Will people ever stop using AI wrong? 🤖
Ha!
Discover why you can expect AI to be inaccurate across a broad range of business and marketing subjects.

(I’m not an AI evangelist nor a Luddite.
Nuanced opinions don’t sell on LinkedIn, especially with hyped topics.
But I’m going to keep trying anyway. 🤷‍♂️)

Here’s a simple experiment that shows why it’s risky to treat AI chatbots as founts of knowledge, especially in marketing and business.

I asked gpt4 and Bard a straightforward question posed by a client:
“What are the leading models and frameworks for mapping customer journeys?” 💡

The twist? I generated answers three times for each.

Results?
• High variability in gpt4’s responses, with differing list lengths and items.
• Over-indexing of thought leaders with large publishing volume / PR.
• Influential Nielsen-Norman group framework appeared only once.
• Bard’s anonymized labels made lists nearly useless.
• Both occasionally included loosely related concepts (e.g., AIDA)

Why does this matter? 🤔
On a practical level, result variance indicates if you’re in the AI’s comfort zone or twilight zone and how much fact-checking is needed. High variance? Be cautious!

But there’s a bigger issue. With many flavours and branded versions of customer journey mapping, LLMs struggle to find clear dominant patterns. This issue is common in marketing, strategy, and business concepts.

Let’s not force AI into corners. It’s just not a great desk research tool at this point. Regenerate and iterate for better clarity. 💡

(Version 1.5 of “the sceptic’s guide to ChatGPT” is out)

Illustration by The Partners

[Sometimes I get asked to write stuff and feel the marketing strategy equivalent of those famous protest signs that read ‘I can’t believe I still have to protest this shit’…]

Nearly 20 years ago, global M&A sprees combined with massive product innovation required the likes of Unilever and Nestlé to carefully assess their portfolios as well as scrutinise any arguments for the creation of new brands.

In February 2000, Unilever famously embarked on a global programme to reduce its number of brands from 1600 to 400 in five years. Coining the term ‘power brands’, Unilever shifted budgets from smaller, local, regional or niche brands to brands like Dove and Persil. It also leveraged the ice-cream Heartbrand to connect local heritage brands (Walls in the UK, Algida in Italy, Langnese in Germany, for example) and act as a platform for international powerhouses (Magnum, Cornetto, Solero, for example) across more than 40 countries.

Telecoms quickly followed suit and we experienced a shift from a world where even an audience-specific mobile tariff would have its own brand to largely monolithic portfolios across the entire sector. Today, you would struggle to point out a non-endorsed sub-brand for one of the major telecom brands.

FMCG companies may not be monolithic, but all the major players increased the prominence of their corporate brand endorsement over the last decade. Nowadays, most of the revenue of Unilever and P&G is estimated to come from a combined group of about 30 brands.

It’s ironic, then, that many of the consultancies behind those famous portfolio efficiency projects are holding increasingly proliferated brand portfolios that are straining not just marketing budgets and internal resources, but the amount of attention they can command in the market. Continue reading →