The Building Brands Toolkit aims to support small businesses, digital creators, and BCM students in brand-building by leveraging advanced technologies. Lee et al. (2023) discuss the applications of OpenAI to enhance performance for a restaurant's branding. The use of AI was blended into their businesses' operations and created enhancements in areas such as marketing, and menu creation to employee training, to enhance its competitive advantages, at a much lower cost compared with more traditional tools (Lee et al. 2023).
My project shifts the focus from static content to dynamic, interactive experiences, utilising AI tools to create social media caption generators, imagery tools, chatbots, and AI voiceovers. This reframing allows users to engage with branding concepts in a more intuitive and accessible way, enhancing their ability to implement effective strategies without getting overwhelmed by technical details and putting them in the 'too-hard pile'.
I will leverage exaptation by repurposing existing technologies for new applications to support my brand-building tools (Larson et al. 2013). For example, OpenAI will be trained for creating to develop social media captions. I'll also leverage uChat, a customer service chatbot service to facilitate my AI chatbot trained with all the knowledge of the BuildingBrands platform.
The toolkit's two-phase approach involves gathering and refining knowledge to create user-friendly guides and tools, followed by using this content as training data for an AI-powered chatbot. This chatbot will be integrated into platforms like Instagram, facilitating natural conversations about marketing and branding. The transformation of this content into a human-like chatbot illustrates Media transmutation, highlighting the fluid adaptability of media (Elleström 2014). Research has indicated that improvements in user interaction were recorded when an OpenAI-based chatbot was implemented into a content-heavy website (Santoso et al. 2023).
The toolkit aims to serve as a practical resource for SMBs and creators, whilst also acting as a portfolio for my future employers.
Sources
Elleström, L 2014, Media transformation: the transfer of media characteristics among media, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, DOI: 10.1057/9781137474254.
Kumar, A, Bapat, G, Kumar, A, Hota, SL, Abishek, GD & Vaz, S 2024, 'Unlocking brand excellence: harnessing AI tools for enhanced customer engagement and innovation', Engineering Proceedings, vol. 59, p. 204.
Larson, G, Stephens, PA, Tehrani, JJ & Layton, RH 2013, 'Exapting exaptation', Trends in Ecology & Evolution, vol. 28, no. 9, pp. 497-498.
Lee, K-H, Chen, P-J & Boo, HC 2024, 'The case of Tulasi: positioning a traditional Indian vegetarian restaurant to OpenAI enhanced brand', Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Cases.
Santoso, G, Setiawan, J & Sulaiman, A 2023, 'Development of OpenAI API-based chatbot to improve user interaction on the JBMS website', G-Tech: Jurnal Teknologi Terapan, vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 1606-1615.
Singh, H 2021, 'How digital transformation is transmuting the media and entertainment industry', Debut Infotech, Medium, viewed 10 August 2024, https://medium.com/debutinfotech/how-digital-transformation-is-transmuting-the-media-and-entertainment-industry-5fc6adac98cc
UChat 2023, OpenAI & ChatGPT integration with UChat, YouTube video, 9 March, viewed 10 August 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJ6b-kB8D_0