How to Employ AI Without Sacrificing Your Winery or Distillery’s Humanity
How do you leverage AI for your wine or spirits brand(s) in a way that preserves human connection and meaningful relationships with your customers?
The fear of alienating one’s customers is warranted, considering AI-suggested ad copy tends to feel like a supermarket birthday cake: the tepid intersection of everyone’s tastes, perfectly inoffensive and underwhelming, pleasant but forgettable. In Wine & Spirits especially, it’s tempting to treat AI’s role in our marketing output like a zero sum game: a choice between efficiency or meaning, novelty or tradition, quantity or quality, transaction or connection.
Fortunately—with the right approach—it’s actually not all that difficult to retain one’s soul despite dramatically improving one’s productivity in any role. While this does sound like something Chat GPT would write (looking at you, em dashes)—well, there’s nothing I can say to convince you I’m human right now, is there? On second thought, maybe it’s best to just read on.
It’s Worth It.
Used judiciously, AI is the great equalizer. Where small businesses truly had little hope of accomplishing as much as larger teams before, a resourceful startup can now run circles around inefficient, bureaucratic, do-everything-by-committee corporations.
It’s tempting as an up-and-coming wine or spirits brand to feel hopelessly outgunned by the old guard in terms of the resources they’re able to muster (like the distributor’s attention, for starters). In our daydreams of success, we tend to mythologize and even emulate those at the top. Ask an actual employee at one of the largest suppliers how they deploy their giant budgets so carefully, and they may have trouble stifling their laughter.
Robots Hate This Simple Trick
In the unlikely event that you’re still here reading this, we’ll cut straight to the chase so you can skip the rest of the article. To prevent your message (that is, your humanity) from getting diluted by AI, just put a human in charge.
Everything that gets published, pushed out, or otherwise utilized for your business needs to be not only approved by, but also endorsed by an actual employee attuned to your company’s voice, values, and mission.
If you don’t want your winery or distillery to join the throng of brands turning our social media feeds into drool-worthy content soup, you must have the final say over anything that gets published or goes out on your labels, in your webstore, and at the point of sale, and in your customers’ inboxes. As Executive Creative Director Saks Afridi observes in his luminary LinkedIn article, Curation is the New Creation, “Your edge is your instinct. Your taste. Your ability to spot the one version that actually sings and say, this is the one.”
Know Thyself
Scroll LinkedIn for a few minutes and there’s an underlying fear of falling behind. Most people have a vague sense that they should be doing something with AI to keep up, but deep down—if they’re not vehemently against it—they don’t really have a concrete idea of what it could do for them (other than impress hiring managers or their boss). The result is a bunch of unchecked experimentation and marketing noise that says, “Look! We’re innovative too!”
The good news is that it’s easier to stand out when your competitors take the path of least resistance, greedily publishing everything Chat GPT writes as though it’s divine revelation. The value of brand strategists grows ever higher in this existential crucible; it takes conscious effort not to lose one’s identity when employing something that’s by definition an imitation: the average of all human thought—a language learning model.
The Roleplaying Framework
To keep your brand identity (and oversight) intact, one approach is to treat AI like you would any other collaborator; take what it brings to the table and mold that back into your voice and vision. Don’t just treat AI like a linguistic vending machine; help it help you by giving it a role to play.
Practically, this means wearing a few different hats. You’ll need to act as a casting director or manager (even if you’re low on the totem pole at your company), telling AI all about your company and asking it to roleplay whatever type of person would help you the most in this instance. Brief your new companion by feeding it your previous writing, your company’s marketing assets—anything that’s going to give it a well-rounded understanding of your history and voice.
Next, work together towards your goal by treating AI like a colleague in your marketing meeting or a top-performing salesperson helping you write cold emails that convert—whatever you need in this instance. We’re so used to search engines and a 1:1 input/output relationship, but what really needs to happen here is a full-blown conversation.
Having a paid account often allows you to save these custom AI personas so you can come back and collaborate anytime with any of these “characters” you invest in creating. Each persona does improve over the time you spend together, with the information and direction you give it. While it sounds a bit creepy, it actually gets to know you – what you’re usually looking for, what you mean when you say x or y, and how to sound like you (assuming that’s what you want).
Lastly, you’ll need to function more like an editor. This is where people get intimidated. “I can’t write better than Chat GPT. I’m not an English major! I haven’t read everything ever written; who am I to correct the closest man-made thing we have to an omniscient being?”
Show (Yourself) Some Respect
It’s true; AI has read everything under the sun— or, at least everything that made it onto the internet. Still, there’s only one you.
Don’t let AI overrun you. If all that AI has to work with is all of the scribblings of other mortals throughout history, then you, dear human, are on equal footing—as you always have been.
The very same thing that gives AI its advantage—sidestepping the limitations of biology—actually gives you metaphysical insights inaccessible to machine learning.
Fear of AI is a misdirect; what we really fear is ourselves. We fear our own mortality, that the overt invitation for AI to take over our work—in many cases, the very thing we derive meaning from—speeds our teleological decomposition. While the introduction of AI-driven innovations to our workplaces is going to create a lot of “now, what?” scenarios – there’s always more work to be done managing that work. Consider yourself promoted.
