By Vedant Modi
If there is one phenomenon that dominates our time, it is the rise and rise of artificial intelligence (AI). Leaders and experts, across all walks of life, are sitting up to take notice. Its relevance to the fashion industry is no exception.
From being worth around USD 270 million in market value in 2018, global AI in the fashion space is expected to amount to a staggering USD 4.4 billion by 2027.
For fashion marketers, this projection is important because in now having to operate in an ecosystem defined by AI, they can no longer view their role as being limited to just marketing.
Instead, they need to have oversight into all the scenarios where AI can have a transformative role to play in enabling them to understand customers better.
For example, with AI, both Above The Line and Below The Line marketing can get more sharply defined. Whether it is in terms of using AI to target a certain demographic during the broadcast of televised matches—think sports drinks advertisements—or gift vouchers for women customers on Women’s Day—it can transform how customers are reached because they are now intimately known.
As a result, is it now incumbent upon marketers to not only create a strategy informed by AI but also one that encompasses all potential customer touchpoints, to ensure success.
Data as single source of truth
To see what such a strategy would look like in today’s brave new world, let us begin with the first prerequisite—the need to understand a brand’s customers. When deploying AI to reach this outcome, what becomes important is the requirement for data. In the fashion industry, this involves collecting relevant data from people to arrive at a ‘single source of truth,’—namely the Customer Data Platform (CDP).
Once this is obtained, marketers can create a clear segmentation and a deeper understanding of individual consumers based on what they buy and where and when they make these purchases.
Several global fashion brands including Zara and Shein collect data on their customers’ preferences by analysing social media platforms. This coupled with insights around buying patterns and trend projections help these companies better know their customers.
The kind of segmentation these processes lead to enables marketers to deploy MarTech stacks. This is because thorough segmentation helps them better target consumer groups on their preferred social media channels after matching individuals and demographic cohorts to their platforms of choice.
With AI, these outcomes see exponential improvement. Tools and platforms based on this technology are able to zip through volumes of data and derive highly personalised insights to help brands better target customers on the right channel at the right time.
Personalising purchases by tracking clicks
The next step in the customer journey that AI can dramatically rewrite for better outcomes is the point of purchase. By leveraging the insights click tracking provides, marketers can better target individual consumers with the help of AI, which can recommend new products that an individual would most likely interact with.
Amplifying marketing reach
Yet another key aspect of the fashion value chain that AI can revolutionise is how marketing strategy is crafted. Earlier, communication companies had to spend hours in writing copy. Now templates can be fed into AI to help companies do this which can then be matched with the best-suited social media platforms.
This is not to say that AI can replace the communication function. But what it can do is add an intelligent layer to what is typically done to provide creativity and insight in much shorter timespans.
Expediting concerns; personalising targeting
Still, another part of the marketing ecosystem that can gain significantly from AI are the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Consumer Relationship Systems (CRS). AI can transform the way that marketers can handle grievances and improve customer retention.
Let us begin by looking at customer grievances. When a brand has great data, it can create an AI chatbot to reply to its consumers easily, no matter what queries come in, regardless of the time. This has immense use value in the fashion and retail space where consumers expect quick and personalised attention to their highly specific concerns.
Having a chatbot that can address grievances at high speed can drastically cut down response times.
A closely affiliated area in which AI can have powerful effects is with regard to retention. Remember how your favourite food delivery apps, including Swiggy and Zomato, can send you push notifications at dinner time with exactly the kind of food or snack you love? That is their AI retention model in use. When marketers deploy AI to do this, they help brands deepen connections and pave the way for new consumer cohorts.
Celebrating the human
However, a cautionary note about AI in marketing for the fashion industry is that marketers must not become its slave. Although AI can provide broad insights, it cannot know a consumer the way only another human can. That exceptional quality—insight—is the biggest function a marketer is tasked to fulfil, and it will remain and must remain manual, creative, and human.
Another valid concern regarding the use of AI is the issue of data safety. No matter how exciting the possibilities, no technology is worth it if it poses a risk to consumers.
Keeping it safe
To address this concern effectively, consumer tech leaders invest in putting their data into one ecosystem and then putting a safety layer on top of it. This ensures that while every department of a company has equal access to data, it is safely masked.
Yet, there is no doubt that when done responsibly and well, AI is here to make everyone’s life better. We need to be open about its possibilities while being aware of its limitations.
The author is Chief Revenue Officer at Vedant Fashions Limited – Manyavar-Mohey
Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook
