Voice assistants in communication of brands.

The premier of Polish language version of Google Assistant is one of the most anticipated events of 2019. Google enabled all companies to add ‘Actions’ to the Assistant. ‘Actions’ are applications that enrich assistant’s offering. Marketers were thrilled to see this new channel of communication with consumers. Below, you will find 6 challenges they will face when using voice assistant in communication of their brands.

1st challenge: how to present your brand solely by using sound?

Brands that have not employed any coherent and specified language, tonality, sound effects or music in their “brand books” so far will have to add these elements without any delay. The sound identity will have to be present in other media mix channels, not only in the assistant itself. The good sound-based identity is composed of specific spectrum of sounds and voices. Therefore, the importance of recognizable readers and voice actors will increase.

2nd challenge: how to shape the algorithm of the voice assistant to make it remember our brand?

Clients rarely use brand names in everyday life. They do say “I need to buy a washing agent” but they do not refer to any specific brand. This is the place where voice assistants may jam in with the interpretation and recommend products. They can ask the question like “which brand would you prefer, product A or product B?”. The marketers will have to ensure that the brand is among these few, accepted options.

The assistant is constantly learning about its users, so it will remember the selected product after getting answer to the initially asked question. Eventually, it will be harder and harder for new marketers to get through solidified consumer purchase-related preferences.

3rd challenge: how to become the voice assistant’s first choice?

Unlike the website browser, which offers the user a few pages of possible solutions, the voice assistant provides one answer, as much adjusted to preferences as possible. Much like the “second Google page” is the synonym of oblivion, each place other than the first one will be treated as such in case of voice assistant.

So, placing the brand in the voice assistant’s search engine to ensure that it occupies the first place is the key problem marketers should focus on.

It will require them to employ a very efficient communication strategies and devise high quality content regarding well defined topics that are close to the brand and fulfill all assumptions of its audio identity.

4th challenge: questions for assistant are the part of never-ending conversation.

Questions addressed to the assistant are not isolated. They are part of one, never ending conversation, during which the assistant learns about the user. It is important to remember that the context of each question is based also on previous interactions of the user in other communication channels. Only exhaustive and well-matched response will be regarded as valuable to the user.

To build accurate answer, the brand relies on integration and aggregation of data from many sources and channels of user’s integration. Plus, efficient processing of such data in a real-time.

Data to integrate will include product-related information, CRM, analytical data, history of integration in other channels, big data etc. It is all to enable artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to get a grip on a context and to have a good base to build answers that users find satisfactory.

It is worth remembering that conversations are happening „now and here”, so the infrastructure will have to manage integration and synthesis of enormous amount of data in a real time.

5th challenge: different characteristics of interface.

Different features of the interface mean that skills and applications of voice assistants will require different team of people, knowledge and work methodologies than have been used so far in marketing departments.

Because the visual aspect of voice assistants is less important, the role of art director/graphic designer is also less important. We can observe decreasing meaning of CI, all types of acceptances or testing of user’s graphic interface.

On the other hand, personality designing skills, copywriting and linguistics competencies gain more value.

Analytical functions and quality assurance will still be very important, but the specificity of work related thereto will be a bit different than before.

Transferring already produced skills of voice assistant to new markets will be hard because of strong reliance on language.

6th challenge: unpredictable directions of voice assistant’s development.

Voice assistants are the new solution for everyone today. Consumers will slowly learn how to use it and we need to watch their behaviors and prepare ourselves for many surprises and unpredictable ways of development.

We have to adopt advanced approach to the dynamic growth of this area of digital marketing, though it is still in its “baby-like” stage.

So, preparation of first skills and applications of voice assistant will constitute the basic step to create strategy of the brand’s presence in this field, its constant monitoring and optimization.