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Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

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Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

#111
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real thing i think people forget is that humans actually value time and effort from other humans. AI is often used by people who want to do neither and that's really what it boils down to. Ask yourself, would you like to receive a christmas or birthday card with a personalized message or something produced you know was 100% produced by AI bot - even better when it has a hallucination in there.

Hallmark built a brand on creating generic messages in card.

You're supposed to write an additional message inside the card...

Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

#112
The correct marketing and product strategy is to not stick AI in everything. It’s to allow AI to access them. But this is a hard concept to grasp and tough to give up territory.

A good story here is notion: I don’t think they (only) stuck AI features. They made it possible for me to use it from AI. This is meaningfully different because it enables * composability *.

I record my notes in Notion using Apple Watch and summarise them or use them through Claude account which has a plugin to Notion.

Now think about it: employees in notion wont think of this as an amazing feature because it is utterly simple to implement. There’s no limelight or anything. If they had made some fancy AI integration within notion to autocomplete or whatever, the optics are better internally. But outside it is lukewarm to bad.

I wish more companies enable composability instead of bespoke AI integration within their application.

Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

#115

I could be wrong, but it feels like one issue is that AI seems to cater more as a signal to venture capital and the internals of the tech industry in a lot of these products, while consumers just want to know "what is this product going to actually do for me," and care less about whether it is implemented with the buzzword du jour.

>while consumers just want to know "what is this product going to actually do for me," and care less about whether it is implemented with the buzzword du jour. I would say that undersells the (not neutral, actively negative) impact of AI to many. What many people hear is "made with the tech that plagiarizes, leaves artists (and soon you as well) without a job, and makes things generic and bland!" You might as well ma…

I wouldn’t over index in the artist side of things. A lot of people don’t really think about that at all, just look at how readily Spotify was adopted despite taking a ton of money away from artists.

But “AI is coming for your job” is very resonant.

Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

#116

I could be wrong, but it feels like one issue is that AI seems to cater more as a signal to venture capital and the internals of the tech industry in a lot of these products, while consumers just want to know "what is this product going to actually do for me," and care less about whether it is implemented with the buzzword du jour.

>while consumers just want to know "what is this product going to actually do for me," and care less about whether it is implemented with the buzzword du jour. I would say that undersells the (not neutral, actively negative) impact of AI to many. What many people hear is "made with the tech that plagiarizes, leaves artists (and soon you as well) without a job, and makes things generic and bland!" You might as well ma…

Another signal that prominent mentions of "AI" in your marketing sends is "this product is going to shoe-horn AI into this somehow". Plenty of products that people use every day at home or in work - Google search, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Jira, and more - have had some kind of AI-first redesign. In each case some AI functionality has been placed prominently either somewhere that you accidentally press it or in place of something that previously worked. Even my iPhone brings up this brightly coloured keyboard expecting me to do something with AI, and I don't actually know what causes it.

So I think it's much simpler than solidarity with creators, artists or even workers more generally. It's that "AI" as a brand stinks, people are connecting it with annoying, low quality experiences and shitty low-effort art.

Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

#117
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve seen a few brands here and there boasting of the quality of the “select Asian suppliers” they moved their manufacturing to. It’s a clever way to preempt criticism that the brand is now no different from any of the competing brands that moved to China or Vietnam.

Is this in things like the clothing industry, where there exists a conversation around fast/cheap/outsourced fashion and has consumer pushback built in? If so, it makes sense they would get ahead of that. I'm not sure all industries bother to make that point/consumers really care.

I don’t know about clothing, but I’ve seen this a lot in the bicycle industry and in the outdoor equipment industry.

Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

#118

I could be wrong, but it feels like one issue is that AI seems to cater more as a signal to venture capital and the internals of the tech industry in a lot of these products, while consumers just want to know "what is this product going to actually do for me," and care less about whether it is implemented with the buzzword du jour.

I dunno, I think in the past year “AI” has gone from meaningless buzzword to having a negative connotation amongst the non-tech population. “That’s so AI” is legitimate slang and it does not mean “that’s so cool and automated!”

All people I know hear when they hear AI is - they are automating art, there are layoffs incoming, they want to build a data centre next to me that will make my electricity costs go up, they are automating the consumer help call center.

The positive views of AI are really increasingly concentrated amongst some of the tech heavy population.

Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

#119

There is a difference between a toaster brand saying their toasting now has AI built in vs Anthropic releasing Mythos. The toaster brand is just trying to fool people. Something like Mythos is actually what's driving change. In tech, Microsoft is a big reason for this turnoff. First, they forced Copilot onto Windows users. Second, they decided to market "AI PCs" by forcing AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm to put NPUs into th…

A toaster with AI could potentially be useful. I've never had a toaster that can make toast for the whole family - you can do 2 slices but then you have to wait several minutes for it to cool down before making the next otherwise the second batch will not be done. (I have used restaurant toasters that can do this, but they are not for home use)
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