Input Bias and How to Compete When the Best Marketer Is AI, What We Know From Psychology

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In his book The Coming Wave, Mustafa Suleyman predicts that AI will be able to successfully build a business in a few years. You would just need to write a prompt like, “Go make $1 million on Amazon in a few months with just a $100,000 investment.”

How?

Well, Suleyman says, AI could research trends online, find what sells on Amazon, generate images of products, and send them to manufacturers on Alibaba.

AI could then “email back and forth to refine the requirements … and continually update marketing materials and product designs based on buyer feedback,” Suleyman writes.

In other words, it’ll make my job in marketing (and most roles in business) irrelevant. This leaves those of us who work at companies big and small in crisis. What will we do? Why would businesses need marketers if an AI can make $1 million on Amazon without human assistance?

Soon, I’d become like the London gaslighters of the 1800s or the doormen of the 1900s — unnecessary and redundant. Except, I think there is a get-out-of-jail-free card. I think there is a way for me to remain relevant in a world where the best marketer is an AI.

Looking to Stay Relevant? Leverage Input Bias

So, what’s the secret to staying relevant? To explain, I need to introduce a well-documented psychological phenomenon: input bias.

Input bias suggests that customers prefer products and services that require a lot of effort, money, or time to create. Nancy Harhut describes this bias neatly in her book Using Behavioural Science in Marketing.

She writes, “The amount of input becomes a proxy for the resulting quality. While in some cases, there is a direct relationship between how much time and energy is put into a project, in other cases there is not. Yet, people are not always good at discerning the difference. As a result, they can automatically assume more effort equals better output.”

For example, suppose I’m told that my favorite restaurant is staffed by an Italian family with 80 years of experience. In that case, I’ll rate their pizza more favorably than the exact same pizza created by a machine in a German factory.

This is input bias at play. We all prefer products or services that require effort and experience. That’s why we love to hear or read about the hard work that powers our favorite brands.

Studies on factory tours prove this. The paper “Pulling back the curtain” found that purchase intent increased by 60% after a customer saw behind the scenes.

We value our own efforts as well. Two University of Oxford scientists discovered that opening wine with a cork top boosts its flavor by 4%. When participants were told the wine was cork top but didn’t open it themselves, this perceived quality and flavor boost disappeared.

<img src="https://www.hubspot.com/hs-fs/hubfs/input%20bias%20represented%20by%20wine.png?width=1532&height=929&name=input%20bias%20represented%20by%20wine.png" width="1532" …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog