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02/17/2023

Generative AI Can Help You Tailor Messaging to Specific Audiences

Successful communication often relies on speaking to personality traits

Few of us are ever successful in changing minds and behaviors by stacking up piles of evidence wrapped in clear communications that support our goals or views. This is most visible in national issues — ranging from climate change to vaccines — but it’s also true of internal corporate challenges. Leaders fail to understand and account for what makes our audience tick and don’t adapt our communications to match their inner wiring and worldview.

Each of us comes pre-wired for how we’ll respond to every issue, situation, policy, and decision. It is never a tabula rasa of rationality. At Ogilvy Behavioral Science, we like to call this tangled, interconnected wiring of personality traits, cognitive styles, and identity-linked worldviews the “Hidden Who.” A wrong word choice or inappropriate framing can create instant rifts — no matter how logical or well-crafted the messaging seems. On the other hand, the right language can make a message click like a key in a lock. Behavioral science studies have shown that empathetic resonance can succeed where attempts to convert will backfire.

Marketers and communications strategists deploy audience segmentation plans all the time, but rarely based on decoding the “Hidden Who.” Admittedly, applying this lens to every communication is a tall order. But new technology may be able to help. Notably, artificial intelligence tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT can be a very effective empathy assistant. In my experiments, I found that ChatGPT can create audience-tailored versions of communications that may resonate more and clash less with each group. Particularly eyebrow-raising is its ability to do so responding to prompts with behavioral science cues — crafting surprisingly appropriate messages for particular personality traits, worldviews and so on.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Harvard Business Review.

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