ChatGPT is Now Guiding Consumer Decisions; What Does it Mean for Brands?

Among the hallmarks of direct-to-consumer (DTC) e-commerce is the ability to learn, directly from the consumer, what helped guide their purchase decision. Over the years, such insights have given DTC brands the jump on many up-and-coming marketing channels, including podcasts, Snapchat, TikTok … and at this moment, ChatGPT.

Within the past few months, consumer responses to the standard DTC post-purchase survey attribution question, “How did you hear about us?” have begun referencing “ChatGPT” and other artificial intelligence (AI) tools as primary sources of influence. What’s more, because the channel is so nascent, consumers almost invariably have to write in their response rather than simply choosing from a provided list of established media platforms.

As a result, these responses reveal additional context around the value ChatGPT delivered to the consumer, where in the funnel a consumer was when they decided to try ChatGPT, and so forth.

The first e-commerce survey responses attributed to ChatGPT

What Does This Mean For Brand Exposure?

ChatGPT is as much a concept as it is a platform. In that sense, it bears closer resemblance to early Google than to early Snapchat. As such, the immediate opportunity for brands isn’t quite solvable with the typical first mover investments. If anything, AI tools muddling together a prompt response from troves of prior knowledge is a recipe rewarding more mature brands — the ones that bet big years ago on content, search engine optimization, and reviews. So, what can a brand without that kind of track record do to get a foothold?

First things first: continue talking with your customers to maintain a pulse on their expanding experience with tools like ChatGPT. Bot-to-consumer interactions are conversational commerce, and knowing half the conversation is knowing half the battle. Any e-commerce brand currently running chatbots for customer support or on-site product recommendations immediately understands this parallel.

Using zero-party data to stay in the consumer-to-bot conversation loop

Now the content strategy. Whether the likes of ChatGPT monetize themselves through paid placements and recommendations remains to be seen; in the meantime, look at how your current content stacks up against ChatGPT’s job to be done. Sixty-nine percent of consumers prefer chatbots because the interaction implies a simple question will get a direct, decisive response.

Does your content library do this today? Would a bot want to cite you as a source, knowing the job it needs to do? What about your brand’s (and competitors’) organic search trends — can you spot the prompt-friendly common threads there, where consumers have historically asked for most of their answers? Go a step further and check in on your product reviews both on-site and off-site, along with any other highly structured user-generated content. The practice may not be new to a well-run brand, but looking at it through a chatbot’s eyes may reveal some key gaps to fill.

All the above is evergreen guidance for sustainable brand-building. Perhaps the most speculative bet in ChatGPT for commerce, then, is how fast it will move. ChatGPT itself isn't up to speed with what happened last year, yet alone last week. So, should there really be a mad dash for new content to appease a new kind of search engine, or will it be years before such content comes across a bot’s desk?

That’s anyone’s guess. On the one hand, ChatGPT is the fastest-growing consumer application in history. On the other, governments and corporations alike are ramping up positions to slow the technology’s expansion. But a bet against progress is a bet for maintaining the marketing status quo — an environment constructed in part to keep young, cash-strapped brands out of contention. For any brand fitting such a description, betting on massive media disruption is perhaps the closest thing to betting on oneself.

Matt Bahr is co-founder and CEO of Fairing, Shopify's leading post-purchase survey tool.