Consumers Beat Marketers At Using AI

If you’re using AI to count things, you’re missing the best part.

Yes, you can use it assemble massive data sets and count the frequency of words and images. There’s a lot of talk about ‘#semiotics at scale’ that focuses on collecting and manipulating big numbers. But that’s not where the best insights are.

Your customers are themselves using AI – much more imaginatively than most consumer insight professionals. They are using AI to imagine and share the world they really want to live in. And that’s not always a world full of dream homes and architecturally impossible mountain hotels. Sometimes they just want nicer bus shelters.

So before you use AI as a way of getting the upper hand over consumers, consider that they are already outdoing you with their creative work.

Today’s post was inspired by AI-generated pics of bus shelters created by ordinary people, not marketing professionals. I made some of my own for illustration purposes, so as not to reproduce their original work. Clockwise from top left: Ancient Greece, LGBTQ, Dolce & Gabbana, Hello Kitty.

Semiotics challenges you to be as imaginative and attentive to everyday details as your own customers. So don’t get distracted or fall behind. Consumers are already doing a better job with AI than the bean-counters are capable of imagining.

#semiotics #consumerinsight #mrx #research #imagination #marketing #marketresearch #semioticsatscale #dolcegabbana #hellokitty #lgbtq #greece #greecetravel

Kogan Page, Market Research Society (MRS), Lawes Consulting Ltd, Dr Rachel Lawes, Joe Lawes