From Artificial Intelligence…to Intelligent Brands

Stepping aside from the mainly adtech-led and very hot debate about potential marketing efficiencies, how might AI enable fresh and compelling innovation - and therefore new growth - for the firm? Where are the opportunities to truly transform and elevate value in how customers experience a brand?

Value in context

To frame this enquiry, let’s briefly revisit how we think about customer value itself. As every student of economics knows, the nature of value has been in dispute for centuries. We might broadly describe this as a long journey from the ‘intrinsic’ to the ‘extrinsic’.

Up to and through the Industrial Age, value was explicitly based on manufacturers’ ability to transform raw materials into usable products. It was literally built in. Slowly and painfully, the discourse shifted, via ‘value-in-exchange’ (you get what you pay for - or not) to ‘value-in use’ (value is, more or less entirely, achieved in consumption).

Alongside these evolutions, we’ve come to understand three more fundamental attributes of modern customer value. It’s subjective (personal to me), it’s referential (comparative to other...