Direct-to-consumer brands are figuring out their AI playbooks in real time.
One such company is bedding brand Boll & Branch. At Digiday Media’s AI Marketing Strategies event on Wednesday, Katia Unlu, chief commercial officer at Boll & Branch, laid out how the company uses generative AI tools for internal productivity and customer-facing content.
Unlu said the brand’s philosophy for using generative AI is straightforward. “We use it everywhere where it can remove friction but not replace humanity,” Unlu said.
Boll & Branch first and foremost uses AI to manage workflows across teams. Take, for example, Google Suite, which primarily powers the company’s internal communication. The company also uses Notebook LM heavily for reporting, which integrates directly with Google Drive, helping to cut down on the marketing team’s weekly reports and recaps. Notebook LM saves previous prompts that help auto-generate weekly recaps and syntheses, Unlu said, so the team can pick right back up from the last session.
Then there is the use of generative AI to create marketing materials, which has become controversial to some consumers. Unlu pointed to some Super Bowl ads that drew backlash for overusing generative AI imagery. She said, for its part, Boll & Branch creates AI-generated imagery when the content is intentionally surreal or obviously detectable to customers.
For example, Boll & Branch is launching a “buttercup” yellow color this spring. Unlu said the marketing used generative AI to make images of large flowers or oversized shopping bags. However, for imagery of a family, the company uses owned creatives or influencer-created content. “We’re not using AI to fake reality,” Unlu said. “If it looks ‘too real,’ we won’t use it.”
Boll & Branch is also just starting to use ChatGPT for media planning and sourcing marketing ideas. Unlu said this is especially helpful when seeking out new influencers to work with, using ChatGPT to identify similar influencers to reach out to based on past campaigns.
“For example, we’ll use Gemini search to find new podcasts [to advertise on],” she said. However, the company then vets and begins conversations with those potential partners before signing them on. “It’s a great starting point.”
Unlu also said using AI search engines can widen the top of the funnel by keeping tabs on what potential customers are looking for. Unlu said her team also consistently asks the chatbots what customers are looking for from the company and other comparable bedding brands.
As a past example, the brand’s in-house customer service team identified over the years that many people were searching for specific thread counts or sateen-style sheets, prompting Boll & Branch to tweak the language it uses in its FAQs and customer service prompts. The strategy is a departure from how Boll & Brach has historically operated; for years, the brand avoided using those terms to avoid pigeonholing its products under marketing terms like high thread count. “It dawned on me: Why would we hide that information from a customer?” she said.
Still, it’s difficult to predict how these tools will change, she said, so it’s important to continually test and learn. All in all, Unlu said the company is finding new ways to leverage AI every day. “We use AI as an efficiency play,” Unlu said. “It’s not here to write our brand story.”