ChatGPT for CPG Brands: Unlocking Its Full Potential.

“Hey ChatGPT, Create an article about how CPG brands can leverage ChatGPT throughout their business.”

Yes, ChatGPT was part of this article’s ideation process, but it’s not where our thought leadership, including experience and overall expertise, comes from. 

In this article, we help you understand how CPG brands should use ChatGPT. You will learn how to include ChatGPT throughout your business process for ideation, revision, and even split testing to ensure that no stone goes unturned. 

You won’t find a recommendation to let ChatGPT have the final say or to let go of “qualified” employees because this robot does a better job. 

This article explores the importance of ChatGPT for Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) brands and how they can leverage this tool to enhance marketing, branding, and strategy efforts. From personalizing customer interactions and generating creative content to streamlining customer service operations, ChatGPT has the potential to revolutionize the way CPG brands do business.

We will also discuss best practices for implementing ChatGPT in CPG brands, including data privacy and security considerations, and how to measure the success of the implementation. We will also highlight the challenges and limitations of using ChatGPT and offer recommendations for overcoming them.

What is ChatGPT For CPG Brands?

For those living under a rock, ChatGPT is a powerful language model developed by OpenAI that has a basic understanding of almost everything under the sun. 

Why Does Chat GPT Matter?

The world of marketing and branding is constantly evolving, and staying ahead of the curve is crucial for companies to remain competitive. With advanced technologies like artificial intelligence and natural language processing, companies have access to new tools that can help them reach their customers in new and innovative ways. 

Many of these tools are complicated and glitchy, creating friction within an organization. ChatGPT does not. It is easy (and fun) to use both professionally and personally. The best part? It’s free!  

Perhaps, the strongest benefit is that ChatGPT will reduce the glucose your brain loses to mundane activities, freeing you up to do your best work. 

ChatGPT in Marketing

Besides engineers, marketers are almost always the first to adapt to new technology, which is undoubtedly the case for ChatGPT. Marketing directors and their teams are already leveraging its advanced language processing capabilities for advertising, including copywriting and content marketing. 

By removing the mundane, brain-draining processes, CPG marketers create personalized and engaging customer experiences by freeing up their thinking power for more creative processes.

Generating Creative Content

Do you want a rap song that sounds like Will Smith when he was on Fresh Prince of Bel-Air? No problem. Unlike previous AI tools, ChatGPT brings flavor to the natural language processing party. Adding prompts to speak like a specific person, knowing where to include examples, and creating quotables are critical to grabbing and keeping the consumer’s attention.

CPG brands can use ChatGPT to create 

• Blog posts
• Social media posts
• PPC ads
• SMS campaigns
• Email funnels

Suppose you are a category-disrupting FMCG brand in the hemp beverage category. You have a novel product and want your marketing to make a splash. With ChatGPT, you create the following: 

• One hundred blog posts discussing hemp’s benefits, the importance of sustainable cultivation, and how to use your beverage in various cocktails. 
• Thirty social media post descriptions to support your captivating visuals.
• 1st-party data-driven Omnichannel PPC campaigns.
• SMS offers that include click-worthy copywriting.
• Newsletters to update consumers on your company, industry, and product possibilities. 

A CPG marketing campaign of this size would have been overwhelming for many start-ups. Now, even during a company’s infancy, by effectively using ChatGPT, a single (qualified) marketing director can handle these tasks.

Enhancing Customer Engagement through Chatbots

It doesn’t take a fortune teller to predict how ChatGPT will soon be a robust chatbot integration. But brands can use ChatGPT now alongside tier-one customer service to improve customer engagement. What a customer service agent might take 5 minutes to look up and verify will be completed 20% of the time. 

Eventually, Chatbots powered by ChatGPT will handle basic customer inquiries and requests 24/7, instantly responding to customer questions and concerns. However, our desire to interact with actual human beings will always remain. 

It may even be a marketing angel as there will be room for brands to market themselves as “by humans, for humans,” where they stand out because customer interaction is robot-free.  

ChatGPT in Branding

Knowing where to start is one of the most challenging parts of a CPG branding campaign. For this reason, brands traditionally begin with a team-wide knowledge transfer of who they are, what they stand for, and what they hope to accomplish. Documenting everything on a whiteboard or mind mapping tool.

Unfortunately, these brand positioning workshops often look like hyperbole in the real world when the branding campaign poorly reflects these initial top-level identities. Sometimes truth is hard to hear, and unfortunately, stating that ChatGPT does a better job of listening is a fact that people won’t like.

CPG Brands should use ChatGPT to keep the principal components of their brand identity moving in a singular direction. 

Personalizing Brand Experiences

Once we leave ChatGPT beta, we expect brands to integrate this technology into their website to make product recommendations and other means of customer purchase customization.

The hemp beverage company, whose chatbot is alive and active, can help shoppers understand the % of Omega 3’s their beverage provides within their dietary constraints and health goals. Unlike the current pitch fest, where brands use so-called “custom recommendations” to promote their next most profitable products, ChatGPT will provide authentic product recommendations.

Natural language processing will calculate the products that best fit the consumer. It needs a contextual understanding of the customer’s hopes, wants, and desires to purchase a product. 

ChatGPT in Strategy

They say that copying is the greatest form of flattery, and ChatGPT flatters the internet by stealing insights you can use throughout your business strategy.   

ChatGPT can and will improve a CPG company’s brand strategy. The improvement occurs when the strategist (or team) leaves a seat at the table for ChatGPT. As smart as we think we strategists are, AI will undoubtedly find something the team did not consider. 

And if it doesn’t, you can always ask, “what didn’t we think of regarding this strategy?” Our brains are not optimized for intelligence while in a deprived state, but natural language processing doesn’t have such limitations. We can count on ChatGPT to keep working when we are experiencing fatigue, brain fog, or a strategy block. 

New Product Development

Thinking of new product ideas comes easily to some, whereas it can be a painstaking task for others. But the idea generator and those better suited for following orders will need help completing the concept and making it seem real-world-ready. 

ChatGPT goes as in-depth as it needs to based on the input provided. Even if it gets some things wrong, it sets the framework allowing you to make corrections rather than building it from start to finish. This can be extremely helpful when considering a line or brand extension.

Here’s a fast (30-second) example where we pretend to be a cereal manufacturer. I asked ChatGPT to create a board game for my cereal box. The response didn’t make me want to play it, but it got my brain thinking about how to customize this for my particular cereal’s branding, including both the design and the game strategy.

Here is a simple board game idea you can create using a cereal box and its pieces:

Title: “Cereal Adventure”

Objective: To be the first player to collect all five cereal pieces and reach the finish line.

Materials:

• A cereal box
• Five cereal pieces of different colors or shapes
• Dice
• Pen or marker to write on the box

Gameplay:

1. Open the cereal box and use the back as the game board. The graphic design includes a start line and a finish line. Like a traditional board game, the board is divided into a series of squares in a rectangle pattern.
2. Each player chooses a color or shape of a cereal piece to represent their playing piece.
3. Players take turns rolling the dice and moving their cereal piece to the number of spaces shown by the dice roll.
4. As players land on squares, they can encounter various challenges or obstacles, such as:

• “Lose a turn” – the player must skip their next turn.
• “Move back three spaces” – the player must move their piece back three spaces.
• “Collect a piece of cereal” – the player can collect one of the five cereal pieces, which they can use later in the game to “skip” over an obstacle.
• The winner is the first player to collect all five cereal pieces and reach the finish line.

You can adjust the game as you see fit, adding more obstacles or challenges to make it more interesting. Have fun playing!

Improving Customer Segmentation

ChatGPT’s ability to analyze large amounts of customer data is incredible. CPG brands can leverage their existing customer segmentation and deliver messages directly to each audience. 

Whether it’s one-off marketing or as a part of a marketing funnel, communication will be more direct and will continuously improve. ChatGPT can analyze: 

• Customer demographics
• Purchasing behaviors
• Geographic influences
• Shopping seasonality

All of these would traditionally be handled by an assistant or data analyst.  

Predictive Analytics for Better Marketing Decisions

Not sure what’s the next marketing move? ChatGPT to the rescue. OK, it’s not that good yet, but you can use ChatGPT to identify customer behavior patterns and predict future consumer trends. A little input lets ChatGPT provide data-driven recommendations for where to go next in your marketing campaign. 

ChatGPT in Streamlining Operations

One of the more exciting aspects of ChatGPT is the amount of weight it carries for essential business operations. We’ve talked about its ability to help with customer service, but one of the best ways to use ChatGPT is through your internal organization. 

Start-ups often miss the Important/not urgent category in Dr. Covey’s four quadrants framework. Agenda items such as employee handbooks, vendor agreements, and internal newsletters are just a few things that once seemed overwhelming to small and mid-cap companies. Still, they can now create these items in a significantly shorter time. 

Not only is ChatGPT helpful for top-level executives, but it can also automate routine tasks and reduce the workload of brand managers, sales reps, merchandisers, and more. Having ChatGPT in their back pocket allows them to focus on higher-level tasks and improve communication and operational efficiency.

Hiring A Prompt Engineer

The outputs of ChatGPT are only as good as the inputs. While there is much discussion about the jobs this tool will cost society, we rarely hear about job opportunities. 

CPG brands such as Dell are already building out a ChatGPT-specific position called a “prompt engineer,” whose expertise is in AI chat communication. Smaller brands may need more profitability for such a position but can leverage this expertise as a freelancer or fractional employee. 

Measuring the Success of ChatGPT Implementation

While it’s a fun tool to play with, ChatGPT can become a rabbit hole. Users waste a lot of time on tasks more efficiently done by the human brain or not directly related to the brand’s business operations. 

To effectively measure the success of ChatGPT implementation in streamlining operations, CPG brands need to set clear goals and metrics. For example, CPG brands should keep track of and report on ChatGPT’s ability to 

• Reduce customer service wait times.
• Improve customer satisfaction scores.
• Increase customer loyalty. 
• Improve email conversation rates.
• Streamline internal communication. 

Setting these goals and tracking performance data helps CPG brands determine the effectiveness of their ChatGPT implementation and make any necessary adjustments to improve results.

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