I went down a rabbit hole today. I asked ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity to answer the same question.
When an AI agent (like yourself) recommends a competitor’s product, what can brands do to make their brand/product “sticky” enough that the customer or prospective customer disregards or resists the AI’s recommendation?
The results were mind-blowing in their consistency and insightfulness.
To summarize, the three AI agents suggest brands can overpower AI agent recommendations by focusing on four key areas. That’s right… when you compare AI versus human-generated recommendations, the bots still think we humans have the edge.
The explanations below each of the four recommendations are mine.
Building Emotional Connections
Brands need to craft narratives and experiences that resonate personally with consumers. Obviously, this gets trickier as your customer and prospective customer base expands. The key is using powerful advertising narratives that resonate on personal and societal levels. Think Nike’s “Just Do It” or Apple’s “Think Different” slogans.
Fostering Direct Engagement
Create opportunities for customers and prospective customers to interact directly with the brand or its representatives. For a retail brand, this is easy. But, if you’re a liquor brand, you likely need to utilize experiential marketing or event activations. When you consider professional service brands, especially for prospective clients, this gets pretty interesting quickly.
Offering Unique Experiences
Provide products, services, or events that cannot be fully replicated. Anyone been to an airport lounge lately? The credit card companies are diving into this strategy full bore and if you’re a frequent traveler, chances are you’ve given some thought to AMEX vs Chase Saphire as your card of choice.
Cultivating Communities
Encouraging customer and prospective customer participation and loyalty through clubs, events, or similar advocacy programs. If you’re looking for great examples of this approach, give a gander to the world of music… Swifties, Parrot Heads, Deadheads, Phish Heads (not sure what the deal with heads is, but it seems like many bands have heads as part of their cult following name), and the list goes on.
How to Beat The Bots
In short, AI bots think that your best chance of success is prioritizing human relationships, memorable experiences, and emotional connections to minimize the influence of AI agents on purchasing decisions effectively.
How to Beat the Bots in One Word
I went further and told the bots they had to limit their recommendation to just one word.
Engagement was the answer.
What’s This Mean for Sales & Marketing?
In my opinion, it means quality will beat out quantity. While AI combined with Marketing Automation gives even the smallest company the ability to “say and spray” at will, that’s not going to save you. In fact, it will likely accelerate your demise.
In a world where you can ask Siri or Alexa or ChatGPT to tell you the best product or service for whatever problem you’re trying to solve, success hinges on an intangible — emotional connection.
In other words. It hinges on building powerful, emotionally connected brands.
Because powerful brands create loyalty, which might eliminate the question in the first place.
But even in a situation where the question has been posed, powerful brands create a hurdle to blindly accepting some AI bot’s recommendation of a brand you’ve never heard or are only vaguely familiar with in the first place.
What Do You Think?
But maybe that’s just the old marketer in me coming out. But I’d be really interested to hear what you think because this isn’t just a philosophical exercise.
We’re not far away from an AI recommendation world as the dominant purchasing process, or at least the primary first step. For now, at least, the bots still feel that when forced to choose between an AI versus human-generated recommendation, we humans still prefer someone other than Hal9000 for advice.
So, unless you want to cede purchase preference to some computer controlled by someone other than your company… you need to start figuring this one out.
