It’s Not What You Say, it’s How You Say it — Insights From 20.9B Marketing Messages

Much like the world around us, consumers — and their spending patterns, sentiment, and the motivators behind their buying decisions — are constantly changing. So the way you interact with them shouldn’t be static or uniform. Beyond simply personalizing campaign messages to the time of year (like Spring or Black Friday), or a customer’s recent purchases, the best retailers break through the noise by individualizing their messaging to a customer’s present day needs and understanding the many ways that language motivates action.

In my role at Persado, I’m well aware of the impact that emotion has on the customer experience — it’s integral to everything we do. The Persado Motivation AI platform is a specialized class of generative AI technology, trained on a knowledge base of over 100 billion customer interactions annually. Retailers such as Gap, Coach, Kate Spade, and Marks & Spencer use Motivation AI to personalize customer experiences by generating optimal language elements — such as emotion, descriptive language, functional language, formatting, and narratives — that resonate with customers and motivate action.

Generative AI, trained on an enterprise-grade knowledge base, is a powerful tool for scaling marketing content, when combined with human creativity and quality assurance. To ensure that our platform’s results are natural, sophisticated, on-brand and perform well for our customers, my team regularly tests and monitors the platform. We identify trends over time — certain words and phrases performing better than others for certain customer segments or verticals — which can give us deep insight into consumer sentiment.

In the 2023 Customer Motivation Report, we analyzed consumer responses to 20.9 billion messages across more than 3,200 brand campaigns in 2022, and found that across industries, themes like “stability,” “reliability,” and “consistency” motivated the most customer action last year. Here are some of our key takeaways for the retail sector and how we see this playing out in the rest of 2023:

• Retail customers gravitated toward “timelessness” and “versatility” in 2022: In 2022, shoppers engaged more with campaigns that promoted the idea of a classic, investment piece that the buyer or recipient would keep for the long term. Campaigns like this helped shoppers feel smart and practical, even when the campaign promoted a luxury good. We found content that conveyed timelessness (e.g. “a verified classic,” “your new forever piece,” “always iconic”) produced the highest response rate from retail customers for 68 percent of the campaigns in which it appeared. Versatility as a narrative (e.g. “for any season and any mood,” “from workday to weekend”) came in second, with 58 percent.
• “Tried and true” tactics aren’t always the most effective: Our campaign data on fashion and luxury campaigns found that shoppers needed a good reason to spend on “nice-to-haves” from the latest designer drop in 2022. Classic narratives that retailers often turn to, like hype (e.g. “everyone’s talking about this,” “this sale will not disappoint"), individuality (“express yourself,” “100 percent you”) and prestige (“spotlight on you,” “own the room”) were unreliable motivators; they performed well for some campaigns, and underperformed for others.
• Convenience fell short: In 2022, people started to return to the office, to travel, and to attend more in-person events as COVID faded from the headlines. With this uptick in busyness, you’d think that narratives of “convenience” would resonate with customers, but this wasn’t the case. Campaigns relying on narratives of convenience (e.g. “stay connected on the go,” “one tap, and you’re done,” “access anywhere”) were far more likely to under-perform than over-perform in 2022.

What These Findings Mean for Retail Marketers in 2023

Given the economic conditions that carried over to this year, customers will still need to see value for money, making timelessness a likely high performer for the year. This will be especially true for shoppers assessing their budgets: justifying non-essential purchases will require reassurance of the long-term value they’ll get. Narratives that speak to hype or prestige may continue to underperform in this economy, and may even come off as tone-deaf to some customers.

Paired with marketing teams, generative AI can drive real results for retailers—especially when its outputs are driven by context. Words are powerful and buying decisions are often deeply tied to emotion, so take a more human approach to your customer communications. On the receiving end of your offer is a person who is impacted by the changing world around us, and using language to show you understand that will pay off.

Lisa Spira is the vice president of content intelligence at Persado.