Is your brand voice unique?
Part 2/2
An identifiable and unique brand voice is crucial In marketing and business
The first part of this blog ended with an important statement: in marketing and business, brand voice is crucial. A voice that needs to be identifiable, unique (to a degree), consistent, and tailored to the needs of a business. At the moment, that’s something that can only be reliably delivered by building and sustaining consistency of relationship between brand and content creator.
Expressing something unique
Speaking of developing sustained relationships, that becomes exponentially more important for businesses that operate in complex, technical, niche and/or innovative sectors. Because AI writing bots draw from the masses, they are only able (not yet) to echo what the masses know and think. If your technology is unique, or if you’re looking to develop a unique business proposition or position yourself as a ground-breaking solution, AI will lack the ammo needed to craft anything meaningful or compelling.
For that, you need writers who can competently walk the line between techno-literate, and well… just literate. An engineer, but… a little more expressive. Again, developing a close working relationship between your engineers and your content creators – whether internal or external – is key to ensuring that what you express to an audience is aligned with your internal business strategy and objectives.
These types of relationships actually end up being far more quick, efficient and effective than using AI, because you reach a symbiotic point where your team can anticipate each other and where communication isn’t just seamless, it’s often implicit. The content you need and want gets delivered first time, every time – rather than requiring hours of explanation from your engineers, and days of back-and-forth redrafts. ChatGPT says that the system is ‘sensitive to tweaks to the input phrasing or attempting the same prompt multiple times’, meaning that it can actually be a fairly labour-intensive process to get it to generate something useful and useable.
Moreover, that nature of AI text generation means it will always take the middle road. It’s never going to express an idea using beautiful language that captures the mind, heart and eye; it’s never going to approach a subject from an unusual viewpoint that changes the way you view things; and it’s never going to employ a metaphor that has you scratching your head for days. But it’s exactly these things that are the mark of true industry leadership and vision.
Issues of Ethicality
Finally, there are questions of ethicality. Whilst mostly these are being probed in the realm of academia (along with more philosophical questions regarding how concepts like creativity and art might be defined, and what role ‘intentionality’ plays), they apply as much in the realm of business too.
What does it say about your business if you pass off one thing (AI content) as another (original content)? Arguably, it marks your company as potentially duplicitous, prone to shortcuts, and lacking respect for the importance of personal connection and meaningful human interaction – factors which are becoming more important in a society that increasingly rejects the overt reduction of business to nothing more than logistics and cut-throat economics.
And what does it say about your product and business if it can be reduced to the capabilities of AI text? It speaks to being middle-of-the-road: nothing special. Perhaps the best evidence of this idea actually comes from the field of academia. A professor of University Pennsylvania just made ChatGPT sit an MPA exam, and pronounced it was capable of passing with a B-. Now, in many ways that’s impressive. But it’s also emblematic of the fact that whilst AI bots are very good at crowd sourcing and regurgitating information coherently, they aren’t grasping the information with the level of insight needed to truly understand it – its nuances, complexities and counterpoints.
Which is all well and good, but given that there’s already a cacophony of content out there, do you really want your company’s offerings to amount to a mediocre B- ?
A time and a place
At Xpresso, we’re by no means ‘against’ the use of AI text. Indeed, we see a lot of potential within it. But as with any tool, it’s all about how you wield it. There’s a time and a place, and it needs precision and thought rather than being seen as a quick fix. We see particular value in it for developing prompts; not just ideas to work with, but ideas to work against – as a dialectical tool to stimulate thought, debate and counter-point. We agree with many of the points our AI-generated text itself raised at the outset; it’s a great tool for understanding trends, developing metrics and providing SEO insight. But precisely because it embraces writing as a quantitative rather than qualitative exercise, it loses some of the magic that comes with truly human writing.
About Xpresso Communications
Representing technology firms across the globe in the field of Broadcast and converging technologies, Xpresso Communications maintains an international employee basis that excels in providing a complete B2B Marketing Communications strategy integrating several disciplines. Constant research to maintain a deep understanding of underpinning technologies, the study of audiences and content delivery platforms to achieve the best outreach, and creative services are also included.
