Speak to any experienced marketer and they will be able to reel off the famous “seven Ps” that define the profession: Product, Price, Place, Promotion, People, Process and Physical evidence.
This is a good place from which to begin a journey towards understanding the present and future impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on marketing – in hospitality, luxury, and beyond.
For those who are not immersed in the world of marketing, it can often be seen purely through the prism of promotion – advertising, content creation, sales promotions, and so on. These are all very visible aspects; but in reality, marketing is a discipline which is extraordinarily diverse. And many of the different facets of marketing can be supported and enhanced by AI technology.
Types of AI involved in marketing
You cannot think about marketing without going all the way back to the first of the seven Ps: the product. Here the big evolution came about in the 1990s, when companies began to study their consumers in greater detail, thinking more seriously about their wants and needs, and using these are the starting point when creating new products and services.
Ever since, we’ve seen an increasing appetite for quality consumer insights; and this is the first important area where I want to talk about the impact of AI in marketing. Already, the technology has proven itself an efficient and effective tool for data mining in order to generate consumer insights.
That’s incredibly useful in an era where companies are data rich to the point of being overwhelmed. Without the speed of analysis provided by AI tools, marketers run the risk that by the time they’ve developed consumer insights at a granular level, the market has already moved on!
Of course, any time we speak about consumer data we must also acknowledge the data protection aspect. Companies have a duty to continually reassure consumers that data will not be gathered against their wishes; also that any data they consent to share is handled correctly.
From a global perspective this remains something of a ‘wild west’, with varying levels of protection for the consumer. In Europe, the GDPR regulatory environment affords a high degree of data protection; Australia, too, is pretty good in this area. Whereas in the United States your data tends to be seen much more as a commodity to be traded.
As the use of AI for data mining becomes more widespread, demands for consumer protection and data security are sure to become louder.
From a content marketing perspective, we know that brands are already using generative AI platforms such as ChatGPT to produce marketing content. While these systems still have their limitations, I do think that for smaller businesses – a standalone boutique hotel, for example – which may not have the capabilities in-house, using generative AI can be cost effective (even when outsourcing to a marketing specialist) as well as offering benefits in terms of speed to market.
Communication relating to your brand is, of course, a two-way process. And on that topic, we’re already seeing AI-powered tools being used to enhance searches for a brand’s media coverage. It’s not so long ago that one or more members of a marketing team would have to read all the day’s newspapers and take physical cuttings of any instances where their company was mentioned. Now this can be done almost instantaneously – and across a vast array of media – by AI-powered search bots.
