Where are You? AI. Friend or Foe of the CMO?
Part 6b - AI will disrupt product distribution, but maybe not the way you think.
In the last article, I talked about the inherent bias in large language models and how they should be used carefully for localisation of marketing.
Now I am going to look at the disruption that is about to occur due to a very specific application of AI - autonomous vehicles.
Some of you might have heard me talk about how self-driving vehicles will impact the real estate market (perhaps even more than the ‘remote work’ trend), but what does a car that doesn’t need a driver mean for retail, for malls, for the high street?
The answers are already there, ready to be analysed by AI models. Many cities have ‘open data’ projects that have provided information about traffic movements, utilities connections and disconnections, inbound visitors. The data shows the impact of the pandemic, the speed at which customers are adopting ecommerce and how quickly they returned to their routines.
So what does all this mean for your channel marketing strategy in terms of product placement and distribution? What does a potential metaverse mean for how customers behave and shop?
Where Are Your Customers?
My first real job was all about the implementation of place as a marketing strategy. As a summer intern, I was given a ‘station wagon’, a fuel card, a trunk full of cardboard Point of Sale (POS) Displays and 24 cases of Vicks Vapodrops - Butterscotch flavour.
My job, was to visit a ‘territory’ of pharmacies and convince them that those cough drops needed to be on their shelves.
Because even though Vapodrops are mostly sugar, stacking them on the counter of a pharmacy helps achieve the brand manager’s objectives through association.
My second real job took this concept further…
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