long as it can act convincingly enough, you won’t need it to genuinely experience or comprehend emotions.
“Once you have a large enough dataset, you could use a generative or natural language processing model to convincingly mimic emotional intelligence in marketing”
How Emotional Intelligence in AI Marketing Works
Whether a machine learning (ML) model creates marketing materials, forecasts customers’ buying behaviors or dynamically adjusts promotions based on demand, emotional intelligence can optimize its performance and maximize its gains. Algorithms already outperform humans on many time-sensitive tasks, which highlights the potential benefits of further improvements.
Take communication, for instance. You could use an ML model to send customers personalized follow-up messages, depending on how they interact with promotional emails. Email is the most utilized communication channel, so manually replying at scale would be impractical — and borderline impossible in many cases.
Since AI can rapidly analyze vast amounts of unstructured data, it can easily use certain data points to assess every individual’s mood and needs in a reasonable timeframe. It could analyze purchasing patterns, likes, the tone of written communications, or device settings to get an accurate idea of their emotional state.
Once you have a large enough dataset, you could use a generative or natural language processing model to convincingly mimic emotional intelligence in marketing. As long as your training data is highly relevant, accurate and clean, the algorithm should be able to pick up on specific details to interpret customers’ feelings in real-time.
“Marketing companies utilizing generative AI have seen their revenue increase by up to 15% and their sales return on investment increase by 10%-20%”
What Sets Emotional Intelligence in AI Marketing Apart
The reason why 90% of senior executives at marketing companies expect to utilize generative AI by 2025 may be because those who have already invested have seen their revenue increase by up to 15% and their sales return on investment increase by 10%-20%. Indicators suggest this technology will soon catch on.
AI-driven marketing campaigns already outperform their conventional counterparts because algorithms work faster, can detect hidden patterns and respond to market changes in real-time. When you equip them with emotional intelligence, they can drive better sales, increase customer loyalty and improve brand reputation even further.
How to Craft Authentic Brand Communication With AI
Instead of prioritizing developing a model that can experience, understand and contextualize feelings, you should build one that can convincingly perceive, interpret and express them. You’ll be successful if people think your algorithm understands where they’re coming from and empathizes with them.
People will still appreciate feeling heard even when they know they’re talking to an algorithm. One study on an “emotional feedback cycle” between an AI-powered robot and human participants discovered that people’s feelings intensified when they saw a machine reflect them, suggesting humans respond well to reinforcement.
If this study is anything to go off of, crafting authentic brand messages with an emotionally intelligent AI involves reflecting a person’s positive feelings while gently redirecting them away from negative ones. When your model displays understanding and compassion like this, it can influence people’s buying behaviors and perceptions of your brand.
Finding Success When Deploying an AI System
Although AI isn’t capable of emotional intelligence yet, you can still use it to craft authentic brand communications for marketing purposes. While it can’t contextualize or comprehend feelings yet, it pretends to convincingly enough.
If you’re concerned about it responding in an uninformed way or with an uncaring tone, consider adding a human in the loop to review its messages or conduct audits. This way, you can filter out overly aggressive or out-of-touch-sounding messages before they reach customers.
