Research Insight | Where GenAI Succeeds—and Fails—in Creating Experiential Marketing Narratives
Generative AI is revolutionizing marketing by offering efficient ways to create compelling content. By using generative AI tools like ChatGPT, marketers can quickly generate posts that sound engaging and professional. What are the benefits and potential risks of relying on AI for marketing communications?
ChatGPT 4, for example, can generate content that resonates well with audiences, often displaying higher levels of positivity and increased variety in language use. The content generated can lead to stronger purchase intentions—especially for unbranded social media posts rather than specific brand messaging.
However, AI tools like ChatGPT often struggle with capturing sensory details. Human writers, drawing from real-life experiences, are better at conveying nuanced physical sensations and emotions that connect deeply with consumers. Additionally, generative AI tends to produce overly positive emotions and can sometimes “hallucinate” or generate misleading information that seems plausible but is not accurate.
These tendencies present risks for marketers relying solely on AI for content creation. To ensure accuracy and avoid potential misinformation, businesses need to maintain human oversight when deploying AI-generated content. By balancing AI’s efficiency with the nuanced touch of human input, marketers can harness the best of both worlds—using AI to scale content production while keeping it relatable and trustworthy for consumers.
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What You Need to Know
- Generative AI can create engaging marketing narratives, but compared with human experts, it may struggle with capturing sensory experiences and using varied language effectively.
- In unbranded social media content, ChatGPT 4 shows more varied language use and boosts purchase intentions, offering strong potential for consumer engagement.
- Marketers should note AI’s tendency toward overly positive emotions and the risk of hallucinations, making human oversight essential for accuracy.
Abstract
As generative AI technologies advance, understanding their capability to emulate human-like experiences in marketing communication becomes crucial. This research examines whether generative AI can create experiential narratives that resonate with humans in terms of embodied cognition, affect, and lexical diversity. An automated text analysis reveals that while reviews generated by ChatGPT 3.5 exhibit lower levels of embodied cognition and lexical diversity compared with reviews by human experts, they display more positive affect (Study 1a). However, human raters struggle to notice these differences, rating half of the selected reviews from AI higher in embodied cognition and usefulness (Study 1b). Instances of hallucination in AI-generated content were detected by human raters. For social media posts, the more sophisticated ChatGPT 4 model demonstrates superior perceived lexical diversity and leads to higher purchase intentions in unbranded content compared with human copywriters (Study 2). This research evaluates the performance of large language models in generating experiential marketing narratives. The comparative studies reveal the models’ strengths in presenting positive emotions and influencing purchase intent while identifying limitations in embodied cognition and lexical diversity compared with human-authored content. The findings have implications for marketers and policy makers in understanding generative AI’s potential and risks in marketing.
Yingting Wen and Sandra Laporte, “Experiential Narratives in Marketing: A Comparison of Generative AI and Human Content,” Journal of Public Policy & Marketing. doi:10.1177/07439156241297973