AI redefines supplement marketing: Credibility beats clever advertisingAI redefines supplement marketing: Credibility beats clever advertising

This article originally appeared in the Nutrition Business Journal Branding and Marketing Issue.

As the chief AI officer for Peter Diamandis’s Abundance360, Steve Brown follows the technology’s rapid emergence and keeps close tracks on all its overlapping ripple effects. Those ripple effects are not small for the supplement industry, particularly in marketing, where AI could increasingly become a first point of contact between consumers and brands. Brown, who spoke at NBJ Summit 2024, talked to us about how the supplement industry should be preparing for AI’s increasingly impactful role.

What does the supplement industry need to understand to get started with AI marketing?

Steve Brown: With marketing in the supplements industry, the big question is, “What can I believe?” In the old days, you could just make up clever ads and control the message as the marketer. Then it became, “What does Google think?” and SEO. Then it became, “What do all the other users think?” and reputation management and the reviews on Amazon or Google. Then it became social media and influencers. The new question is, what happens when AI is the ultimate influencer, when AI becomes the thing that people go to first as the source of truth?

How should supplement marketers be changing their approach to marketing?

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SB: In the example I gave at NBJ Summit, I asked ChatGPT to assign a letter grade to all of the supplements and drugs that are marketed for improving your memory. The most marketed product in the category, Prevagen, got a grade of F. They could spend $100 million on advertising Prevagen, and AI gives them an F, while omega-3 fatty acids—fish oil—gets an A, and vitamin D gets a B, and gingko biloba gets a C. So you’re making a product, and you’re used to spending all this money on advertising and influencers and reputation management and SEO, and now the ultimate influencer comes along, and it doesn’t like you. What can you do about that? How can you influence the ultimate influencer? The answer is that you actually have to do good science. You actually have to publish your results in reputable journals that are allowing themselves to be part of the AI training sets. Having a clever message and a clever slogan isn’t going to cut it with AI. You actually have to create a good product, do the science and publish your results in a credible way.

Is this dynamic more true for supplements than other industries?

SB: It may be a little different for supplements, because supplements haven’t done enough of that in the past. They have focused on consumer marketing and influencers more than science. You need more science. You need to become more credible as an industry. If you’re going to influence AI, it’s going to become more scientific.

Related:NBJ Summit: 5 things natural supplement brands should know about AI

Do you get the impression that the supplement industry is up to speed on AI and marketing compared to other industries, or is it behind more?

SB: I think that everybody in the consumer marketing field is trying to figure this out. I think that the supplement industry already has been going through an internal conversation about how we become more credible. The industry has had a reputation for selling snake oil and promoting things that we’re not sure really work. It’s had that reputation for a while, and people have already been addressing saying that we need to do more. So I think that the industry has already started moving in the right direction of doing the things that will matter to AI. I’d say that the more scientific fields already were doing the right thing, not because they wanted to influence AI but because they already had established high standards. They were just doing things that AI actually cares about, like doing more substantial scientific work and publishing peer-reviewed research. When you’re training a better AI model, you’re trying to train it on higher quality and more credible sources. That’s what the AI model creators are looking for right now, rather than consuming more social media and search engine spam.

Related:NBJ Summit: Educate dietary supplement consumers through social media platforms

Do you think companies need to be hiring AI specialists and AI teams, or do they just need to make everybody smarter?

SB: First of all, there are multiple dimensions to AI that your industry should be using. This is just one dimension of it: “What does Google think?” is being replaced by “What does AI think?” Another part of AI marketing is your brand’s frontline interface to your consumer. If it’s not already, that’s soon going to be an AI agent. That’s already happening for customer service with the little help button that takes you to a chatbot. Those chatbot agents are becoming more like avatars with personality. You want your agents to be friendly and professional, and you want them to know all about your products. It’s more fundamental than just customer service. Your consumers are interacting with something that feels like interacting with a person. This is something your AI team should care about, because that agent needs to reflect your brand. You control that agent. You train that agent. Your interface to your customer is going to be an AI, and that’s what your own AI team is going to need to understand and know how to manage.

Is that agent/avatar component different for supplement companies?

SB: Every one of those products that I heard about at the NBJ Summit is a component of a lifestyle. These products are not something that ever were really intended to be a simple standalone answer. It’s like, “Hey, take the supplement, but also include good nutrition and exercise.” It’s part of a health behavior/lifestyle medicine program. Where AI will be particularly useful is in all those value-added services around your product that help your users be more successful. Think of it as the health coach that actually knows your user and knows how to integrate that product you’re selling into a broader set of changes, because for that product to be successful, it’s not a standalone, it’s part of a lifestyle change. AI has a fabulous role in being a teacher and a coach in lifestyle medicine.

That sounds like a fundamental change for supplement marketing and a real opportunity. How do brands get that right?

SB: It’s about creating the personality that works with each person. AI is very customizable in a way that it adapts to who it’s talking to. When you interact with an AI health coach, and that AI health coach knows all about you, knows what your goals are, knows where you’ve been, knows where you’re at today, its feedback is very personalized, relevant and also very empathetic. That’s the one thing that’s really enticing to people about these AI agents. They can be trained to be extremely empathetic, often more so than real people. They don’t judge you, or at least you don’t feel judged. They feel like they’re always on your side. You can create a lot of different personas, and you can match them to the user.

Who has the advantage here? Is it a matter of having a bigger budget that gets you better AI marketing?

SB: I would like to think that with AI evolving into the world’s smartest brain, you’re not going to be able to fool AI. You’re not going to be able to take a bad product and somehow convince AI that it’s better than it is. You can train your custom AI to promote a bad product, but for the AI that everyone is using in the outside world, you have to think of it as becoming the world’s smartest consumer. You’re going to have to have a good product, and you’re going to have to do good science.

So, a small company that does it right could do as well in the AI age as a big company that has a bigger marketing budget?

SB: I think it’s more about prioritization. You prioritize the things that matter to AI, like actually doing great science and publishing your results. That’s one thing, and it’s also building a great agent that’s going to represent your product or going to be a very useful health coach around your product. Those things are not free, but they’re becoming more and more accessible. So instead of relying just on building your traditional web and social media marketing, it’s going to be about getting your product right and then providing services to your consumers. In the tech world, people are used to saying that the best marketing is having a great product.

So, it’s still word of mouth, but AI has the biggest mouth?

SB: Yes, that’s a good way of putting it.

Is there a risk that natural product consumers are going to react poorly to artificial intelligence?

SB: I don’t think that’s particular to this industry at all. There will be people in every market who get annoyed by the AI customer service agent, but it’s really more of a function of whether or not that agent can solve your problem. Every time you call a company today, for most industries, you already talk to an AI. If AI is able to solve your problem, then you’re not yelling “real person” into the phone. As AIs become really good, it will become something that people get used to, where they don’t want to call and talk to a person. They want to go to the website and push the buttons and have their problem solved. With something like health coaching, you’re actually filling a gap where a lot of people otherwise didn’t have access to that. They might have some of those services through an AI agent as a free value-added service to the supplement they’re taking.

Which is more important, controlling what AI thinks of your brand and your products or providing that personal interaction to your consumers?

SB: I think two sides of the same coin. How do we present ourselves? Where we have direct control over it, that’s our agent and our value-added services. The other side of it is, “what does the outside world think of us?” For that, we need to make sure that we’re doing the kind of work that the outside world believes. There are two legs here, and it’s hard to imagine how you could stand on just one, or why you’d want to.

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