How Should Premium and Luxury Brands Use AI?

Luxury and premium brands walk a special tightrope, needing to maintain their allure and mystique, but also function as a business seamlessly, often with clients that demand service at the highest level.  As AI impacts all companies, these brands need to integrate AI solutions- but only where it’s suitable. 

No clunky AI customer service chatbots making people talk in circles and not getting proper answers.  

No blog posts generated by AI that flag your brand as adding to the AI sloposphere.

No AI ads churned out that sound generic, look unnatural, and don’t reflect the brand voice.  

Like a swan, they need to appear to float gracefully through their customer interactions, while paddling hard underwater, where their hard working tech is not visible to their clients.

Here are 5 AI must-do ways that luxury brands need to use AI that will strengthen their brand and support their sales and marketing efforts:

1. Luxury and premium brands need to be found by AI chatbots too.  

Luxury customers, like everyone else, are turning to AI to research their next travels, fashion advice, cars, and other purchases. And from there, people are clicking on the links suggested by AI, bypassing traditional search engines. For this reason, luxury and premium brands need to prepare their digital presence to be found and included in AI recommendations, just as previously, having good SEO was important.

2. The human touch is still a requirement.

Luxury brands can run digital solutions in the background of their operations and sales and marketing, but they must not have any situations where customers feel like they are being served ‘by a robot’ or any kind of AI/automated answerbot. ‘Human-in-the-loop’ solutions can help here, where the customer service person is using technology to help them research customer questions, but this should be kept invisible and seamless.

3. Human-feeling creative work.

AI-generated visuals and text are already annoying people. Needless to say, luxury and premium brands should not be using this in any customer-facing media- not social, not ads, not in-store, nowhere. And definitely don’t re-create your products as AI images for ads unless you are a very tech-associated luxury brand, like Bose or Tesla perhaps, and seeming futuristic works for your brand.  As the enthusiasm for AI dampens down, traditional luxury customers will appreciate brands that use real human models, and human-written/edited copy.  Any use of AI for creative work could seem gimmicky and inauthentic.

4. Human reviewed writeups.

AI is still hallucinating at a rate that makes it necessary for everyone to read through what it generates, and fact-check everything.  Recently, I heard from a business owner who was annoyed that his marketing team had posted up product descriptions that were wrong, and the founding year of the company that was off by decades.  Don’t be those people.  Check everything with in-company management or your knowledge catalog or brand guide for accuracy.

5. Use AI in Business Processes.

There is no doubt that AI is making business processes faster.  Luxury and premium businesses can use it behind the scenes to also benefit from these efficiencies, so long as they do not impact the brand’s story of human care and craftsmanship. Buyers of luxury handbags, for example, probably don’t want their bags to be made by robots any time soon, however, they probably don’t care whether the company has automated HR processes for its employees, or supply chain management.  These are good ways that luxury companies can still make use of these new technologies.

If you are looking to integrate AI into your luxury or premium company, you’ll need to think about not just the customer experience and whether it will remain ‘high human touch’, but also what the perception will be should customers come to know how you’ve implemented these new solutions.  Brands built on history need to tread carefully when adapting to modern times. Start with the swan approach to protect your brand image.

If you would like help in creating a digital strategy that will benefit your company, contact us to discuss the possibilities.  You can book a complimentary 20-minute strategy call with us here.