AI is the new buzzword these days. Every industry, organization, and individual is trying to understand, implement, and master it at the same time. The industry and CPG brand innovation is not far behind either. Even though this industry thrives on consumer behavior and habits, it still has to generalize insights based on data limitations and its capability. With AI, not anymore!
Analysing Data with AI
A couple of years ago, marketers took pride in the number of hours they spent in the market or with consumers just to get a “sense” of what’s happening in the lives of their beloved consumers. Scrambling through intense Excel sheets to track and make sense of data.
AI has made things dramatically easy with just a click of a button. It’s all in the database! Imagine, storing insights from every single market visit, consumer visit, market research, qual/quant study etc in a virtual library and then doing an analysis of all the data just by the click of a button. Analysing millions of data points to give insights and trends to turn into product and campaign ideas.
Brands Using AI Smartly
Big brands and companies are already embracing the change. Campbell is one such company that is investing and piloting launches using its “Insight Engine”, a database analysing over 300 billion data points at a time. It recently launched a new soup variant in the US called “Chunky Ghost Pepper Noodle” soup using AI. It became hugely popular especially amongst Gen Z clearly showing that it tapped into the right insights.
Apart from analysing insights (which is extremely smart btw!), AI is also used in personalized campaigns. As a marketer, we always rely on key visual and distinctive brand assets to create a visual for a campaign. Imagine creating millions of such, each personalized for a consumer, based on his/her personality and point with brand identifiers! Coke used the same technology and released its holiday greeting cards last Christmas. It is said to have created “Real Magic” for its users. Now this really is taking UGC to the next level!
Benefits & Risks
Innovation, whether brand or product, needs to be grounded in reality to really make a difference. The CPG industry is hungry for that. Since the products are designed to be “fast-moving”, there is that constant urge to understand “what’s next?” AI is really solving that by significantly reducing the time to latch onto a trend and launching it in the market. However, it also poses a significant risk to the industry. Aside from the risk of machines replacing humans, it potentially also poses a risk to intellectual property. Who really owns the idea? Who owns the copyright? Also, this big data that a company relies on, is a big risk to consumers’ privacy, especially when it evolves into generative AI. It also poses a big risk to a company’s privacy in the form of data breach vulnerabilities.
Future of AI in CPG
This is a fact that AI is here to stay and in fact, companies who don’t invest in it are at a competitive loss. It is also true that all of our online interactions are monitored and are added to one database or the other in the world. These databases are the new “insight” generation tool for marketers. Let’s see which company sets its hands on which database and takes over the world (of CPG only hopefully!), it’s only a matter of time. Hence embrace it fully!