The growing influence of AI on modern marketing strategies

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become an integral part of marketing workflows, regardless of a brand’s size. Marketing teams across the board are actively exploring AI and its various applications to enhance their strategies and operations. As AI continues to evolve, businesses are focussed on understanding how best to leverage this technology to meet their specific needs and objectives.

Organisations have been using AI for a long time, primarily in the personalisation space, whether it is bots, chatbots, CRM tools, and more. Biswas opened the session by asking marketers about how they differentiate between Gen AI and traditional AI applications in marketing.

Rohit Dadwal, CEO, MMA Global - APAC, explains that personalisation from a data perspective is complemented by creativity, and this is where Gen AI comes into play. As marketers advance into personalisation and custom ads, they are working to determine how to tailor every type of advertising for each individual consumer.

“I believe generative AI will play a significant role in the segmentation and cohort design processes that AI will enable. This is where Gen AI will begin to facilitate the optimal utilisation of these tools. While this shift won’t happen immediately, we need to start by building sandboxes from a brand imagery, trademark, and IP perspective. Once that is done, it will become much easier and more consumer-friendly to serve the right ad with the right creative to the right audience,” he says.

As marketing continues to evolve with the integration of advanced technologies, every element of a brand's strategy is being reimagined, including how products are presented to consumers. Packaging, traditionally viewed as a static component, is now being recognised as a dynamic element that can significantly influence consumer perceptions and decisions.

Talking about the scope of Gen AI in the same, Amit Sarda, managing director, Soulflower, says that a product is nothing without packaging. One can create a product, but they need something to package it well.

He added that a concern he has about packaging is whether the product will ever get oxidised, as Soulflower makes preservative-free products and AI can help address these types of issues.

“We work closely with our research and development (R&D) team, and I am personally involved with AI on a day-to-day basis. I think the opportunity is immense. It's just crazy the way things are changing now and it's an interesting time for me as a product person and as a marketer”, notes Sarda.

AI-powered recommendation systems, in particular, have transformed how brands interact with their audiences by offering tailored suggestions based on individual preferences and behaviours.

Devika Sharma, VP and general manager, InMobi, believes that the key asset that AI is driving is relevance. It is able to understand user behaviour with granularity. According to her, to be able to establish relevance with far higher success rates is one of the key things that AI drives.

“At Glance, I think one of the biggest advantages AI offers is the ability to fuel serendipitous discovery. This means that users are not just shown content in a linear consumption pattern, but are also exposed to related content categories and trending topics that might be relevant for them to discover. For any platform, AI plays a critical role in ensuring content liquidity. One clear application is in facilitating seamless language translations, which AI has significantly improved,” she adds.

Marketers highlight that to effectively leverage AI in marketing, it is crucial for them to keep it real, ensuring that the content they create - whether branded or otherwise - is as authentic and grounded as possible.

AI has also made contributions to e-commerce and online stores by providing personalised shopping experiences, improved customer service, and optimised inventory management.

According to Sukhleen Aneja, former CEO, Good Glamm Group, AI will end up disrupting the entire value chain across the board. She emphasises that digital communication requires more dynamic advertising, where different messages are personalised for various audiences, a task where AI will play a critical role.

Aneja also saya that on the supply side, AI can enhance forecasting capabilities, provided there is sufficient historical data to create accurate predictive analyses. “Historical data is essential for large language models to produce predictable outcomes. Additionally, AI is already playing a substantial role in enhancing consumer experiences, a major use case in the industry,” she states.

Dadwal further adds that measurement analytics, driven or powered by AI, coupled with machine learning, will lead to a lot of automation in marketing. Performance-driven brands will be the beneficiaries in the short term.