‘Artificial intelligence meets marketing’ with the virtual marketing strategist
Step Change Marketing, the consultancy behind the Wankers Don’t Work Here recruitment video, is claiming a world first with the creation of a website where marketing problems are tackled by a ‘virtual marketing strategist’.
Promoted as a tool to help businesses identify growth opportunities in nine questions and under 15 minutes, the technology has been billed as where “articial intelligence meets marketing” with “a choose your own adventure” approach to strategy.
The user is asked a series of questions, and is guided through the program by a video image of the consultancy’s lead strategist, Ashton Bishop, and general manager Jeff Cooper.
On completion, the user receives an email with a top-line strategy for growth, and commentary on their responses. The final page asks the user if they would like Step Change to review the report, or share the program with a colleague.
“You’ll never fully replace human creativity and strategic thought – although never is probably an over-claim,” said Cooper. “The Virtual Marketing Strategist is designed to showcase the way we think and stimulate potential clients in looking at things in different ways. If they see value in this as a free intro the idea is they’ll like to engage us further at a Stump the Strategist event or retain us to help them solve a problem.”
“The funny thing is that the more value we give away the more clients seem to pay us, and not the other way around,” he added.
The idea had been incubation for around two years, and took six months and cost $67,000 to build. The technical infrastructure, information flow, user journey, user interface and report content were all created inhouse.
“We see this as the start of consultants and infoprenuers needing to embrace digital and provide value first. You can’t just show-up and sell nowadays,” Cooper added.
Articial intelligence eh?
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Cool and innovative way to engage with new clients
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Very skeptical that marketing strategies can be created automatically, but if it works … it works.
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Nice idea guys… Good to see a different way to start conversations with potential clients…!!
@Craig Seitam, give it a try – it generated a pretty informative report for my business!!
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While I hear the Stump the Strategist events are great, and these chaps seem smart, could we please, in the name of all that is wonderful, stop with these godawful “-preneur” attempted neologisms?
“Preneur” simply means “buyer.” That’s all. So a “mumpreneur” is a human trafficker, and an “infopreneur” would be someone who buys information.
Is that really what you meant?
The OED lists over 250,000 English words. Try using some of them.
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An interesting idea, that awkwardly positions Step Change as the Advertising Advantage of marketing strategy.
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The output is very thought provoking, would love to push this to clients
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I certainly will have a look, which should make me an infononpreneur or perhaps even a regardnonpreneur. I like those! 250,007 and going up!
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See me after class, Madcom.
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Got bored after they asked for my details at step 1
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Give that there are a lot of people using less than half of their brain then AI may just help us all get back on the front foot. Great to see you giving it a crack guys and shaking up the standard industry approaches. It has worked in manufacturing so why not in service collaboration.
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