Vogue's article of how AI checkouts will affect luxury brands, but AI will affect the marketing of other brands and products too
Each new days brings more evidence that AI, in the form of LLM search, will profoundly change the way people discover brands and now even in the way they make their purchases.
As explained in the Vogue article consumers will increasingly turn to AI chatbots, whether they are ChatGPT, Google AI Overview, Gemini, Perplexity or Copilot to find information.
Because of AI's ability to provide seemingly authoritative and credible answers their recommendations are usually accepted by their users. But if you wanted to act on their recommendations and make a purchase, you had to take another step by going to a brand's website to make a purchase (if they online sales features).
Now, however, AI companies are getting rid of that source of friction by making it seamless for the user to discover brands and products and making a purchase without having to leave the platform. Hence Open AI's Instant checkout. Google already has AI shopping features and Apple is expected to follow suit with something similar.
This marks the next step in agentic commerce, where ChatGPT doesn’t just help you find what to buy, but also helps you to buy it,” OpenAI said in the blog post.
The Vogue article talks about how AI is affecting luxury brands, but the lessons here are equally applicable for all brands.
This creates interesting challenges for CMOs around the world, including in Indonesia that has already seen widespread adoption of AI search and as a consequence seeing website traffic dropping.
How can they stay relevant when the main touchpoint of their brand for their consumers is increasingly migrating to AI? How do you adapt to AI search and come out a winner?
The problem may seem complex and overwhelming because of the frenetic pace of development of AI.
Fortunately, however, there is a solution: Generative Engine Optimization. This refers to the practice where you approach marketing with a firm on AI as a major stakeholder and influencer.
However you communicate from now on could be for humans but you cannot neglect to tailor it for AI as well. That is how you optimize for Generative Engines.
Now, experts say AI search is the new non-negotiable channel.
Generative Engine Optimization, however, is a new field so marketers and communicators may have a huge difficulty wondering how to pick a partner to help them optimize.
SEO professionals will say that a lot of GEO is similar to SEO and they therefore are the ones best suited to advice on the matter. Although good GEO relies on a solid SEO foundation there are huge differences too.
The main difference, apart from the on-site optimization where you deal with codes and schemas, is AI search's heavy reliance on high-authority sources - websites that have credibility and authority - like news portals, aka Earned Media.
This creates difficulties for creative agencies as they are more familiar with Paid Media such as advertisements and paid content.
This is because effective optimization generative engines require a deep understanding of how to embed your messages in Earned media, which PR agencies specialize in.
So my advice to CMOs who are trying to figure out how to remain relevant in a communications landscape increasing driven by AI is to check in with PR agencies that understand GEO.
At the moment there are few PR agencies that move in this areas and that is the reason why Maverick, the agency where I work, took the bold step of launching a suite of GEO Services.
We did this knowing full well that the technology will change and evolve, but we felt that there is no choice for us and for brands. If you do not get into the AI sandbox and start playing you'll be left so far behind that its impossible to catch up. Early movers in GEO will have secured AI visibility while others will still be debating what to do.
